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

Clint Eastwood: Straight Shooter

Unforgiven (Directed by Clint Eastwood)

Clint Eastwood has directed over 35 feature films, frequently starring in them and composing original music for nearly a dozen, amassing in the process several Oscar nominations, two Oscar wins and two DGA Awards for Outstanding Directorial Achievement. Revered as the last ‘classical’ director working in Hollywood – a tribute to the restraint of his storytelling and the effectiveness of his working method – Eastwood has never been afraid of taking risks, balancing accessible mainstream success with darker edgier projects. 

Eastwood as a figure of the brooding anti-establishment was first solidified by his portrayal as a protagonist in A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964), For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965) and The Good the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966). He was in the early 1970s looking for more challenging roles which he found in films like The Beguiled (Don Siegel, 1971), which allowed him to go beyond the roles he had become associated with.

Eastwood began directing with Play Misty For Me in which a radio presenter is stalked by an obsessive fan. His presence as an actor in most of these early ventures tended to overshadow his film's successes, most notably in the remarkable The Outlaw Josey Wales. Yet he was recognised as a capable filmmaker with a consistent and distinct style by the mid-1970s. He also began to show an increasing inclination for less marketable ventures like Bird (1988) and White Hunter, Black Heart (1990). His standing as one of America's most distinguished filmmakers was reinforced by his award of the Oscar for Unforgiven (1992), which was widely praised and is now recognised as his masterpiece.

The following extract is from an interview with Scott Foundas in which Eastwood discusses his approach to directing, his attitude to commercialism and the significance of the script:

Q: You have a reputation for working fast on the set, and [Don] Siegel had a similar reputation. Was that something you picked up from him?

A: Speed is just up to the individual. Some people think things over more; others work more instinctively. I’ve worked with some other fast directors – Bill Wellman wasn’t slow. He knew what he wanted, shot it and moved on. I came up through television, and in television you had to move fast. The important thing, of course, is what comes out on the screen. I like to move fast only because I think it works well for the actors and the crew to feel like we’re progressing forward. But I think the reputation that I have for speed is not necessarily a good one – you don’t want to do Plan 9 from Outer Space, where the gravestones fall over and you say, ‘I can’t do another take. We’re too busy. Move on.’ You’re still making a film that you want to be right. But I find, as an actor, that I worked better when the directors were working fast. That’s why I guess Don and I got along so well. You sustain the character for shorter periods. You’re not having to ask yourself, ‘Now where was I three days ago? What the hell is this scene all about? What are we doing here?’

Q: Is the filmmaking process significantly different for you when you’re acting in and directing a picture as opposed to just directing?

A: It is. You definitely split your concentration. Most actors who’ve turned to directing – William S. Hart, Stan Laurel, Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier – have had to be in the picture in order to get the directing job, and that’s what happened with me. Once in a while an actor comes along and gets a project going that he’s not also starring in – Redford with Ordinary People, for example – and that’s certainly the more ideal thing, to do one job and concentrate on that one job. I always expected to withdraw from acting at some point and just stay behind the camera, and in recent years, I’ve done that. Even when I think back on Unforgiven – I had a major role in it, but there’s also a lot of the picture that I’m not in. Being out of Mystic River was great. But then Million Dollar Baby comes along and there’s a great role in there for an older guy. Well, I’m an older guy. So, there you go. Never say never.

Q: Did directing your own pictures then make it harder to go back and act for other directors?

A: I don’t think so. I actually think every actor should direct at some point to learn the hurdles and the obstacles the director faces and the concentration it takes – a concentration equal to that of the actor, just in a different way. I felt that directing made me much more sympathetic to what directors have to do. I think I was easier to work with as an actor after I’d directed a few times. When the director wanted another take for reasons other than performance, I didn’t bog down and say, ‘Come on, what do you need that for?’

Q: When you start a film do you always have a sense of what you want, what it’s going to look like?

A: I always wanted to try something different. A lot goes into a film. But first you have to have a great story, a foundation; then you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to frame that story, how’s it going to look, how’s it going to sound. It’s hard to express it, because I don’t sit around and intellectualize it. A lot of times when I go to work, I have a picture in my mind of how things should be, but I don’t know why I have that picture. I just know that I want to get there and I’ve got to explain to people how we’re going to get there, or have people explain that to me.

Q: Unforgiven is frequently cited as the film that caused American critics and audiences to finally accept you as a serious artist, whereas that recognition had come considerably earlier from some foreign circles, notably France.

