Clint Eastwood built Unforgiven as a reckoning with the films that made him famous — specifically Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns, which were themselves remakes of Kurosawa's samurai films. Leone took Yojimbo and made A Fistful of Dollars. Eastwood played the character. Decades later, he made Unforgiven to ask what that character actually was: not a hero, a mechanism of violence given a moral costume. Yojimbo is where it started.