Write Combination: Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes (Part 2)

Trevor Hogg delves into Writing with Hitchcock by Steve DeRosa to explore the collaborations of director Alfred Hitchcock and screenwriter John Michael Hayes in the second of a two part feature... (read part one here)...

During the preparation for To Catch a Thief (1955), Alfred Hitchcock handed a book to his screenwriter composed by first-time novelist Jack Trevor Story; The Trouble with Harry (1955) revolves around the discovery of a corpse and the comedic mayhem it causes in a small town. “It was rather faithful to the novel. I added touches of my own, but still wanted to deepen it somewhat,” stated John Michael Hayes who was instructed by the filmmaker to change the setting from Britain to America. “It was a relief from the pressures of trying to make a big box office success. We were just trying to make a good picture and enjoy it. I don’t think Paramount really wanted to make it because they didn’t see much future in it commercially. But Hitch had done so well with them, they couldn’t quarrel with him.” The first draft was completed during the principle photography for To Catch a Thief. “After the script was done, he wanted me in the office every day for conferences and to have lunch with him.”

When Shirley MacLaine (The Apartment) filled in as the replacement for the ill Carol Haney (Kiss Me Kate) during a theatrical production of The Pajama Game, the young stage actress came to the attention of Alfred Hitchcock. “When she came down on the set and read her lines, Hitch said to me, ‘I’m not going to tamper with this girl. She has such an odd quality and it’s delightful,’” recalled John Michael Hayes who unwittingly gave MacLaine one of the most memorable lines in the picture when upon being kissed by John Forsythe (Topaz), she warns him, “Lightly, Sam. I have a very short fuse.” Hayes was stunned by the crowd reaction. “It rocked the theatre and I looked up in total surprise. I had no idea. It was a fairly common expression. I didn’t mean it the way it came out. I meant that she was very emotional. I didn’t mean that she was climatic, but that’s the way the audience roared with it.” A famous British playwright is quoted by the character of Dr. Greenbow (Dwight Marfield). “It’s my favourite sonnet from Shakespeare. I had to put something in. I don’t think the audience understood what it was all about but it went with the theme. We had Shirley MacClaine and John Forsythe, and there were all sorts of things that prevented them from getting together. They met and got to know each other under the strangest of circumstances but they were destined to be a couple.” Unfortunately, moviegoers did not take to $1 million production which grossed $7 million and was described by Hitchcock as being “an expensive self-indulgence.” At the BAFTAs, The Trouble with Harry was nominated for Best Film and Best Foreign Actress (MacLaine), while Hitchcock contended for a Directors Guild of America Award.

22 years after its original 1934 release Alfred Hitchcock opted to remake The Man Who Knew Too Much. An American doctor while vacationing with his family unwittingly becomes entangled in an international assassination plot which results in his son being kidnapped. The protagonist in the thriller, Dr. Benjamin McKenna (James Stewart), was inspired by the character of Bulldog Drummond who appeared in the British adventure and spy stories penned by H.C. McNeilie. The filmmaker recruited Angus MacPhail, who was the chief story editor for Gaumont-British, to develop the screenplay. At the time, John Michael Hayes was contracted to work on The Captain’s Table (1959). “I was going to do the screenplay and Spencer Tracy was going to play the lead,” stated Hayes. “[Sol] Siegel left Paramount and moved over to Metro; they just stopped the picture.” Hitchcock took advantage of the opportunity. “I never saw the original script and the original picture, except for the Albert Hall sequence at the end, which was pretty much the same as it was in the original. Hitch called me in and said, ‘What I’m going to do is tell you the story, and you take notes and write the story I tell you, your way.’ We talked about a lot of things. I picked out the best ideas I could and made a screenplay out of it.”

“Hitch went off and the script wasn’t even finished,” recalled John Michael Hayes. “We only had maybe a third of it, and gaps in that too because he’d scheduled it before we were ready. They went to Marrakesh and I was sending pages by Pan American pilot to the set. Then I flew to London, wrote on the airplane in the lounge, then wrote all day, mimeographed at night, and brought the script to the set in the morning until we caught up.” Despite the time constraints, the screenwriter was able to infuse a sense of humour into the project. “There were two sets of dialogue, because Hitch wanted something lighter. Ben and Jo were in the marketplace and were going to face a bad situation, and Hitch didn’t want a scene with a family argument over her going back on the stage. It didn’t fit the mood, nor the walk they had to take, so they cabled me and asked for some other dialogue to fit the scene. I went home and I wrote all that stuff about how Ben’s patients had paid for their trip and their new clothes. ‘I’m wearing Mrs. So-and-So’s appendix.’ I sent it to them and remember John Mock saying, ‘Oh, this is so good!’ He got a cable back from Marrakesh saying how delighted they were with the dialogue.”

Like with Rear Window, the screenwriter wanted to create a sympathetic antagonist. “She envied Doris Day [Pillow Talk] and Jimmy Stewart [Vertigo] and their family relationship,” said Hayes when discussing the character of Mrs. Drayton played by Brenda De Banzie (Hobson’s Choice). “It made her more interesting as a villainess that she has feelings which begin to come out. She begins to like the boy and doesn’t want anything to happen to him. She’s seen happiness and a nice family blown apart, and suddenly it’s too much for her.” The Man Who Knew Too Much which cost $1 million to make grossed $11 million and won the Oscar for Best Original Song. Alfred Hitchcock received a Directors Guild of America nomination and contended for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Controversy erupted between the filmmaker and the screenwriter over the contribution of Angus MacPhail. “Hitch had to have somebody to talk things over with and keep notes but it was left up to me to finally write it. Angus was a perfectly nice man. He was a friend of Hitchcock’s from the 1920s, and Hitch wanted to give him credit because he said, ‘He needs a credit. He needs the work.’” Hayes successfully pursued credit arbitration despite Hitchcock threatening never to speak to him again. “I was told that there were pages sent to the Guild that Hitch said Angus worked on. But if that was true, he never showed and mentioned them to me.” The victory came with a great cost as the two men never worked with each other again. “The collaboration got my writing noticed by the critics, the public, and the studios,” reflected Hayes. “It lifted me out of the ordinary journey of the screenwriter’s life, and there were a lot of good writers who never got the chance. I was lucky.”

For more on the collaborations between Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes, check out Steve DeRosa's book, Writing with Hitchcock.

Five Essential... Films of Alfred Hitchcock
Silent Master: The Early Films of Alfred Hitchcock

Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.

Write Combination: Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes (Part 1)

Trevor Hogg delves into Writing with Hitchcock by Steve DeRosa to explore the collaborations of director Alfred Hitchcock and screenwriter John Michael Hayes in the first of a two part feature...

“A lot of people embrace the auteur theory,” observed legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock. “But it’s difficult to know what someone means by it. I suppose they mean that the responsibility of the film rests solely on the shoulders of the director. But very often the director is no better than his script.” Arguably, the most fruitful collaboration for Hitchcock was with American screenwriter John Michael Hayes; within a two period they produced Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1955), and the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

Recalling how he became creatively involved with the British moviemaker, John Michael Hayes told Steve DeRosa, the author of Writing with Hitchcock, “Hitchcock had his agents and my agent get together for lunch; they handed me this book which had the short story in it called Rear Window. They told me, ‘You’re to meet Mr. Hitchcock on Friday night at the Beverly Hills Hotel for dinner. Read the story and be prepared to discuss it with him.’” When time came for the meeting Hitchcock was nowhere to be found. As Hayes headed for his car a taxi pulled up and his late host hurried out of the vehicle. Hayes called out, “Mr. Hitchcock?” to which the filmmaker replied, “No. Sorry. No autographs. I have a very important meeting.” Hayes surprised him when he responded with, “You have it with John Michael Hayes.” Without apologizing for his tardiness, the director ushered the screenwriter back into the Beverly Hills Hotel. Asked by Hitchcock to give an analysis of his movies, Hayes obliged by giving him critiques on Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Notorious (1946) and The 39 Steps (1935). After the meal, the two men went their separate ways with the topic of Rear Window never being discussed. On Monday morning Hayes received a phone call from his agent announcing, “You’re in. Hitchcock loved you.” A year later Hayes asked Hitchcock to explain why he hired him. “I remember meeting you and going in to eat, but I don’t remember anything after that,” admitted Hitchcock. “But you talked a lot, and on the assumption that a man talks a lot has something to say, I hired you. But don’t forget if I didn’t like you, two weeks later I could have let you go.”