A: I’ve never thought about what other people think. I’ve always just thought – and I still think this way – that you make a film, you present it to the public and then it’s out there and it’s up to them to judge it. I just kept grinding them out, like a machinist, and I guess some people might go back and, in hindsight, say, ‘Well, this wasn’t so bad.’ The Outlaw Josey Wales, for example – I would say that, judging from the man on the street, that’s the most popular Western I’ve ever done. But Unforgiven did break through in a way.

Q: You’ve been directing films for thirty-five years, does it feel like you’re doing anything different now than when you started out?

A: A lot of people say, ‘Well, how come you’re doing better now than when you were 45 or 50?’ The answer is I don’t know. Maybe I’m not. Maybe 45 or 50 just wasn’t looked at in the same way. Or maybe I know more and I’m thinking more, doing better things, being more selective. Probably because I’m older now, I don’t feel compelled to do a lot of work. I’ll do a lot of work if it’s there, like in the last two years I’ve done two pictures back-to-back – Million Dollar Baby and Flags of Our Fathers. But these things just all came about. If they hadn’t come about, I’d probably be a much better golfer. Whereas back in the 1970s and ’80s, I was doing more stuff. Some things you read and you say, ‘I love this script!’ Others you read and you go, ‘I like the script and I’ll do it.’ Now, I’m inclined to wait until I love the script.

Q: So many filmmakers complain about the time it takes to raise money and set projects up. But you’ve been fortunate in having a major studio–first Universal and then Warner Bros. – that was more or less willing to support whatever you wanted to do over the years.

A: Sure. A project like Bird (1988) was going nowhere when I grabbed it. It had been hanging around for a long time. It was owned by another studio and I talked Warner Bros. into trading something for it. Now, Warners might not have done that for someone else. So I’ve gotten a few films made that probably wouldn’t have been made otherwise. That goes for the last two, especially. They ended up successful despite the apprehension of the studio – so sometimes that studio thing works for you and sometimes against you. Warner Bros. wasn’t excited about doing Mystic River – they thought it was too dark. And they weren’t excited about doing Million Dollar Baby, because it was a woman’s boxing movie. But I didn’t see it like that; I saw it as a great love story. So it’s all about the way you look at it. But we got it made; that’s the main thing.

Q: Is the difficulty you had making those two films representative of any larger changes you’ve observed in the industry over the last four decades?

A: We live right now in an era where the fad is to remake a television show or a movie that’s already been remade five other times. It’s tough for a lot of studios to say, ‘Let’s start from scratch.’ In the 1940s, they had writers on tap all the time who would pitch ideas to the studio personnel. But can you imagine pitching Sunset Boulevard or some of these classic films now? A picture like that would have to be done as an independent, just as Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby had to be done semi-independently. The good thing is that it’s come full circle in a way, with the studios forming independent divisions to finance smaller films, to take on projects that wouldn’t get made otherwise. George Clooney’s film, Good Night, and Good Luck, is another example of a film that probably wouldn’t be high on a studio’s list of things to do. I’ve always tried to influence the studio to not be afraid to do things that might not make a lot of money, but which they’ll be proud of thirty or forty years from now. That’s what I told [former Warner Bros. chairman and CEO] Bob Daly when I was doing Bird. I said, ‘I don’t know if this thing will make any money – it’s about jazz, it’s not very commercial, it’s a tragic story. But I can guarantee you that I’ll try to make a film you’ll be proud to have your logo on.’ That’s about all I can offer. That’s about all I can offer on any of these films.

Q: The writer of Unforgiven, David Webb Peoples, has said that you filmed what was basically the first draft of his script, which is certainly a departure from the Hollywood norm of ‘developing’ and rewriting things ad infinitum and calling in four or five writers. You seem to have enormous respect for the written word.

A: Some scripts come in and they’re just great to start with; I’ll use Unforgiven as the example. It was a good script. I got it in the early 1980s and waited until ’92 to make it. I called up the writer, David Peoples, and said, ‘I’m going to make your movie, but I want to change a few things. Can I run these ideas by you as I get them?’ He said, ‘Go ahead.’ But the more I fiddled with it, the more I realized I was screwing it up. It goes back to something Don Siegel used to say: So many times you get a great project and people want to kill it with improvements. And that’s exactly what I was doing with Unforgiven. So finally, I called David back and said, ‘Forget what I said about making those changes. I’m not doing anything except changing the title.’ It was originally called The William Munny Killings. Of course, once you get into a project, there are always some things that live up to or exceed your expectations, and certain other things that will be disappointing. So you have to be able to re-write on your feet as you’re working. But once in a while projects come along where everything fits together like a jigsaw puzzle – as it went together in your mind, it comes together on film.

- Interview extract from ‘Scott Foundas: The Straight Shooter’. DGA Quarterly, Spring 2006.