Clint Eastwood: ‘Sometimes I don’t change a good script at all.’

Unforgiven (Directed by Clint Eastwood)

Clinton Eastwood Jr was born on May 31, 1930, to Ruth and Clint Sr. He spent his early years travelling about Depression-era California with his family while his father sought work. He struggled to make ends meet after graduating from high school, working as a logger, steel mill worker, and truck driver. He was drafted into the US army at the age of 19, putting an end to his hopes of enrolling in a university music programme. Clint left the force after two years and enrolled in business classes at LA City College. However, on the advice of army pals, he decided to pursue his interest in acting. He was hired as a $75-per-week bit character following a screen test at Universal Studios. 

Then, in the late 1950s, he got his big break to star in a television western series called Rawhide, a role he undertook for seven years. 

In 1964, he starred in A Fistful Of Dollars, the first of three "spaghetti" westerns directed by Sergio Leone. "I never considered myself a cowboy," he explains. "However, I suppose when I dressed in cowboy garb, I looked convincingly like one." The Italian movies, which were shot in Spain over a three-year period, established Clint as an international celebrity and became cinema classics. 

A Fistful of Dollars premiered in the United States on January 18, 1967, followed by For a Few Dollars More on May 10 and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly on December 29. All three films were commercial successes and established Eastwood as a major cinema star.

Eastwood gained additional roles as a result of his celebrity. Eastwood founded his own production company, Malpaso, for his first American western, Hang 'Em High (1968)—Ted Post's brilliant copy of the Leone model, enlivened by a superior cast of character performers. He also collaborated with Don Siegel on the popular police drama Coogan's Bluff (1968); Eastwood always admitted that Siegel taught him the majority of what he needed to know about filmmaking. He also collaborated with Siegel on the 1970 western Two Mules for Sister Sara, the 1971 psychological Civil War drama The Beguiled, and the prison-break thriller Escape from Alcatraz (1979). Their most well-known collaboration is Dirty Harry (1971), in which Eastwood played the ruthlessly successful police investigator Harry Callahan for the first time. 

Eastwood began directing in 1971 with the thriller Play Misty for Me, followed by the westerns High Plains Drifter (1972) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), as well as the espionage thriller The Eiger Sanction (1975), both of which he also starred in. Eastwood took over the western The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) from Philip Kaufman, who co-wrote the storey of a Missouri farmer driven to revenge following the massacre of his family by renegade Union soldiers. For the first time, this work humanised Eastwood's legendary avenger character. It was stylishly photographed by Bruce Surtees and featured a great performance by Chief Dan George as a Cherokee elder. 

Eastwood continued his career with The Gauntlet (1977), a kinetic but predictable action film in which he starred as a police investigator tasked with transporting a witness (Sondra Locke) to an Arizona judge to testify. Bronco Billy (1980)'s soft good humour was a far cry from the mayhem of his westerns and cop films; Eastwood was skillful as the proprietor of a two-bit Wild West show who shelters and eventually falls in love with a runaway heiress (Locke). Firefox (1982) was a high-tech Cold War drama in which Eastwood starred as a pilot attempting to hijack a Soviet supersonic plane. Honkytonk Man (1982), set during the Great Depression, starred Eastwood as a tuberculosis-stricken country musician whose aim is to make it to the Grand Ole Opry before he dies. 

Eastwood directed the fourth Dirty Harry film, Sudden Impact (1983), starring Locke as a rape victim on a vindictive murder rampage. He subsequently reverted to his film roots with the quasi-religious western neo-mythic Pale Rider (1985). It starred Eastwood and Surtees and was one of the few 1980s hit westerns. 

Heartbreak Ridge (1986) was an entertaining drama about an old-school marine sergeant (Eastwood) on the eve of retirement who uses a stern method to whip a squad of raw recruits into shape for the Grenada invasion. Eastwood's most adventurous endeavour during this phase of his career was White Hunter, Black Heart (1990), an adaptation of Peter Viertel's novel à clef about his on-location collaboration with director John Huston on The African Queen (1951). Eastwood bravely took on the role of Huston, emulating the renowned director's rough physical appearance. 

Eastwood, a lifelong jazz enthusiast and talented musician, also directed and produced the critically acclaimed Bird (1988), a film biography of saxophonist Charlie Parker (Forest Whitaker), and the documentary Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988).