Rear Window was first published in the February 1942 issue of Dime Detective under the title It Had to Be Murder. Hal Jeffries is confined to a single bedroom with an unscreened window; to fight off his boredom he watches the activities of his neighbours, one of whom may be a murderer. The tale, which is told in the first person, was inspired when author Cornell Woolrich discovered two giggling teenage girls staring at him from the apartment building next door as he wrote in his underwear. “We had to give Jefferies [given a slightly changed name] a reason to travel around the world, a dangerous occupation, and a reason to get his leg broken,” revealed John Michael Hayes as to why the main character was turned into a photojournalist. “It was more dramatic having it broken in the line of work, and not just slipping on the stairs.” The camera owned by Jefferies influenced the storytelling. “He had a telescopic lens we could use later with the picture of the flowers going up and down in the garden. He had flashbulbs to fend off the villain.” The occupation enabled the protagonist portrayed by James Stewart [Mr. Smith Goes to Washington] to realistically meet his glamorous love interest. “I spent a week with Grace Kelly [The Country Girl] and got to know that she was whimsical, funny, humorous, and teasing. She was like girl next door, but she was very sexy and had all these attributes. I had to give her a profession, so I gave her my wife’s profession – a high-style fashion model. I combined the best that I saw in Grace Kelly, the best in my wife, and created the character of Lisa.”

In order to make the story more interesting Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes decided to have Lisa Fremont pursue L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies as opposed to the other way around. “Jeff is afraid of the fact that if he and Lisa marry, she’ll get him to settle down in New York to do portraits, and he’ll miss all the excitement of life.” It has been suggested that the relationship between Lisa and Jeff was modeled on the love affair between Ingrid Bergman (Gaslight) and photojournalist Robert Capa. Hayes is quick to point out that he incorporated his own experiences into the romantically-charged liaison. “In the case of Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, when Lisa was in danger, he suddenly realized how much she meant to him and that if anything happened to her, my God, life was worthless. That came out of my life. Before my wife and I were married, we decided to delay our marriage until I was more successful. We got into an automobile accident, and she was thrown out of the car and onto the highway.” The screenwriter from Massachusetts adds, “I believe in building your characters carefully. The more you know a character, the more you suffer when suspenseful things happen to them.”

“When we were casting Rear Window, they brought in all sorts of thuggy-looking people for [Lars] Thorwald, and you knew damn well that they killed their wives,” remarked John Michael Hayes. “We got Raymond Burr [Count Three and Pray], aged him, put rimless glasses on him and tried to disarm him. Yet he was such a good actor, there was an intensity about him that was tremendous, so when he turned and looked directly at the camera, everybody in the theatre moved back.” The screenwriter does not define the world by black and white. “I’ve never really written a pure villain. I think when a man becomes a villain there have to be reasons for it.” Contemplating the actions of Thorwald, Hayes observed, “One day, he had enough of his wife, had an affair on the side, and made a desperate move which was probably atypical of him. He thought nobody would notice.” A key role was that of Stella (Thelma Ritter), the wisecracking insurance company nurse. “I like a character like that to act as a Greek chorus, to tell us what might happen and to go to for comic relief because you can’t have unrestrained suspense all the time. You have to give your audience a chance to laugh, catch their breath, and get set for the next scary thing that’s going to happen.”

To enhance the gruesome nature of the murder and the detection of the crime, Alfred Hitchcock referred John Michael Hayes to two famous British murder trials. Patrick Mahon cut up his female victim and deposed of her body parts by throwing them out of the window of a train; and Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen poisoned his wife, dismembered her, and buried her remains in his basement. Hayes met daily with Hitchcock turning the screenplay into a shooting draft. “We sat down in his office and he broke up all the scenes into individual shots, made sketches of them, and laid out the picture.” The Hollywood Reporter wrote in 1954, “Rear Window is one of the directorial masterpieces of recent years. To keep it from being cold and technical Hitchcock adds to it the warmest love story he’s ever packed on the screen. In addition to revealing a new capacity for tenderness, the director shows an unsuspected flair for wisecracking comedy, particularly the scenes where Miss Ritter and [Wendell] Corey make expert use of the bright dialogue in John Michael Hayes’ screenplay.” The thriller which cost $1 million to make grossed $26 million and contended for Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography – Colour, and Best Sound at the Oscars; it also received nominations from the BAFTAS, Directors Guild of America, and the Writers Guild of America.

For his next cinematic effort with the American wordsmith, Alfred Hitchcock decided to adapt To Catch a Thief; the novel penned by David Dodge revolves around a former convict who is suspected of orchestrating a number of jewelry robberies. The story was inspired by a series of French Riviera burglaries committed by Dario Sambucco during the 1950s. “We went over, they got a French assistant director as our guide, and we went down and did research,” recalled John Michael Hayes who was accompanied by his wife. “Plotting was not my greatest talent, dialogue and character were. I was presented with the same problem as Rear Window. You’ve got this basic background and all we had to do is just sit down and ask, ‘What if he did this? What if he did that?’ And gradually our plot grew.” The script and the source material deviated so much that Dodge stated, “All that survived in the end were the title, the names of some of the characters and the copyright, which was mine.” One significant change was making the criminal mastermind Bellini a restaurateur. “I learned that a lot of the people in the underground were restaurant workers – cooks, chefs, and waiters,” explained Hayes who modeled the illegal network on the French Resistance; however, instead of battling the Nazis, the eating establishment preyed upon its wealthy patrons. “Hitch and I thought we could get them all together as a group in Bellini’s restaurant. This would give the gang access to the wealthy. They could overhear their conversations, [and] judge the jewelry they wore.”

There were daily meetings between the filmmaker and his screenwriter. “We discussed in general terms story and character; he let me go on and write until I finished,” remarked John Michael Hayes who described Alfred Hitchcock as being not one to hand out compliments and very cordial when addressing changes which needed to be made. “Most of my conferences with Hitch concerned with his reminiscing about how he had solved some cinematic or story or problem.” Hayes was instructed to do an unusual task. “Hitchcock had me translate the script into French but more than that, we translated it back into English, so that the French actors would speak English with French idiom. I worked long and hard with a translator to get the script ready on time. I can’t imagine many producers doing that but Hitch did.” Language issues still ensued in particular with French actor Charles Vanel whose speeches as Bellini had to be shortened. “Hitch hired him because he saw him in The Wages of Fear [1953] and never bothered to check whether he could speak English at all. They had his lines on a blackboard and he tried to look offstage and read the lines.”

Lead actor Cary Grant (Penny Serenade) liked to improvise during the principle photography. “We had to come up with a gimmick to forestall this because Hitch planned every script very carefully, down to the camera angles,” revealed John Michael Hayes. “When he did the scene as written, everyone from the grips to the lighting boys, broke out into applause.” French actress Brigitte Auber (The Man in the Iron Mask) endeared herself to the filmmaker. “She had a casual way of wearing a blouse which exposed her bosom frequently. Hitch, of course, was delighted with her. She brought a lot of humour and vivacity to the part. Grace [Kelly] was more reserved and Brigitte was more playful, more childlike. And of course, that was disarming. You couldn’t think of her as the jewel thief. She was just a lovely, effervescent young girl, in love with this older man, who kept saying, ‘Leave me alone. Go back to your dolls.’” The onscreen competition between the two women gave the screenwriter an opportunity to compose some crafty dialogue such as when Kelley responds to the playboy antics of Cary Grant with Auber by observing that it looked like they had been “conjugating some irregular verbs.”

