Directorial credit dispute
When the film began shooting in Spain in Almería and Guadix, Valerii had a new cinematographer Giuseppe Ruzzolini, with Sergio Salvati working as a cameraman, uncredited, for the sequences of the duel among mirrors and Nobody's meeting with Sullivan in the gambling room. A new problem arose on set when costumes for Henry Fonda vanished, leading to production stopping for nine days. This led to paying a high penalty to keep Fonda for a few days or postpone shooting until he was free again. Leone proposed to Valerii that they either cut 30 or 40 pages from the script or create a second unit to finish the film. Leone offered to take the second unit shots, which Valerii accepted. Claudio Mancini warned Valerii, stating that Leone would take credit for the film when they go back to Rome if he let him shoot anything. Valerii took over scenes involving Henry Fonda and the action sequences in the desert, while Leone directed the saloon scene with Terence Hill showing his gunslinger skills, parts of the sequences in the village festival, and the public urinal scene, which was not in the original script.
Assumptions range over how much Leone contributed to the film. Christopher Frayling wrote: "The most likely scenario is that Leone helped out on a duel, then took over second-unit work on 'the battle', and then directed the opening scenes and the carnival section of the film." John Landis, who has claimed to be an extra in the film, said: "We shot for a couple of weeks, among hundreds of extras on horseback, attacking and firing wildly. Fonda and Hill kept us all at bay. [...] Leone directed that battle on horseback." Neil Summers, who played Squirrel, stated that Leone "directed most of the scenes I was in [...] [Leone] worked slowly and was constantly trying new angles with his camera and new innovative shots with his actors." Valerii himself stated that "scenes filmed by Leone are: Terence Hill getting drunk in the saloon (but not the close-ups of that shattering glasses, I shot those myself; and also the footage of the betting, with Piero Lulli taking the money, is mine); the part of the sequence at the fair which starts from the moment where Nobody steals the apple from the boy, to the episode of the pies thrown at the negroes' faces; the digression in the public urinal, [...] and several close-ups of Nobody who, while Beauregard fights the Wild Bunch, takes note of the body count as if they were points at a game, another addition on the part of Leone, who thought it was a funny idea." Screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi confirmed Valerii's comments stating that "Tonino shot the whole film, absolutely ON HIS OWN", and that Leone "organized a second unit crew and shot a couple of sequences, which in my opinion are the weakest in the film: the urinal, stretched in an abnormal way, and the glass contest in the saloon. Nothing else." Sergio Donati expanded on this, stating that some photographers were sent over by the press office, and asked Leone, who was on set for a single day, to sit behind camera in a director's pose with Valerii's permission. Donati stated that "inevitably, from that moment on, everyone, in and outside the movie business, started saying, 'Yeah, actually the real director of the film was Leone, who saved it from the disaster of an incapable director.'" Leone's own discussion following the film's release often contradicted itself.
