Clint Eastwood was once a veteran actor who later entered the field of directing. Starring alongside other notable actors, Eastwood has had his fair share of enemies and jealousies with other actors and directors throughout the years.
Working alongside director Sergio Leone in the 1966 film The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Clint Eastwood had grown to resent the director by the end of the filming. In his later years, Leone would go on to compare Eastwood with a block of marble while hailing Robert De Niro as an actor!

Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
When Sergio Leone Compared Clint Eastwood To A Block of Marble!
Arguably becoming famous for starring in Western spaghetti movies, Clint Eastwood essentially became famous for portraying the role of Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy. The actor, however, was fed up with working with Leone by the end of the 1966 film.
Robert De Niro in The Irishman
Being very tight around his films, Eastwood learned his sense of perfectionism from Leone himself. However, the trait became heavy for the actor when the director behaved very strictly in his movies. After starring in 1966’s The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Clint Eastwood never worked with Sergio Leone again. In a 1984 interview with American Film, Leone went on to compare Eastwood to a block of marble!
“Robert De Niro throws him­self into this or that role, putting on a personality the way someone else might put on his coat, naturally and with ele­gance, while Clint Eastwood throws himself into a suit of armor and lowers the visor with a rusty clang.”
The director further continued,
“East­wood moves like a sleepwalker between explosions and hails of bullets, and he is always the same — a block of marble. Bobby, first of all, is an actor. Clint, first of all, is a star. Bobby suffers, Clint yawns.”
Although his character of Man with No Name became iconically famous, the mysterious persona around the character wasn’t always so. It was actually Clint Eastwood who came up with that idea but had to argue with Sergio Leone in the process!
Clint Eastwood Had To Argue With Sergio Leone
Clint Eastwood in Cry Macho
Before the iconic character of Man with No Name was created, Italian director Sergio Leone had a different idea in mind. Giving the character dialogues and a backstory to explain his motives, it was Eastwood who advised the director to go the other way. Eastwood revealed in an interview with Ric Gentry (via Slash Film) how the iconic character finally came to be.
“Sergio argued with me, though he did agree in a way, but it was just much harder for the Italian mentality to accept. They’re just used to so much more exposition and I was throwing that out.”
Well, it seems that Eastwood eventually won over and the Man with No Name came to be. As for the strained relationship between the actor and Sergio Leone, the duo never worked together after 1966.

It’s well-known that John Wayne seemed to hate almost every actor other than himself, but there were a few figures within the film industry with whom The Duke had serious and bitter feuds. Most notably, Wayne held a particular distaste for Clint Eastwood, the western movie icon who looked to take Wayne’s position as the most prominent performer to spread their wings in the genre.
While Wayne could seemingly find a bone to pick with any of his contemporaries or successors, the feud with Eastwood arose from his second movie as a director, the 1973 western High Plains Drift, written by Ernest Tidyman. Following on from his debut feature in the boss’ chair, Eastwood’s second effort saw him play a mysterious stranger who looks to deliver justice when he arrives in a frontier mining town rife with corruption.
The film arrived not too long after Eastwood had completed his work with Sergio Leone and his Dollars Trilogy movies and was greatly inspired by the legendary Italian director, as well as by Don Siegel. The likes of Verna Bloom, Mariana Hill, Jack Ging, Stefan Gierasch and Mitchell Ryan are all featured in the movie, which was shot on location at Mono Lake in California.
Eastwood once noted the issues that Wayne had with the movie, writing in the book John Wayne: The Life and Legend, “John Wayne once wrote me a letter saying he didn’t like High Plains Drifter. He said it wasn’t really about the people who pioneered the West. I realised that there’s two different generations, and he wouldn’t understand what I was doing.”
The actor went on to add his justification for his movie and provided an explanation of how Wayne had got his intentions all wrong. “High Plains Drifter was meant to be a fable,” Eastwood added, “It wasn’t meant to show the hours of pioneering drudgery. It wasn’t supposed to be anything about settling the West.”
High Plains Drifter was well-received by critics upon its release. It sees Eastwood’s character come to a small town’s rescue when he is persuaded to protect them from a deadly gang of outlaws. The unnamed stranger is a golden-gilded gun-slinger, so his arrival is initially met with fear by the townsfolk, but when they witness his skill with a pistol, it’s not long before they turn to him for help.
The screenplay by Ernest Tidyman was loosely inspired by a real-life murder in Queens in 1964, during which several eyewitnesses were said to have stood by without action. There’s an element of black humour within the movie, too, which comes primarily from the way that Sergio Leone used the device to fill in plot holes in his own works.
Eastwood’s second effort as a director (and the first in which he both starred and directed) remains a classic of the western genre, although it was not well-met by John Wayne. After all, Wayne’s films tended to rely on a well-trodden trope of good vs. evil, whereas Eastwood’s were more ambiguous in their morality. Throw in the kind of violence that Wayne was not welcoming of, and it’s easy to see why The Duke found a distaste for Eastwood and his cementing of his position as the new outlaw in town.
Check out the trailer for High Plains Drifter below.