“We had a fight only once and that was over the ending of To Catch a Thief, and it got to be quite bitter,” confessed John Michael Hayes. “I must have written a dozen endings for that picture. I had a scene that I liked. Cary Grant would like one. Grace Kelly would like one. And Hitch wouldn’t like it.” Hayes wanted to literally conclude the picture with a cliffhanger. “The ending I liked was with the little Sunbeam, Francie’s car, with which she took him for a ride over the Corniche and scared the hell out of him. I wanted the last love scene to be played in the car, on the edge of the road, overlooking Monte Carlo.” The final sequence features Grace Kelly following Cary Grant to his villa; her concluding line was changed from “So this is where you live? I think I’m going to like it.” to “So this is where you live? Oh, Mother will love it up here!” Explaining the reason for the alteration, Hitchcock said, “I didn’t want to wind up with a completely happy ending. It turns out that the mother-in-law will come and live with them, so the final note is pretty grim.” Film critic Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times, “In his accustomed manner, Mr. Hitchcock had gone at this job with an omnivorous eye for catchy details and a dandy John Michael Hayes script.” To Catch a Thief had a budget of $2.5 million and earned $9 million; it won Best Cinematography – Colour, and competed for Best Art Direction & Set Decoration – Colour, and Best Costume Design – Colour at the Academy Awards. John Michael Hayes received a Writers Guild of America Nomination while Alfred Hitchcock contended for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

The third collaboration between Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes involved the discovery of a corpse and the movie debut of an Oscar-winning actress.

Continue to part two.

For more on the collaborations between Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes, check out Steve DeRosa's book, Writing with Hitchcock.

Five Essential... Films of Alfred Hitchcock
Silent Master: The Early Films of Alfred Hitchcock

Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.

Quick Shooter: A Clint Eastwood Profile (Part 5)

Trevor Hogg profiles the career of Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood in the fifth of a five part feature (read parts one, two, three and four)...

“Maybe the title of Space Cowboys [2000] is a bit misleading because it is mostly about the pioneers of space,” stated Clint Eastwood when discussing the story about four former test pilots from the 1950s who decades later get an opportunity to go into outer space. “We were not really cowboys, but these men who did all the pioneering in the 1950s were going to the frontier of space in planes they were not sure could make it. They were being rocketed along on the ground faster than the speed of sound to see if the human body could take it, so I would say that the film is something of a homage to those gentlemen.” The action thriller with a production budget of $65 million stars Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones (The Fugitive), Donald Sutherland (Klute), James Garner (Murphy’s Romance), James Cromwell (Babe), Marcia Gay Harden (Miller’s Crossing), William Devane (Marathon Man), Loren Dean (Enemy of the State), Barbara Babcock (Far and Away), and Courtney B. Vance (The Hunt for Red October).

“I think there is a lot made of age, and what age you feel. I am about 12 and the rest of the guys [Jones, Sutherland, and Garner] are about 14. None of us sit and dwell on the age thing, and this particular film does deal with a sort of resurrection of some people who were very active in the 1950s in the space program and did not get to go on the journey. It does have that sort of appeal - people getting a second chance in life.” Making life a lot easier for the American filmmaker was the attitude of a particular American government agency. “NASA was extremely co-operative and allowed us to play with a lot of their toys. We used their space shuttle cockpit simulator and virtual reality rooms. We could not have done the film as efficiently or as inexpensively without their co-operation.” Eastwood had to incorporate computer generated characters into the outer space scenes for practical reasons. “You couldn’t really send anyone out there! It works terrifically but sometimes the toys start running the factory and that’s what has happened now.” Space Cowboys earned $179 million worldwide, received an Oscar nomination for Best Sound Editing and won Best Foreign Language Film at the Mainichi Film Concours.

Los Angeles crime novelist Michael Connelly captured the attention of the native of San Francisco with a story about an F.B.I. profiler recovering from a heart transplant, who hunts a serial killer. “He made a preemptive strike on it before I was done with the book,” recalled Connelly when discussing how Clint Eastwood came to cinematically adapt Blood Work (2002). “We met and talked about things he thought I might want to consider changing because they would not be that way in the movie. It was an interesting conversation.” The author learned something else during the meeting, “He told me that I wouldn't hear from him again until he made the movie. That's the kind of filmmaker he is. He has his own team and so forth, and he was true to his word. Four years went by and I never heard anything. Then the script was delivered to my house; I got excited about it after four or five years of anxiety about what would happen. Eastwood is 25 years older than the guy in the book and that was a big thing about how that would be dealt with. The script catered to his age now as opposed to him trying to pass for a much younger man; that was a relief. I did have some minor thoughts and notes, but I didn't think I would have the opportunity to voice them. Then he [Eastwood] called me out of the blue and asked what I thought of the script. I ended up sending him four pages of notes and he responded, saying he agreed and liked the notes; he said, ‘I'm going to use them all.’ So after not being in the loop it felt like, maybe out of courtesy, I was at least somewhat involved.”

The crime drama cost $50 million to make and features a cast that includes Clint Eastwood, Jeff Daniels (State of Play), Angelica Huston (Prizzi’s Honor), Wanda De Jesus (The Insider), Tina Lifford (Grand Canyon), Paul Rodriguez (Ali), Dylan Welsh (Congo), and Mason Lucero (I Am Sam). “As an actor you have two philosophies,” explained Clint Eastwood. “One is that you are afraid to let go of what you once were, or you are not afraid to but you have to let go anyway! I have no other choice – they don’t make enough shoe polish for my hair and they don’t have a belt sander for my face! At some point you have to say, ‘This is who I am and this is an opportunity to play roles that I couldn’t play before’. I couldn’t play that vulnerability factor 30 years ago. You just have to view it as an opportunity and not worry about it. If your ego is to the point where you always have to look like a matinee idol, it’d be over. I always thought of myself as a character actor even though some people viewed me as a leading man.” Eastwood revealed, “I did research prior to making the movie and spoke with the head of the organ transplant division in Stanford; it’s amazing what people can do after a transplant. I thought they would be invalids but some of them can even run marathons!” Blood Work grossed $32 million worldwide and won Future Film Festival Digital Award at the Venice Film Festival.

“I've done a few special effects movies in my life, so I've gotten that out of my system,” admitted Clint Eastwood who selected Mystic River (2003) as his next project. “I wanted to tell a story about people, about conflicts, and about people overcoming obstacles in their lives. This story did it for me.” Three men scarred by a childhood tragedy are torn apart when one of their daughters is murdered. “I liked the many-layered part. The story was a combination of an emotional tragedy with a parallel investigative piece. But the fact that they converge upon themselves is interesting. I just like to really lay it out... When I first read the synopsis for this: ‘It's about the taking of a child's life, the stealing of someone's innocence, robbing them of their youth.’ I always thought what an interesting idea because almost everybody's fascinated by the perpetrator of a crime; very few people study what happens to people for the rest of their lives, and how it affects not only that particular character but other characters around him as well.”

