BBC News
published a story today on the Sand Hill Unearthed project which has been made
into a full length documentary by our friend, filmmaker Guillermo de Oliveira. The story was reported by Guy Hedgecoe in Burgos,
Spain.
Cédric Biscay dons a poncho and places a cheroot in his mouth. Behind,
the hills and rocky escarpments of Burgos, in northern Spain, shimmer in the
summer heat. And all around him is a place he had only ever seen before on the
movie screen: Sad Hill cemetery, site of the final showdown in The Good, the
Bad and the Ugly, the 1966 western directed by Sergio Leone.
In that scene, the characters played by Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef
and Eli Wallach meet in the cemetery for a three-way duel that will decide who
gets to keep the gold buried in one of the graves.
"I feel like I'm in the movie!" says Mr Biscay, who is
visiting from Monaco, after wandering around the cemetery and admiring its
central paved circle and the hundreds of wooden crosses surrounding it. Nearby
are props from the movie's final moments: a noose hanging from a solitary tree.
"This is such an important place for me," he explains.
"I've watched the movie four times a year for the last 30 years, so yes,
I'm a big fan."
But two years ago, Sad Hill looked nothing like this. There were no
crosses to be seen and cows roamed across the site, which looked like just
another overgrown, grassy meadow. The cemetery had been created solely for the purposes of the movie,
much of which was filmed in this area of Spain. Then Sad Hill was forgotten for
nearly five decades.
But in 2014, a group of local people decided to restore the site to
its former glory. They called themselves the Sad Hill Cultural Association and
after locating the exact cemetery spot, with the help of photographs from the
film's final scene, in 2015 they set about the painstaking process of
excavating the site.
"At the start it seemed like it was going to be impossible, but
bit by bit people from other provinces of Spain, other towns, and even other
countries, came to help us rebuild the cemetery and it snowballed," says
David Alba, the 35-year-old president of the association. Aficionados could
help finance the project by paying €15 (£13; $18) to have their name painted
onto one of the wooden crosses.
Mr Alba remembers a key moment early in the excavation.
"We were digging in the ground and we saw that underneath the
earth were the original stones of the central circle of the site, the place
where all the actors, the director and all the technicians had walked across
during the filming," he says. "It was like digging in the ground and
finding treasure."
Documenting the entire process was filmmaker Guillermo de Oliveira (Right). He has recently finished filming a documentary, Sad Hill Unearthed, telling the story
of the cemetery's restoration. It is due for release later this year. Several celebrity fans of the original western feature in the
documentary, such as James Hetfield, the singer of heavy metal band Metallica,
and Gremlins director Joe Dante. In addition, there are interviews with some of the key personalities
from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly itself, including composer Ennio Morricone
and Eastwood, who declared himself delighted that the cemetery had been
restored.
The Sad Hill Cultural Association now stages concerts and other events
at the cemetery, which is drawing increasing numbers of visitors from Spain and
abroad. For many of them it is a chance to see the location of what Oliveira
describes as "one of the most important scenes in the whole history of
cinema". Leone, he explains, masterfully used the eerie location and
Morricone's music to generate several minutes of heart-stopping suspense as
Eastwood, Van Cleef and Wallach glared at each other before drawing their guns. Oliveira and his team also tracked down a number of locals who
were extras in the western.
For them, and the younger volunteers who have rebuilt the Sad Hill
site, the whole exercise has blurred the boundaries between reality and cinema,
says Luisa Cowell, producer of the Sad Hill Unearthed documentary.
"Most of the volunteers had seen the film when they were
children, with their families, their father or grandfather, so it has marked
their lives, it's something that is very special to them," she says.
"So they all went there with the intention of unearthing a piece
of something that for them is real - it's not fiction for them anymore, it
becomes real," she adds. "And once they unearth it and they find the
stones it becomes even more of a reality and they become part of this
reality."
Thank You to
David Vernall-Downes for sending me this story