In 1992 Eastwood released Unforgiven, a magnificent film that transcends its familiar story of a reformed gunman forced to revert to his violent ways by circumstance. When a cowhand murders a prostitute and a bounty is placed on his head, Will Munny (Eastwood), a former killer turned farmer, joins forces with his old partner (Freeman) and a bluff youngster (Woolvett) in the hunt. However, in Big Whiskey, they must contend with Sheriff Daggett's harsh justice (Hackman). While Eastwood's muscular direction demonstrates a thorough understanding of genre conventions, he and writer David Webb Peoples have created something new, profound, and complex. It's not just about the superb characterisations; it's about situations given a new spin: prostitutes and the spirit of Munny's deceased wife introduce a feminist angle; there are insights into the fine line separating law and justice; and the emphasis on ageing, fear, and death establishes a dark tone perfectly complemented by Jack Green's sombre images. All of which relates to the way this extremely violent film depicts the cost of violence, painting a convincing portrait of people becoming increasingly dependent on emotions over which they have no control. Eastwood challenges conventional cowboy heroics by presenting an alternate myth in which a man, compelled by Furies to confront a past that still haunts him, sends himself to a living Hell. The film achieves a magnificent intensity in this dark, timeless landscape.

In the following excerpt from an interview with Clint Eastwood, the director and legendary actor discusses his approach to the screenplay and what draws him to projects. 

Sometimes I don’t change a good script at all. I bought the Unforgiven script in 1980 and put it in a drawer and said I’ll do this some day—it’s good material and I’ll rewrite it. And I took it from the drawer ten years later and called up the writer and said I had a couple of ideas and wanted to rewrite some of it, and he was fine with that. I told him I might call him because I wanted him to approve my changes. So I went to work and the more I tooled with it, the more I realized I was killing it with improvements. So I went back to him and said that I had been working on these ideas and I really felt I was wrecking it, so I was just going to go with it the way it was. So I did. Of course, you make improvements along the way, but generally when you start intellectualizing it, you can take the spirit out of it.

On other occasions, you get a script where the idea is terrific, but the execution isn’t quite right or doesn’t suit the actors that you’re hiring, so you adapt it and add things to it. I’ve made changes to everything I’ve done, but with some of them it’s a minor knick-knack here and there, and on others you rework it entirely from the start.

During shooting, I have certain objectives, but I am never locked into things. In other words, when I am going on a location, I don’t say it has to be this way because this is the way we looked at it two months ago so this is the way it has to be.

Unforgiven (Directed by Clint Eastwood)

I’m always flexible, I always improvise. If we looked at the location in the fall and the sun in the summer makes it a different place, I change it. If an actor is left-handed instead of right-handed, I ask them to come in whichever direction is more natural to them. I am using simplistic analysis here, but there is no rule that has to be stuck to rigidly.

Likewise, I am flexible with the script during production. Sometimes I get an idea in one scene that will stimulate something else. Or I’d like to see the actors do that, or maybe this character would do that.

I always like to feel I am doing something different on every picture. If I’m not, if I feel like I am doing something reminiscent of a lot of things I’ve done before, it would cause me anxiety that I was repeating myself. That’s why after Unforgiven, I thought that was a perfect time for me to stop doing the western. Not for anybody else, but I would hate to be doing the same genre continually. That’s why I left Italy, because after doing three movies with Sergio Leone I felt I had done as much as I could with that character and I thought it was time for me to go home and get other ideas.

Bird (Directed by Clint Eastwood)

When I did Bird, it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn’t in it and second because most of the films I’d been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me. But whether it’s a drama or an action film, the story content is everything to me. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes not, and that is in the eye of the beholder. You definitely have to step up to the bat and try to hit the ball out of the park. If you don’t, you should at least try to be innovative, and hopefully the audience will respond to that.

I always think about the audience. When you are thinking about telling the story, you are thinking about how you want the story to be as interesting as it possibly can be for the audience—otherwise it will never take on the life it’s supposed to have out there with the audience.

It’s hard to be a judge of that. You can’t start thinking about it too much because a lot of wonderful movies haven’t done any business and a lot of not-so-wonderful movies have done tremendous business. All you can do is use yourself as the audience, ask yourself if you were going to the theatre how would you like to see this. What about this actor in that part? In every element of the film, there’s always that thing an audience is going to see and judge, like or dislike. Of course, once you have committed yourself to doing it on a film, that’s it. If the audience likes it, that’s great; if it doesn’t, go back to the drawingboard for the next feature.

Million Dollar Baby (Directed by Clint Eastwood)

I can work quite fast. If the next project is there and it’s good and it’s something that’s been brewing for a while, I can move onto it. If it’s not there, then I won’t. For example, when I was doing post-production and editing on Mystic River, I read Million Dollar Baby. I had read the book it came from some years earlier and liked the script and I thought “Well, I’ll do this.” And they asked when I wanted to do it and I said “well, right away.” We ended up getting Morgan Freeman and Hilary Swank, and we just went ahead and started doing it. One went right behind the other, but it doesn’t always happen like that. Sometimes you have to wait for a while for a very good script to come and I don’t make films just to be working. I might have done that when I was younger, but now it has to be something that I have a certain feeling for.

Excerpt from FilmCraft: Directing by Mike Goodridge on Indiewire