Cast in the $25 million production are Sean Penn (Milk), Tim Robbins (Bull Durham), Kevin Bacon (Sleepers), Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix), Marcia Gay Harden, Laura Linney (The Savages), Kevin Chapman (Unstoppable), Tom Guiry (Black Hawk Down), Emmy Rossum (The Day After Tomorrow), and Spencer Treat Clark. “As each one came on board, I sent them to Boston and they studied the accents and the Boston neighbourhoods. I arranged interviews with [author] Dennis Lehane so that they could get a feeling for what he was intending. Eventually it clicked together so that by the time we started, everyone was really well schooled on what they wanted to do. We had a few philosophy talks, but mainly, acting to me is a very organic art form and you just go and do it. I like to direct the same way that I like to be directed. Let me bring in what I want to bring in, and if something's wrong, just tell me about it and I'll make some corrections or adjustments.” Questioned about working with Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, and Laurence Fishburne, Eastwood responded, “The fact that these fellas - the four principal men - had all directed films before is actually an asset, because I've always felt that every actor should direct a film at some point in their life, and every director should act. In this way it makes everybody understand what the process is.”

Mystic River earned $157 million worldwide and became an awards circuit darling, winning Oscars for Best Actor (Sean Penn) and Best Supporting Actor (Tim Robbins), and contending for Best Supporting Actress (Marcia Gay Harden), Best Director, Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay. At the BAFTAs, the crime mystery received nominations for Best Actor (Sean Penn), Best Supporting Actor (Tim Robbins), Best Supporting Actress (Laura Linney) and Best Adapted Screenplay; the Golden Globes lauded it with Best Actor – Drama (Sean Penn) and Best Supporting Actor (Tim Robbins) as well as nominations for Best Director and Best Picture – Drama. Mystic River won Outstanding Performance of a Male Actor for a Supporting Role (Tim Robbins) and was honoured with nominations for Outstanding Performance of a Cast in a Motion Picture, and Outstanding Performance of a Male Actor in a Leading Role (Sean Penn) at the Screen Actor Guild Awards. Other guild awards nominations came from the American Cinema Editors, the Directors Guild of America, the Producers Guild of America, and the Writers Guild of America. Globally Mystic River was presented with Best Foreign Language Film at the Mainichi Film Concours and was handed nominations for Best Foreign Film by the Australian Film Institute and the Japanese Academy.

Collaborating with six other filmmakers, featuring the likes of Martin Scorsese (Hugo), Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas), and Mike Figgis (Timecode), Clint Eastwood directed the seventh and final episode in the PBS music documentary series The Blues (2003). Piano Blues has Eastwood sitting at a piano interviewing legendary musicians such as Ray Charles, Dave Brubeck, Marcia Ball and Dr. John. “I taught myself to play a little stride piano and a three-chord, eight-beat thing,” recollected Eastwood. “I became interested in boogie-woogie, jazz, and bebop. I was telling stories on the piano long before I ever directed a movie. In my movies, I like the image of the piano player: The piano player sits down, plays, tells his story, and then gets up and leaves, letting the music speak for itself.”

“Al Ruddy gave me the book, Rope Burns, and said he had been talking with F.X. Toole, who’d written these great stories set in and around boxing,” remarked Clint Eastwood. “So I read them and particularly liked Million Dollar Baby [2004]. I thought it would be relatively simple. I went to Warner Bros., and they said, ‘We don’t think boxing movies are really that commercial now,’ and I said, ‘I don’t quite see this as a boxing movie.’ I said, ‘It was a love story between a surrogate father and his surrogate daughter, and it’s the next picture I’m going to do.’ We went out [to sell it elsewhere], and we had two or three little turn-downs; they all thought it was interesting material but not commercial.” Lakeshore Entertainment intervened and Warner Bros. agreed to distribute the picture. A boxing trainer helps an amateur to achieve her dream of becoming a professional, but with fateful consequences. “It's a tragedy that could have been written by the Greeks or Shakespeare,” observed Eastwood who reunited with Morgan Freeman (The Dark Knight) and performs alongside Hilary Swank (Red Dust), Jay Baruchel (Tropic Thunder), Mike Colter (Taking Chance), Lucia Rijker (Star Trek), Brian F. O’Byrne (The International), and Anthony Mackie (The Hurt Locker).

“I had great faith in Hilary; I think she's a terrific actress. Boys Don’t Cry [1999], that was a wonderful performance, and in smaller roles like Insomnia [2002]. She has a great presence on the screen; there's a realness to her. I knew that's what it would take to make this picture work.” Made on a production budget of $30 million, Million Dollar Baby grossed $217 million worldwide and won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Hilary Swank), and Best Supporting Actor (Morgan Freeman); it contended for Best Editing, Best Actor (Clint Eastwood), and Best Adapted Screenplay. The Golden Globes presented the movie with Best Director and Best Actress – Drama (Hilary Swank) as well as nominations for Best Picture – Drama, Best Original Score, and Best Supporting Actor (Morgan Freeman); while the Screen Actor Guild Awards lauded it with Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role (Hilary Swank), and Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role (Morgan Freeman), and a nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. The drama received award nominations from the Writers Guild of America, Producers Guild of America, Directors Guild of America, Directors Guild of Great Britain, Art Directors Guild, and the American Cinema Editors. The Awards of the Japanese Academy rewarded Million Dollar Baby with Best Foreign Film.

“What intrigued me about it was the book itself and the fact that it wasn't really a war story,” remarked Clint Eastwood regarding Flags of Our Fathers (2006), which chronicles the tale of the six American World War II soldiers who took part in the famous flag raising incident that occurred during the Battle of Iwo Jima. “I liked it because it was a study of these people; I've always been curious about families who find out things about their relatives much after the fact.” The filmmaker was interested in exploring the aftereffects of warfare on soldiers. “It was a time in history when you didn't have a lot of psychiatric evaluation and coddling. When they came back they were just told to go home and get over it. If they didn't have wives or loved ones to help them, they had to adjust on their own.” Starring in the historical picture are Ryan Phillippe (The Lincoln Lawyer), Jesse Bradford (Hackers), Adam Beach (Windtalkers), John Benjamin Hickey (The Bone Collector), John Slattery (The Adjustment Bureau), Barry Pepper (Saving Private Ryan), Jamie Bell (Jumper), Paul Walker (Running Scared), and Robert Patrick (Terminator 2: Judgment Day). “We used lesser-known actors because the average age of people sent to Iwo Jima was 19 years, except for some of the officers.”

When recreating the famous battle, the film crew had to improvise. “The Japanese government feels it's a sacred place because there are still almost 12,000 of their men unaccounted for on that island. We couldn't do the pyrotechnics that we would have to do to actually recreate the invasion, so we went to Iceland.” Eastwood had his doubts about the alternative location. “I could not understand how it would work, but really there's a lot of similarities between Iceland in the summer and Iwo Jima in the winter time. Iwo is a geo-thermal island, a lot of volcanic activity, a lot of sulphur minerals coming out of fissures in the mountains and what have you. Iceland is not necessarily that way, but it does have some of that. It has tremendous black beaches, black sand beaches, which are very hard to duplicate.” Flags of Our Fathers had a production budget of $90 million and grossed $66 million worldwide; it received Academy Award nominations for Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing, while Clint Eastwood contended for Best Director at the Golden Globes. In Japan, the movie won Best Foreign Language Film at the Awards of the Japanese Academy. “I just wanted them to get to know these people, know what they went through. Maybe give the audience a feeling of what it was like in that time, what these people dedicated their lives or donated their lives for.”

