Production
Under a joint production between Malpaso and Universal, the script was created by Ernest Tidyman, an acclaimed writer who had won an Oscar for Best Screenplay for The French Connection. Holes in the plot were filled in with black humor and allegory, influenced by Sergio Leone.
Eastwood scouted locations for filming in a pickup truck while driving alone through Oregon, Nevada, and California. He had an entire town built on the shores of Mono Lake for the project, as he considered the area "highly photogenic". Over 40 technicians and 10 construction workers built the town in 18 days using 150,000 feet of timber. Additional scenes were filmed at Reno, Nevada's Winnemucca Lake and California's Inyo National Forest. Eastwood filmed High Plains Drifter in sequence. Filming was completed in only six weeks.
Eastwood has noted that the graveyard set featured in the film's finale had tombstones reading "Sergio Leone" and "Don Siegel", intended as a humorous tribute to the two directors. The character of Marshal Duncan was played by the stuntman Buddy Van Horn, a long-time stunt coordinator for Clint Eastwood, in order to create some ambiguity as to whether he and the Stranger are one and the same. During an interview on Inside the Actors Studio, Eastwood commented that earlier versions of the script made the Stranger the dead marshal's brother. He favored a less explicit and more supernatural interpretation, however, and excised the reference, although the Italian, Spanish, French and German dubbings restore it.
Read more about this topic: High Plains Drifter
Famous quotes containing the word production:
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—Ernest Gellner (b. 1925)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally to be nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)