With 1964's A Fistful of Dollars, Italian screenwriter and director Sergio Leone brought an entirely new sensibility to the Western, incorporating ideas from other genres within the framework of a tale set in the Old West. In doing so, he not only created a new type of film, the Spaghetti Western, but also launched the film career of its star, Clint Eastwood.

Leone wanted to make a Western because he thought there was a market for them in Europe that wasn't being satisfied by the films Hollywood was putting out. So he wrote a script, copying the plot of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's 1961 samurai film Yojimbo, without asking for the rights, and found locations in Spain to shoot.