A desire to explore the Japanese perspective of the Battle of Iwo Jima led Clint Eastwood to helm Letters from Iwo Jima (2006). “I kept going over story points, and how the defense of the island worked. I got interested in General [Tadamichi] Kuribayashi, [commander of the Japanese forces on the island].” The filmmaker sent out a request to learn more about the military figure. “It was a book of letters to his wife, his daughter and his son, and a lot of them were mailed from the U.S. when he was here as an envoy in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s. He was a very sensitive man, very family-oriented, missing his family very much. In those [letters] you got a feeling for what he was like.” Eastwood approached an Oscar-winning colleague for help. “I told [screenwriter] Paul Haggis I didn't have any dough, but that I had this crazy idea. I asked if he had any students or anyone he could mentor along. He got [writer Iris Yamashita] to do some research, and she came up with the idea of following the general through the eyes of a young conscript. I said, ‘Go ahead and write a script,’ and then I forgot about it. We went and prepared Flags. One day, she came with a script, and it was quite good. I realized I was heading to Iceland and Iwo Jima, and that I could pick up a few shots for both films, so that is how it all came about. Everybody asked me why was I doing [two films]? I said, ‘It just seemed like the thing to do.’ We were in the mode, so why not?” The World War II picture, made on a production budget of $19 million, stars Ken Watanabe (Inception), Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase, Shidô Nakamura, Hiroshi Watanabe, Takumi Bando, and Yuki Matsuzaki. Letters from Iwo Jima earned $69 million worldwide and won the Oscar for Best Sound Editing, while contending for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. The Golden Globes lauded the war story with Best Foreign Language Film and nominated Clint Eastwood for Best Director. The Awards of the Japanese Academy presented Letters from Iwo Jima with Best Foreign Language Film.

“[J. Michael Straczynski] had a friend who was working at the L.A. Times, and his friend called him and said, ‘We're purging all of our records. You ought to come down here and look at some of this stuff.’ He saw this bizarre case and got this idea of how to tell this woman's story,” explained Clint Eastwood as to the origins of Changeling (2008); when the Los Angeles Police Department recover her missing child, the mother suspects that she has been given an imposter. Cast in the period picture that takes place in 1928 are Angelina Jolie (Wanted), Gattlin Griffith (Green Lantern), Michelle Gunn (Super), Michael Kelly (Unbreakable), John Malkovich (In the Line of Fire), Colm Feore (Thor), Devon Conti, and Frank Wood (Michael Clayton). “When I was first given the script, I was told that Angelina had read it and liked it, so I didn't see any reason to look further. I liked her as an actress and she's a mother, so I figured she'd understand her character; she did an amazing job.” Eastwood added, “She reminds me a lot of the actresses from the Golden Age of movies in the 1940s.” Made on a production budget of $55 million, Changeling grossed $113 million worldwide and received Oscar nominations for Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography and Best Actress (Angelina Jolie). At the BAFTAs, the mystery drama contended for Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Director, Best Editing, Best Actress (Angelina Jolie), Best Production Design, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Sound; while at the Golden Globes it competed for Best Original Score and Best Actress – Drama (Angelina Jolie).

“We'd finished Changeling and were doing post-production when along comes Gran Torino [2008],” said Clint Eastwood, “is a very offbeat and unusual story for me and doesn't fit into any slot of pictures that are coming out nowadays; so I thought, ‘Well, I'll try that, too.’” The filmmaker decided to step in front of the camera again. “It's politically incorrect and it's something of a redemption story, which are the kind of things I like, so it was fun.” An embittered and recently widowed Korean War veteran becomes a mentor to a young boy taunted by a local gang. “He has a lot of things that are haunting him, and those have been suppressed. But he’s also a guy who’s out of kilter with generational changes.” Eastwood enjoyed playing the outspoken Walt Kowalski. “He wasn’t afraid to say what was on his mind even if it wasn’t particularly appealing. And of course, I felt he had to be that kind of guy because in order to change, and to make changes, and to show you’re never too old to learn a lot of things, including tolerance, he has to come from somewhere far away.” There was no way the Californian was going to tone down the character. “The trap would have been to go soft with it. If you don't play it all the way, it becomes a Hollywood bailout. You can't be Mr Nice Guy. It's very non-politically correct and that's good. There was just no pussyfooting around it.”

“The Gran Torino is his pride and joy,” stated Clint Eastwood in reference to the car which gives the movie its title. “Walt sort of is the Gran Torino. He doesn't do anything with it except let it sit in the garage. But every once in a while he takes it out and shines it up. Walt with a glass of beer, watching his car – that's about as good as it gets for him at this stage in life.” The attempted theft of the vehicle by the Hmong boy who lives next door leads to an unexpected social reawakening. “He doesn't want to have anything to do with these people. He changes when he realizes they are intelligent and they're very respectful of others, and I think he admires that. He has one line in the film where he says, ‘I have more in common with these people than I do with my own spoiled, rotten children’ and that sums it up.” Eastwood gets to portray a modern day gunslinger. “He goes back into his war mindset. That's when he really starts to see the problems with the Hmong community, mainly the kids who join gangs.” Staring in the drama are Clint Eastwood, Bee Vang, Ahney Her, Christopher Carley (Garden State), Doua Moua, Sonny Vue, and John Carol Lynch (Zodiac). “I got young people – 17, 18 – who had never acted before, but they were really good and brought a certain realistic feel to it.” The casting decision paid off as Gran Torino easily surpassed its $33 million production budget by grossing $267 million worldwide. “When it came out, it got nice reviews, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a thing. But then, when the public started liking it, I said, ‘Fine. I’ll take the success.’” At the Golden Globes, Gran Torino contended for Best Original Song, and won Best Foreign Film at Mainichi Film Concours as well at the Awards of the Japanese Academy.

Next on the cinematic agenda was Invictus (2009), a historical picture about Nelson Mandela using the 1995 Rugby World Cup as a means to unite South Africans. “It’s a story about how he handled the transition, going from a prisoner to becoming president of South Africa and how he handled racial relations and various social issues through one sporting event. It’s a rather brilliant maneuver he made at that particular time for reunification of the country.” Clint Eastwood had an opportunity to meet Mandela. “I thought he was equally impressive as he was on film. I'd seen him on newsreels and at various film presentations over the years. He's an extremely charismatic man, and he has that million dollar smile when he walks into a room and everybody else wants to smile with him. But I never got a chance to talk with him very much.” The filmmaker visited the president’s former prison home on Robben Island. “It's very emotional when you go into a little cell that doesn't even have a toilet in it. When you think a person spent 27 years of their life in there, just cracking rocks or digging in a salt mine, it's a little bit overwhelming. So, to come out and be as open and magnanimous and forgiving as he was is almost impossible to imagine.”

Invictus stars Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon (Good Will Hunting), Tony Kgoroge (Blood Diamond), Patrick Mofokeng (Africa United) Matt Stern (District 9), Julian Lewis Jones (The Bank Job), Adjoa Andoh (Adulthood), and Marguerite Wheatley. “I could not imagine anyone else in the role of Mandela,” declared Clint Eastwood. “They have the same stature and same kind of charismatic nature. Morgan also has a similar vocal quality, and he worked very hard to capture Mandela's inflections. I think he did it quite well.” The filmmaker had to familiarize himself with the sport of rugby. “I talked to the coach at the University of California, Jack Clarke, who gave me a whole rundown of the game. Then I watched his practices and everything they did there and got ideas. Then, when I got to South Africa, we had Chester [Williams, from the 1995 Springboks] and Francois [Pienaar] and various people who had been in the game. We also hired rugby players to play all the rugby parts, with the exception of Matt and one or two others.” For Eastwood there was only one place that would be suitable for the principle photography for the $50 million production. “I would not have filmed this movie in any place but South Africa. You have to be there. You need the people, you need the places. We wanted that authenticity. The majority of our cast and all of our extras were South African. They also have a viable cinema group in South Africa, so we had a nice ensemble of Americans and South Africans working together behind the scenes, and their crew could not have been better.” Invictus earned $122 million worldwide, and Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon received acting nominations from the Oscars, Golden Globes, and Screen Actors Guild Awards. “I just thought this is something that politicians around the world today could learn a lot from, in terms of having a certain creativity and bringing people together instead of just talking about it.”

