Why A Western Icon Regretted Turning Down The Opportunity To Work With Clint Eastwood

When it comes to the cowboy cool of the Western genre, there might not be anyone who's done it better than Clint Eastwood. Sure, there's the Duke, John Wayne, but he brought a different kind of old-school cool to his characters, whereas Eastwood had more of an edge in his heyday. He starred as the Man With No Name in Italian director Sergio Leone's "Dollars" trilogy, cementing himself as a Western legend with very little dialogue and a whole lot of steely glares. He would go on to direct his own films, including his classic 1992 Western "Unforgiven," the morally complex tale of a former outlaw. He's only continued working as an actor and director into his 90s, having released his latest (and possibly last) directorial effort, "Juror #2," in November 2024, and though he's had some ups and downs, he's mostly managed to keep his legendary status as a filmmaker intact.

Eastwood has worked with quite a few big names over the years as a director, including Sean Penn, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Bradley Cooper. However, there's one cinema legend who had the opportunity to collaborate with Eastwood as a director and turned it down: Ennio Morricone, the late, great composer who scored Leone's films and helped create the sounds of spaghetti Westerns, leaving a huge stamp on the genre. In an interview with the BBC in 2014, Morricone revealed that he regretted not working with Eastwood when asked. Still, he had a pretty good reason for not wanting to score Eastwood's films, and it came down to loyalty.

Morricone told BBC that he was regretful that he didn't take the chance to work with Eastwood on his own films, but that he did it out of respect to another Western legend:

"I missed a great opportunity and I am really sorry. When Clint called me, I said no out of respect to Sergio Leone, not because I did not like the movies that he did."

Imagining "Unforgiven" or even something like "Mystic River" with Morricone's incredible soundscapes seems amazing, but unfortunately the two would never collaborate because of Leone and Eastwood's falling out after filming "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly." The two both had strong ideas that they wanted to fight for, and by that point Eastwood was moving towards directing himself, which led to some serious bitterness. That meant that when Eastwood came knocking, Morricone had to decline, as he had a lot of loyalty for Leone. Over the course of his career he wrote scores for other fantastic directors, including John Carpenter's "The Thing" and Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight," but his chance to collaborate with Eastwood never came to be. Morricone died in 2020 at the age of 91, leaving behind an impressive legacy in the world of cinema. It's really a shame that he never got to fix his regrets and these two Western icons didn't get a chance to work together again, but hey, at least we got the "Dollars" trilogy.