Once Upon a Time in the West

Gore Verbinski wanted the final pirate parliament to feel like a Sergio Leone Western showdown, lingering close-ups of faces, the musical score as primary character, tension built through silence and proximity rather than movement. The parley scene on the sandbar is Leone's filmmaking translated to the Caribbean. Verbinski documented this in DVD commentary, understanding that Leone had already solved the problem of how to make standoffs feel inevitable. Once Upon a Time in the West is available on Criterion Channel.

I watched 'Once Upon A Time In The West' again before shooting, just to see how to use close-ups to create tension.

He wants to make a film that, like Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, is ‘pure atmosphere,’ without much dialogue.

Clint Eastwood built Unforgiven as a reckoning with the films that made him famous, specifically Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns, which were themselves remakes of Kurosawa's samurai films. Leone took Yojimbo and made A Fistful of Dollars. Eastwood played the character. Decades later, he made Unforgiven to ask what that character actually was: not a hero, a mechanism of violence given a moral costume. Yojimbo is where it started.