“Steven Spielberg called me one day and said, ‘I have a script that I'd love to send over to you.’ And I said, ‘Fine.’ He and I had worked together on a few other projects. I read it, liked it, and called him back to say I'd do it,” remarked Clint Eastwood as to how he became aware of Hereafter (2010). “It had a spirituality about it, but it was not necessarily tied into any particular organized thought.” An American, a French journalist and a London schoolboy have different death experiences. The filmmaker could relate to the subject matter. “My dad was taking me into the surf on his shoulders and I fell off. I can still remember today, even though I was about 4 or 5 years old, the color of the water and everything as I was being washed around in the surf before I popped to the surface. But at that age you don't think too much about it.” At the age of 21, Eastwood faced a perilous wintertime situation; a plane he was flying in crashed off the coast of Northern California. While swimming to shore, the survivor noticed lights in the distance and thought, “Somebody’s in there having a beer and sitting next to a fireplace; I just want to be in there. So I’m going to make it.”

Hereafter stars Matt Damon, Cécile de France (Switchblade Romance), Thierry Neuvic (Don’t Look Back), Jay Mohr (Jerry Maguire), Richard Kind (The Station Agent), Bryce Dallas Howard (The Help), Derek Jacobi (Gosford Park), Frankie McLaren, George McLaren, and Lyndsey Marshal (The Hours). It opens with a dramatic sequence. “The tsunami was very difficult to do. I kept having fantasies of huge hoses and thousands of gallons of water running down the streets, and I figured out how to do that but I figured that would be prohibitive.” Clint Eastwood turned to Michael Owens whom he had first worked with on Space Cowboys. “We went through it and figured out what shots we would need to do live and then we did it but it took a lot of different places. Cécile was in a tank in London for nine hours without getting out too much, and she had to have a skin replacement afterwards. But then we went to Maui and shot in the ocean and on the streets of Lahaina. We had to preplan it in order to piece all the elements together with the connective shots. If you don’t preplan CGI, it’s the most expensive thing in the world; you have to plan every single shot and that’s normally not the way I shoot, but it worked out rather well. We hired a company named Scanline and they did a terrific job.” The visual effect caused some complications for Eastwood when it came to the trailer for the movie. “I would have preferred to not show the tsunami and have it sprung on everybody, but that’s just not the practicalities of life. You do want people to come in and see it, and hopefully enjoy it. It’s a tricky story because with this particular screenplay you have to flesh out all the characters and it’s tough to do; it’s tough to market a film like this.” The fantasy drama doubled its $50 million production budget by grossing $105 million worldwide. Hereafter contended for Best Visual Effects at the Oscars and won Best Foreign Film at the David di Donatello Awards.

“If you're doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible,” remarked Clint Eastwood regarding J. Edgar (2011). “But you really don't know what was going on in the person's mind; you just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.” Leonardo DiCaprio (The Departed) portrays J. Edgar Hoover who was made the director of the FBI in 1924 and served eight presidents from Calvin Coolridge to Richard Nixon. The biopic also features Armie Hammer (The Social Network), Josh Lucas (A Beautiful Mind), Naomi Watts (The Ring), Ed Westwick (Children of Men), Lea Thompson (Back to the Future), Dermot Mulroney (Copycat), Jeffrey Donovan (Hitch), Judi Dench (Jane Eyre), Stephen Root (No Country for Old Men) and Miles Fisher (Final Destination 5). “I visited with the FBI in Washington, D.C., and tried to find out as much as I could about people who had worked with Hoover.” Eastwood observed that Hoover was “the most powerful guy in the country at a time when America was by far the most powerful country [in the world]” and that “he was obviously a very detailed guy all his life, starting as a very young man. He had some great ideas—modern-day investigative techniques [like fingerprinting and forensic science]. But he also liked the glory of it all.” As for the suggestions of homosexuality, the filmmaker responded, “I’d heard all the various controversies, and gossip—that he wore dresses at parties. Everybody was saying, maybe he’s gay because he’d never gotten married. But that’s the way they did it back in the 1940s. If a guy didn’t get married, they always thought, ‘Oh, there’s something wrong with him.’” But were Hoover and his right hand man Clyde Tolson lovers? “They were inseparable pals. Now, whether he was gay or not is going to be for the audience to interpret.” Eastwood emphasized, “It’s a movie about how this guy manipulated everybody around him and managed to stay on through eight presidents.”

A remake is tentatively set to be the thirty-third feature film to be helmed by Clint Eastwood. “It’s when I became a fan of Barbra Streisand,” enthused Beyoncé Knowles (Dreamgirls). “I then saw Judy Garland’s version of A Star Is Born [1954] and realized every 20 to 30 years a new talent represents that generation and era — I didn’t think that I would ever get the opportunity to be the star.” Eastwood remarked, “My preferences for strong roles for women in my films stems from when I was a kid. I grew up on pictures in which the women always played very important roles – Barbara Stanwyck [Double Indemnity] and Bette Davis [All About Eve]. Clark Gable’s role in It Happened One Night [1934] was only good because he had Claudette Colbert to play off of. Those movies are more true to life than many films now where you have the guys motivating most of the stories and the in secondary positions.” The 2012 project has been called into question since it was announced that the leading lady is pregnant.

As Hollywood icons come and go Clint Eastwood continues to maintain an acting and filmmaking career that has spanned over seven decades; his body of work has led to his being honoured at the Golden Globes in 1988 with the Cecil B. DeMille Award and at the 1995 Oscars with the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. He was lauded with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Film Institute in 1996, and a Career Achievement Award by the National Board of Review in 1999 and by the Chicago International Film Festival in 2002. A Britannia Award for “excellence in film” was given to him by the BAFTAs in 2006, and he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild of American in 2006. “If I started analyzing the impact my pictures produce or what I represent in today’s America, I would be paralyzed,” admitted Eastwood. “It’s not for me to dissect myself; I could never have the requisite objectivity.” However, the Californian confessed, “As you get older you start to run into more and more people who go way back with you, who maybe saw one of your films on their first date. It’s as if you’ve become part of the landscape.” The 80 year old added, “There’s a Portuguese director [Manoel de Oliveira] who is still making films at over a hundred years old, and I plan to do the same thing.”

For more on the legendary actor and filmmaker, visit Clint Eastwood.net and ClintEastwoodSite.com, along with the Dirty Harry fan-site The-Dirtiest.com.

For more on J. Edgar, be sure to check out Trevor's article, Subtle Manipulation: The Making of J. Edgar.

Five Essential Films of Clint Eastwood

Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.

Quick Shooter: A Clint Eastwood Profile (Part 4)

Trevor Hogg profiles the career of Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood in the fourth of a five part feature (read parts one, two and three)...

“What I liked about this script is that it is faithful to the book, contrary to some previous versions, which had eliminated elements that in my opinion had to be preserved,” stated Clint Eastwood who chose to cinematically adapt White Hunter Black Heart (1990); the fictional tale was inspired by experiences of screenwriter Peter Viertel during the production of The African Queen (1951). “He told me that during the filming, Huston became hostile to Sam Spiegel, though he’d worked with him before. In his autobiography Huston says he was searching for a period of three weeks he could use to go on safari while in Africa. That’s what gave Peter Viertel the impetus to write his novel. He was in the presence of someone surrounded by all his technical crew, who was suppose to be scouting locations and getting ready to direct a film, and who left in search of elephants to kill! What happens when this tragedy takes place and how does it affect this group of people?”

“I liked the role and as soon as I read the script I immediately thought of playing it,” remarked Clint Eastwood. “It was afterwards that I considered directing it.” As for what attracted him to the part, the moviemaker explained, “It fascinated me, as obsessive behaviour always does. Here was a personality that offered a real dichotomy. He could be full of charm and generosity, concerned with the down and out, and at the same time cruel to the people in his entourage, if that was his mood. It was a very interesting character to explore.” Though John Wilson is a literary creation, he is based on reality. “I never knew someone like Wilson, who’s an amalgam of several people. I never knew John Huston either, so I don’t know what he was really like. According to the testimonies of those who knew him, I suspect that Wilson is very close to him in many areas. I admire Huston’s work a lot and I think he directed some marvelous films. Sometimes it’s preferable not to know someone, in order to have more distance with regard to the topic you’re dealing with.”