It’s the dream of many screenwriters to pen a one-liner for a star that’s so memorable – that so captures the essence of a character, that’s so in touch with the cultural zeitgeist – that as moviegoers leave the theater, the line is on their lips. From there, the famous line graduates to meme and beyond. While zingers have been around since at least The Iliad, they truly found their voice, so to speak, in the Spaghetti Westerns and James Bond films in the 1960s and early ‘70s; then flowered into a movie art form in the tough-cop-mercenary-hero films of the 1970s and ‘80s — the ones that made Clint Eastwood famous.
But in the quotable realm of movie stars, no one has added to the patois like Clint Eastwood. From the 1960s to the 2000s – from cigarillo-smoking gunslingers to .44-toting rebel cops, to the old racist guy in the neighborhood – Eastwood, now 93, has squinted and growled through some of cinema’s most memorable moments … and left screenwriters with a legacy of inspiration.  
Here are some of his best one-offs, barbs, affronts, cutdowns, and rough-hewn aphorisms.
A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
Screenwriters: Based on the film Yojimbo, by Akira Kurosawa, with seven writers credited, including director Leone, and five uncredited.
Eastwood’s first starring role, and also the first of “The Man With No Name” trilogy by director Sergio Leone that inspired the Spaghetti Western genre, Eastwood plays a mysterious stranger who arrives at a U.S.-Mexico border town that’s torn apart by a feud between two smuggler families … which he inserts himself into.
Shortly after arriving in town, he’s confronted by three gunmen from one smuggler family. He tells the undertaker, “Get three coffins ready.”
Later, after gunning down four men, he corrects himself: “My mistake, four coffins.”

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)
Screenwriters: Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli, Luciano Vincenzoni, and Leone
Set during the American Civil War, this epic is the third film in Leone’s trilogy. Eastwood’s bounty-hunter gunslinger – nicknamed “Blondie,” representing “the good” – tangles up with his antagonists, Tuco (“the ugly”) and Angel Eyes (“the bad”) as they search for buried Confederate gold.
After winning a climactic three-way gunfight (but leaving Tuco alive), they head to the site of the buried Confederate gold, when Eastwood tells Tuco how it’s going to work: 
“You see, in this world, there’s two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.”

Dirty Harry (1971)
Screenwriters: Harry Julian Fink, Rita M. Fink, Dean Riesner
Created by Harry and Rita Fink, Eastwood’s Harry Callahan (“Dirty Harry”) serves as the template for all rebel antiheroes in action movies that followed. But it started here. Dirty Harry, armed with a .44 Magnum, is a San Francisco cop who bends and sometimes breaks the rules for the greater good – to get scum killers and crooks off the streets of his dirty, beloved town.
Dirty Harry follows the hunt for a serial killer who’s terrifying the city. But close to the film’s beginning, we are introduced to Harry and everything he and his hand cannon are capable of. While eating a sandwich, he happens upon a bank robbery. After shooting and injuring one shotgun-wielding robber, he knocks off the other two. 
Then, he casually approaches the bleeding suspect lying at the bank’s entrance – who briefly considers reaching for his nearby shotgun.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Eastwood’s Harry says, pointing his .44 at the robber. “Did he fire six shots or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I’ve kinda lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”

Magnum Force (1973)
Screenwriters: Harry Julian Fink, Rita M. Fink, John Milius
In Magnum Force, Dirty Harry is back, and he’s searching for a group of vigilante killers. This time, the call is coming from inside the house – or rather, the San Francisco Police Department.  
After (explosively) dispatching the rogue lieutenant who headed up the vigilante gang, Eastwood’s Harry repeats a line he delivered earlier in the film – an “I told you so” that only he knows. 
“A man’s got to know his limitations,” he says. 

