Sad Hill Unearthed (Desenterrando Sad Hill)

Alright, you need one more, right?

GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN JULY 2011

- Yeah! - So do we.

So we wanna turn on the houselights if that's possible.

'Cause this is what happens at the end of the Metallica show.

We wanna see the sweat.

We wanna see...

We wanna see the voices struggling to talk.

We wanna see people just destroyed. We wanna see the smiles.

-Can we turn on the houselights, please? -

Thank you, Gothenburg! The Metallica family!

In July 1966 the Spanish Army raised a huge graveyard in Burgos.

That cemetery had over 5,000 graves...

...but no one buried in them.

MIRANDILLA VALLEY, BURGOS, SPAIN SEPTEMBER 2015

When the shooting ended, after July,...

SAD HILL CULTURAL ASSOCIATION

...in the Valley everything was quickly forgotten.

All film sets were left behind. The concentration camp, its constructions,

the wood, tents, all was left there.

The trenches with...

TWO MONTHS AFTER THE SHOOTING SEPTEMBER 1966

...all props, some of the porexpan canyons.

All the crosses and signs at the cemetery.

Some people say there are crosses from the film

on the rooftops of nearby villages,

to prevent water leaks.

It deteriorated progressively over 48 years.

Until it became invisible

to anyone walking around.

Nature has done its job, slowly burying the place.

And at the end, it lied below 7 inches of soil.

In that summer 1966 people worked on the film, earned their money,

but no one spoke about it afterwards. No one spoke about it.

When I first heard about it I was shocked.

That announcement changed my life.

There's so much said with no words in this movie...

METALLICA LEAD VOCALIST

...makes it universal.

Almost nothing had come along...

FILM DIRECTOR

...that was as big as "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly".

Everything is so perfect.

EDITOR "THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY"

The directing, the music,

the production design, the editing.

You could take a single sequence of that film and frame it

and it would be a fantastic piece of artwork to have

because there are just so many individual shots...

FILM CRITIC

...that are stunning to look at in that film.

It shows the toughness, it shows the dirtiness,

it shows the unpredictability of the west.

You can watch the film over and over

and see something different every time.

Italian Westerns are more fashionable.

SERGIO LEONE'S BIOGRAPHER

More fashionable design-wise with the clothes, the production design

and the music.

They're more hip, something sort of stylish, hence Tarantino.

Ennio Morricone...

The... The soundtrack to that movie

is so horribly great.

This music is considered...

MUSIC COMPOSER

...the second best in the world,

in 100 years of cinema.

I don't remember ever being as exhilarated

by a movie as I was with "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"

and a large part of that has to do with the scene in the cemetery.

The cemetery is one of the most beautiful sequences

in film history.

The plot of the film was the search of the grave

where the treasure was buried.

This sequence represents the perfect ending for the film.

You get so much emotion from that scene.

You can feel every ounce of tension

from each character. And it's just wonderful filmmaking.

They take scenes that would ordinarily be

a five minute scene in an American Western

and it's now a 15-minute scene,

because every nuance is explored.

Luciano Vincenzoni, the script writer, said to me:

"It said in half a page: the three of them walk into a cemetery,"

"they have a duel, one of them dies."

And that page or those two pages became 20 minutes of screen time.

I remember the first time I saw Leone's movie,

at the cinema in Majorca, where I lived.

I went with my grandfather.

He took me to the cinema, I was only five years old,

I didn't know which movie we were going to see.

Most of all, I remember the music.

We sat down, lights turned off and when the first notes sounded

I was blown away by what I was listening to.

I saw it as a kid, most likely in black and white.

And what I do remember is when I bought my first VHS.

It had a cropped 4:3 format for TV.

So the duel sequence was a mess.

We had a relief teacher at school...

CELL BIOLOGY PROFESSOR AT MUNSTER UNIVERSITY

...and he talked about this movie.

AUTHOR "BEHIND THE SCENES: SERGIO LEONE'S GBU"

He talked about this film about three...

protagonists looking for 200,000 dollars in buried gold

during the American Civil War.