“The screenwriter in the film is playing the role of a conscience,” observed Clint Eastwood. “He has his own philosophy and sticks to it even though the director, Wilson, sweeps everyone away in his wake, inasmuch as he’s the commander-in-chief of the project. That’s what I liked about this story, that it didn’t confine itself to one character expressing his ideas. Everyone has their reasons.” Eastwood could relate to his cinematic persona. “Wilson is at a stage of his life as an artist where he believes he must be completely honest with regard to the subject he’s dealing with, and whether or not people will want to see his film is not his department.” The native of San Francisco revealed, “A lot of people advised me not to make White Hunter Black Heart because it didn’t correspond to the marketing studies on public tastes.” The filmmaker makes an analogy, “I’m like a guide. I lead the tour and if people don’t like it they can leave along the way.” The drama which stars Clint Eastwood, Jeff Fahey (Machete), Charlotte Cornwell (The Krays), Norman Lumsden (A Handful of Dust), George Dzundza (The Deer Hunter), Edward Tudor Pole (Sid and Nancy), Clive Mantle (Casualty), Boy Mathias Chuma, Timothy Spall (Secrets & Lies), and Jamie Koss grossed $2 million domestically and received a Palme d’Or nomination at the Cannes Film Festival. “I constantly quote John Wilson who says, ‘You can’t let eight million popcorn eaters pull you this way or that.’ I have no idea what makes a film commercial. I don’t think anybody does. Just when you think you’re an expert someone comes along with something out of the blue, and you have no idea why it works, but it does.”

“I don’t believe you can label me, pigeonhole me in one style or another,” said Clint Eastwood who decided to helm and act in the action comedy The Rookie (1990), which was originally intended to be a Dirty Harry sequel. “My films all have a different look. It depends on the story, on its progress, on the relationships that develop among the protagonists and the way I feel about the subject.” Veteran police officer Nick Pulovski (Eastwood) partners with a novice detective Dave Ackerman (Charlie Sheen) to bring a German crime lord Strom (Raúl Juliá), operating in Los Angeles, to justice. The role of the no nonsense Pulovski resembles previous characters portrayed by Eastwood. “A man who thinks on a very simple level and has very simple moral values, appeals to a great many people. I think that’s one of the great frustrations in the world. People see things as becoming more complicated.” The Rookie features Clint Eastwood, Charlie Sheen (Wall Street), Raúl Juliá (Presumed Innocent), Sônia Braga (The Milagro Beanfield War), Lara Flynn Boyle (Men in Black II), and Tom Skerritt (Alien) along with more stunt performers than cast members; it earned $22 million domestically and garnered mixed reviews. “An entertaining buddy-cop movie with some exciting action sequences and some great lines,” wrote Chuck O’Leary of Fantastica Daily. “Eastwood and Sheen are an amusing odd couple.” John J. Puccio of DVDTown.com was of a different opinion and wrote, “The Rookie may be the weakest, most-implausible, most-formulaic film Eastwood ever directed.”

“Unforgiven [1992] was a screenplay that seemed perfect when I read it – I owned it for quite a few years and then decided to make it into a film,” stated Clint Eastwood. “I started making quite a few changes, realized I was wrecking it, and I stopped, went back and just filmed it in its original form.” A group of prostitutes seek to avenge the mutilation of one of their own by putting out a bounty on two cowboys. “It contains two stories that coexist in parallel, the one of the journalist who wants to print the legend of the West and the one that runs through the film and contradicts it completely. The meeting of these two stories was what I liked about the script. Everyone changes in the course of the story; everyone starts out from one place and finishes somewhere else.” Though the genre is familiar to him, Eastwood found the tale to be unique. “What makes this Western different from the others is that the film deals with violence and its consequences a lot more than those I’ve done before.” The filmmaker explained, “If the Little Bill character [Gene Hackman] had granted justice to those women in the beginning, that would have changed the whole story. His lack of concern in the face of an act of violence, or even his indifference to it, actually sets the story in motion – straight towards his own death.”

“When I asked Gene Hackman [The French Connection] to be in the film, he answered before reading it that he didn’t want to make any more violent pictures,” remarked Clint Eastwood. “He thought there was too much violence around us and he had been taken in by a number of films where the sole concern was to outdo the competition or find unheard of ways of killing. I insisted he read the script all the same and I told him maybe we had a chance here to deal with the moral implications of violence.” There is a fine line separating the two adversaries. “The only difference between William Munny and the sheriff Little Bill [Daggett] is that Little Bill has as his excuse, pretext or justification, the fact that he’s on the side of the law. But Munny has only his demons to be accountable to.” Eastwood does not see Little Bill as being evil. “He’s deeply convinced he’s doing right with his decision to have total gun control and he believes that the acts of violence he commits for the sake of setting an example are a lesson that will discourage everyone else from coming to town to make trouble.” Starring with Clint Eastwood and Gene Hackman are Morgan Freeman (Se7en), Richard Harris (Gladiator), Jamiz Woolvett (The Lazarus Child), Saul Rubinek (True Romance), Frances Fisher (Titanic), Anna Thomson (The Crow), David Mucci (For Love of the Game), Rob Campbell (Rabbit Hole), Anthony James (In the Heat of the Night) and Beverley Elliott (2012). “In Unforgiven, there is this storm that becomes almost a character itself, a determining factor: the three protagonists, as they approach, seem to be bringing the storm along with them. This sort of thing isn’t written in the screenplay, it gets inserted later on. But the basis of drama, the question of justice and violence, all that was already present.”

“No one wins anything at all in this story; everyone suffers some sort of a loss, whether it’s a part of themselves or their life,” reflected Clint Eastwood. “That’s what happens when people indulge in violence in order to obtain justice.” William Munny reverts back to his old ways when he causally kills a dying man. “At that moment Munny is almost on a suicide mission. Except for the sheriff, he doesn’t give a damn about anything; his friend Ned has been killed, he feels guilty about having dragged him along on this job, and he’s gone back to being what he was – a killing machine.” Addressing the scene where Munny is severely thrashed by Little Bill, Eastwood stated, “I only see the actor who’s playing a role. If the character has to be beaten up or crawl in the mud, there’s no place for vanity, you do what the role requires.” The Western is dedicated to Sergio and Don. “I spent some time in Rome with Sergio Leone, just before he died. When I came back, Don Siegel was already ill. I’d written a preface to his memoirs and I encouraged him to finish them. It’s sad that he died, it’s also sad that he couldn’t go out with a great film.”

“When Unforgiven came out and started doing business, I was shocked because I never try to romance the audience,” confessed Clint Eastwood, as the Western grossed $101 million domestically and became an awards circuit darling winning Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Gene Hackman), Best Editing, and Best Director at the Oscars, while receiving nominations for Best Actor (Eastwood), Best Art Direction & Set Decoration, Best Cinematography, Best Sound and Best Original Screenplay. At the BAFTAs, Unforgiven won Best Supporting Actor (Hackman) and contended for Best Cinematography, Best Director, Best Film, Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound; while the Golden Globes handed out awards for Best Director and Best Supporting Actor (Hackman) and nominations for Best Picture – Drama and Best Screenplay. The Western won Best Foreign Language Film at the Mainichi Film Concours, a Directors Guild of America Award, an Eddie Award from the American Cinema Editors, Film of the Year at the London Film Critics Circle Awards and received a Writers Guild of America Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. In 2004, Unforgiven was inducted into the National Film Registry. “The Western brought me a certain amount of notoriety,” admitted Eastwood. “It’s also a film genre that leaves you room for an original analysis of certain subjects or moral principles.”