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
Screenwriters: Adapted from the novel by Asa Earl Carter, screenplay by Philip Kaufman, Sonia Chernus
The Outlaw Josey Wales is that perfect Western that melds old-school tropes and lightning-fast gunslinging with contemporary commentary. It even has an ending that includes a ride off into the sunset.
Eastwood’s good-at-heart outlaw, Josey Wales, is just a hardworking father, husband, and farmer in Missouri during the Civil War when he sees his family murdered by “Redleg” Union soldiers. He then dedicates his life to avenging their deaths. Along the way, and despite his efforts to remain a lone cowboy, he takes on a surrogate family that includes a mangy mutt, an aging Native American chief, a tough but traumatized Native American woman, plus a naive Kansas granny and her granddaughter. 
The film is rich with quotable lines. 
“Buzzards gotta eat, same as the worms,” he says after killing two bounty hunters and not wanting much to bury them.

“Are you gonna pull those pistols or whistle Dixie?” he tells other would-be killers.
“I always heard there were three kinds of suns in Kansas,” he tells his Kansas-born love interest, “sunshine, sunflowers, and sons-of-bitches.”
“I guess we all died a little in that damned war,” he says close to the film’s end. 
But it’s when a bounty hunter reveals his profession to Eastwood’s Wales – and shrugs, “Man’s got to do something for a livin’ these days” – that Eastwood offers his trademark scowling wisdom.
“Dyin’ ain’t much of a living, boy,” he says. 

Sudden Impact (1983)
Screenwriters: Harry Julian Fink, Rita M. Fink, Joseph Stinson
By now, the “Dirty Harry” canon had become nearly as anticipated as a James Bond film, but with more big guns and violence. Moviegoers knew they’d hear some tough and funny lines, and that the (sort of) good guy would win in the end. 
In other words, the time was right for Eastwood to deliver.
After gunning down all but one in a gang of diner robbers, Eastwood’s Harry approaches the last standing (but injured) crook, who has grabbed a hostage. Sizing up the situation, Harry’s waiting, hoping, for the suspect to make one more wrong move. 
“Go ahead,” Eastwood growls, “make my day.”

Widely considered Eastwood’s most popular one-liner, it has been co-opted by everyone from President Ronald Reagan (threatening Congress) to ordinary dads everywhere wanting to impress their children with their impressive powers of impersonation. 
Pale Rider (1985)
Screenwriters: Michael Butler, Dennis Shryack
Another classic though underappreciated Western in Eastwood’s career, the actor plays a mysterious preacher (whose real name might be Death). When he arrives in a prospector village that’s being bullied by a greedy mining company, he inspires the townsfolk to fight back.  
After disabling one of the mining company’s goons, and just before he breaks a boulder in half with his sledgehammer, Eastwood’s Preacher playfully says, “The Lord certainly does work in mysterious ways.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s9kzbLF-4E
The Dead Pool (1988)
Screenwriters: Harry Julian Fink, Rita M. Fink, Steve Sharon
The final “Dirty Harry” includes a brief appearance by then little-known Jim Carrey as a heavy metal rock star. He’s the first victim in a “dead pool” that’s sending a list of celebrities to the morgue. 
Dirty Harry is also on the dead-pool list. Not that he cares about anything, including what anyone else thinks.
“Well, opinions are like assholes,” he says at one point. “Everybody has one.”

Unforgiven (1992)
Screenwriter: David Webb Peoples
As this is an Oscar-winning film that attempts to debunk many of the stereotypes of movies and novels about the Old West, the memorable lines in this poetic picture are less attempts at a catchphrase and more a look into the dark recesses of the human soul. 
Eastwood’s William Munny is a gunslinger who has done terrible things in his life. But now, nearing the end of his life, he offers perspective and caution to the would-be mentee who admires him.   
“It’s a hell of a thing, killin’ a man,” he says. “Take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.”