WE CONTINUE OUR SERIES OF REPORTS FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT JOHN EXSHAW'S DIARY FROM THE RECENTLY CONCLUDED VENICE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL.
Started the day by calling in on Giancarlo Santi at his
hotel, having arranged an interview with him last night. He was just finishing
his breakfast, but otherwise seemed quite ready to hit the trail and “git them
dogies rollingâ€. Politeness required that I kept my generally low opinion of
‘The Grand Duel’ to myself – though to be fair to Santi, I never got the
impression that he himself regards it as an imperishable classic. In any case,
I was much more interested in hearing him talk about his time as assistant
director to Sergio Leone on ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’, ‘Once Upon a Time
in the West’ and ‘Giù la testa’ (‘A Fistful of Dynamite’, ‘Duck, You Sucker’).
Santi speaks pretty good English, but as the interview progressed, he tended to
lapse into Italian with increasing frequency. When he apologized for this, I
suggested that he continue in Italian, saying I could always get the tape
translated at a later date.
The best-known story involving Santi concerns his aborted
direction of ‘Giù la testa’, caused by Rod Steiger’s refusal to work with
anyone other than Leone. After about three days, so the story goes, Steiger
refused to continue under Santi’s direction, responding to Leone’s assurances
that Santi was perfectly capable by saying, okay, I’ll send along my stand-in,
he’s perfectly capable too. And so, reluctantly, Leone demoted Santi and
assumed the directorial burden himself . . .
Santi, however, remembers things rather differently. At the
end of filming ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’, he recalls, Leone turned to him,
removed his viewfinder and placed it around Santi’s neck, telling him, “You
will direct the next film.†Santi, who doesn’t appear to have harboured any
great desire to be a director, thought no more about it. Some two years later,
when Santi was working in Africa as
assistant director on Glauber Rocha’s ‘The Lion Has Seven Heads’, Leone,
unbeknownst to him, took out a full-page ad. in Variety announcing ‘Giù
la testa’, “to be directed by Giancarlo Santiâ€. Leone was immediately bombarded
with telegrams from both Steiger’s and James Coburn’s agents: their clients had
accepted the film on the understanding that it was to be “Directed by Sergio
Leoneâ€, and they weren’t going to settle for the crown prince in place of the
king. When Santi did join the film as assistant director, it was the first he’d
heard of all this rumpus, and he categorically denies that he shot any
principle scenes, or any scenes which would not fall within the usual remit of the
assistant director.
We continued talking about his work with Leone, but such
stories as emerged will have to wait for another time. Before I left, he
whipped out a digital print of Lee Van Cleef and himself on the set of ‘The
Grand Duel’ and proceeded to inscribe it to me. Remembering Lee and Dave’s
injunction to “spread the good wordâ€, I presented him with a back issue of Cinema
Retro, shook hands and oiled off.