Beniamino Maggio tends to our hero’s wounds in KILL OR BE KILLED.
over name possibilities for a couple of days, we finally settled on Robert Mark. They were delighted. They now had a name that sounded “reeully Amurikan” and a whole lot more “Westurne” than “Rodanna.” So everybody was happy: they got their way and I got rich. I used that name until I left the cinema behind in Rome in the early Seventies.
Sicario 77, vivo o morto was another spy film? What can you tell us about that one? That was over 40 years ago, but there is one day’s activity from that frantic period I’ll never for- get. We had contracted for a couple of hours to shoot a fight scene in an aerial-tram three hun- dred feet in the air over the Barcelona harbor be- tween the docks and Tibidabo Amusement Park. We finished filming the sequence and the direc- tor, Mino Guerrini, radioed the Tibidabo command center to bring us back over. No response. An hour later, he finally got through to them and was told that the operador had misunderstood, thinking we had the tram for three hours, and had gone for lunch. They said they would bring us right in. The tram moved fifty feet and abruptly stopped, swing- ing precariously above a large Turkish tanker far
below. We immediately called and were told that there had been a power failure but that it shouldn’t be long. Well, that was early afternoon and it wasn’t until after 7:00 that evening that we were at last brought to the Tibidabo side—hot (it had been over 100° all day in the Spanish August sun), tired, hungry, dehydrated and, needless to say, very pissed-off. It seemed that nobody had reported seeing an occasional person taking a wizz from the gondola, yet we each took our turns. It was lucky in a way that we had nothing to drink up there. The manager of the amusement park was very apologetic and issued each of us lifetime passes to the park! I have never been back... don’t know about the others. The director was so mad, I thought he might have a coronary, which he did have a few years later.
The only other story I can think of concerns the day we filmed a sequence with a motorcycle. I was supposed to crash it through a barricade at 60 miles per hour, so, on the day of shoot- ing, we wanted to rehearse the shot. I was sup- posed to ride up to the barricade and stop just short of ramming it, so as to give the camera people a good line-up. As I approached, the
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