And he described it in such a great way,

sort of the way that maybe Sergio Leone

or Christopher Frayling would describe the story,

it was really exciting, and I thought: "Wow, I have to see this movie."

"The Good, the Bad and the Ugly", I think I was predestined to it

because my father is from Quintanarraya,

a village 30 minutes away from the filming location,

and my mother is from Gérgal, in Almería, a town near Tabernas Desert.

When we went to Almería we visited MiniHollywood and the desert,

and watched western movies.

As a child I watched the movie with my father and my uncles

I knew nothing about Leone nor Eastwood,

but I just loved them. I watched them a thousand times.

After a long time watching

and revisiting Leone's movies

I began to hear people's stories saying they had worked in the movie,

one played as extra, others talked about the bridge story.

So I started to investigate into the film they were talking about.

And it was "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly",

and the cemetery was a few miles from where I lived.

And there's people researching, passionate about the subject.

I knew the locations since I was a kid.

We went to the cemetery with our bikes.

But it got serious when we opened the Dinosaurs Museum in Salas,...

SALAS ARCHAEOLOGICAL COLLECTIVE

...and some tourists came asking about locations with pictures taken from a TV.

BETTERVILLE CONCENTRATION CAMP

And that's when we became interested in finding

exactly every location.

If you put together Morricone's music with having enjoyed these places,

and suddenly realising

your grandfather worked in the film,

that left a big mark inside me.

Big enough to make me look for information

about what happened here in the summer of 1966.

The film starts...

My new film, "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"...

SERGIO LEONE INTERVIEW, 1966

...you could say it is

an epic picaresque western because...

it is the story of three magnificent and funny scoundrels

during the American Civil War.

It begins as a classic western...

in a little village from the Far West.

At the premiere for "A few dollars more",

Leone was approached by producers from United Artists

who offered him a huge budget to realise the third film in the trilogy.

So for him it was finally an opportunity...

"FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE"

...to go as big as he wanted

and to create a film that was on the largest scale imaginable.

Leone's career is so strange in those 3 years, 1964, 1965, 1966.

1964 "Fistful of dollars", budget 200,000 dollars.

Huge success in Italy. Immediately on the back of it

"For a few dollars more", budget 600,000 dollars.

The most successful film ever made in Italy at that time.

Right on the back of that

"The Good, the Bad and the Ugly", budget 1.3 million dollars.

So he is going from 200,000 dollars to 1.3 million dollars in 2.5 years.

Certainly, the third western film of Sergio Leone

is where he had improved exponentially,

even if before it was already very high.

After editing "For a few dollars more",

Sergio Leone whom I loved, said:

"I'm doing a new film 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly',

I want the editor

to be in Spain with me."

In fact, the first part of the film

"The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" was shot in Almería.

Western and American epic movies

have impressive landscapes at their disposal.

"SPAIN: AN INTERNATIONAL FILM SET"

Spain presents a varied topography

with a wide range of natural cinematographic scenarios.

-Settlements accurately reconstructed. -

Even if it is easy to find out what's behind the façades.

As the movie takes place during the American Civil War

Leone had secured locations in Madrid and Almería

but he soon realised he would require greener locations as well.

Leone once said that

Northern Spain is like Virginia,

Southern Spain is like Arizona and New Mexico.

'Betterville Concentration Camp' was the first location,

in Carazo, and during those days they decide

to locate the cemetery in Mirandilla Valley,

between Santo Domingo de Silos and Contreras.

-That's the cemetery! -Wow!

Holy shit! Oh man! Oh, my God!

We found it! This is it!

CANADIAN FILM FANS WILL ROSS, DEVAN SCOTT AND DANIEL JEFFERY

VISIT SAD HILL CEMETERY FOR THE FIRST TIME, SEPTEMBER 2014

-We are on one of the mountains! -I know! I didn't expect this!

Holy shit!

This is one of the coolest moments of my life.

This is honestly like... This is out there with the greats.