“A Perfect World [1993] takes place at one precise moment of one precise year, just on the brink of a great turning towards the void that will take hold of America,” remarked Clint Eastwood who did not cast himself as the escaped convict who develops a friendship with the young boy he has kidnapped in 1963 Texas. “The character could be any age but it seemed that a man of 60 who goes off in search of an 80 year old father would be ridiculous. I thought it was better if Butch were about 30.” Kevin Costner (Dances with Wolves) was chosen for the part. “I rarely indulge in sentimentality and Butch couldn’t be completely a hero. I tried to preserve a certain toughness in Kevin. I didn’t want him to have a ‘paternal’ attitude towards the kid. Butch doesn’t know anything about children; he’s spent too much time in prison.” Contemplating the cinematic subject matter, Eastwood observed, “It’s a crime drama that’s also about the family unit and how it has changed.”

“Butch is in search of freedom – even though he doesn’t have any illusions about his ‘new frontier,’ Alaska,” said Clint Eastwood. “He only knows it from a postcard sent long ago by a father who probably doesn’t exist and who, if he exists, doesn’t have anything to do with him. Then there’s Red in his steel shell, who maybe, at an earlier point in time, could have helped Butch, but he’s messed up a number of things in his own life among which, specifically, is fatherhood. The two characters have their attractions, but also their limitations.” The movie features Kevin Costner, Clint Eastwood, Laura Dern (Jurassic Park), T.J. Lowther (Mad Love), Keith Szarabajka (The Dark Knight), Leo Burmester (The Abyss), Paul Hewitt (The Player), Bradley Whitford (Scent of a Woman), and Ray McKinnon (The Blind Side). “I wanted her [Laura Dern] to actively participate in the investigation; I didn’t want her to be a jellyfish, or a decorative element, or the gal on the job who adds to the mistakes or gets into situations that only men will be able to get her out of. I wanted her to have a point of view, opinions, a more open conflict with me, and above all not [involved in] a love story.” A Perfect World grossed $135 million worldwide. “People were expecting Kevin Costner and me to do more fighting, make it more of a Western, but it worked very well in Europe. What matters is to have done what you wanted to do, to be happy with the film, to know you didn’t cheat.”

Next on the cinematic agenda was an adaptation of The Bridges of Madison County (1995), a story by novelist Robert James Waller about an Italian war bride who had a four day affair with a photographer. “I read it and thought, ‘There’s a good idea here but it’s written flowery. How do we pare it down into a screenplay?’ In the case of a book, the big question is, ‘Can you convert it into a filmable script?’ Then you decide if you like the story and if it’s one you’d like to see as a film. Then you decide if you also want to act in it,” stated Clint Eastwood who cast himself as the male lead in the romantic drama that also stars Meryl Streep (Doubt), Annie Corley (Monster), Victor Slezak (Salt), and Jim Haynie (Pretty in Pink). “Meryl’s used to working with directors who do a lot of rehearsals, take a lot of preparation time. In this case, she didn’t have time to think, she couldn’t do anything but concentrate on her character and play it, nothing else.” It is important for the man behind the camera to be creatively flexible. “The main thing for the director to do is to set up an atmosphere to work in, move on, and keep everybody involved with the plot. Some scenes I’ll rehearse quite a bit, if they’re technically complicated, but others I’ll improvise.” The Bridges of Madison County which had a production budget of $24 million grossed $182 million worldwide. Meryl Streep received nominations for Best Actress nomination at the Academy Awards, Best Actress – Drama at the Golden Globes and Outstanding Performance of a Female Actor in a Leading Role at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. The movie contended for Best Picture – Drama at the Golden Globes and won the Readers’ Choice Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the Mainichi Film Concours.

“With Absolute Power [1997], I liked the whole setup and the characters,” explained Clint Eastwood of the crime thriller by author David Baldacci, “but the problem was that all those great characters were killed in the book; my question was, ‘How can we make a screenplay where everyone that the audience likes doesn’t get killed off?’ So [screenwriter] Bill Goldman came in and wrote it, put in the quest to reconcile Luther and his daughter, and really explored that whole relationship.” A career thief witnesses the American President committing murder. “He’s obviously a thrill criminal who does it for the kick of it, running the numbers down in the end – and then he gets caught in this wild situation with the president. I tend to pick offbeat characters like that because they’re fun to play. But he has some real concerns in his life, such as his relationship with his daughter. He has his own code and in his own way he’s a moral person. He’s a thief but not a murderer.” Eastwood performs along with Gene Hackman, Ed Harris (Pollock), Laura Linney (The Truman Show), Scott Glenn (The Silence of the Lambs), Dennis Haybert (Heat), Judy Davis (A Passage to India), E.G. Marshall (12 Angry Men), Melora Hardin (17 Again), Kenneth Welsh (The Aviator), Penny Johnson (Molly & Gina), and Richard Jenkins (Let Me In). “The big problem was finding locations that looked like Washington, D.C. because shooting there is so tough. There are a lot of streets you can’t use because of all the security.” The film crew had to improvise. “We ended up getting our establishing shots in D.C. and then moving to Baltimore. The rest of the logistics were pretty straightforward.” Absolute Power earned $50 million domestically, and Judy Davis received a Blockbuster Entertainment Award nomination for Favourite Supporting Actress – Suspense.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) which is based on the book by John Berendt about a reporter who befriends a millionaire on trial for murder, combines elements of crime, thriller and comedy. “The characters are interesting because they’re so diverse,” stated Clint Eastwood who was also attracted by the setting of the story and then there was Savannah, a very unusual city, which we wanted to make into a character in its own right. This isn’t the South the way it’s portrayed most of the time, with an overabundance of clichés.” Cast in the $35 million production are John Cusack (Grosse Pointe Blank), Kevin Spacey (L.A. Confidential), Jack Thompson (The Good German), Irma P. Hall (The Ladykillers), Jude Law (Contagion), Alison Eastwood (Once Fallen), Paul Hipp (Face/Off), Lady Chablis, Dorothy Loudon (Garbo Talks), Anne Haney (Psycho), Kim Hunter (Planet of the Apes), and Geoffrey Lewis (Double Impact). “If the script is good and the casting is right, you’ve only got to stay on course. On the other hand, if the casting is wrong, you don’t have a chance to achieve your goal,” remarked Eastwood. “I’ll let the actors create their own roles and find what it is in the material that means something to them, what connects for them emotionally.” Commenting on the picture which earned $25 million domestically, the filmmaker said, “Some spectators got it, others didn’t get it at all. Sometimes I think Americans don’t have much of a sense of subtlety and that they overlooked this story of tolerance, of very different sorts of people who know how to live together.”

Turning to another literary source, the Californian moviemaker adapted the novel True Crime (1999) authored by Andrew Klavan; the story centres around a journalist who Clint Eastwood describes as having “all the faults a man can have, he smokes, drinks and womanizes; he’s known better days, he’s worked for The New York Times, now he’s writing for a small paper and he finds himself in a spot where he has to try to save a condemned man he knows is innocent.” The $55 million crime mystery features Clint Eastwood, Isaiah Washington (Romeo Must Die), Lisa Gay Hamilton (Jackie Brown), James Woods (Salvador), Denis Leary (The Ref), Bernard Hill (Gothika), Diane Venora (Heat), Michael McKean (This Is Spinal Tap), Michael Jeter (The Green Mile), Mary McCormack (1408), Penny Bae Bridges (Nothing to Lose), and Francesca Fisher-Eastwood (The Stars Fell on Henrietta). “I prefer to be drawn to it on an emotional level; if you start on an intellectual level, I think you’re starting without the nucleus. The instinct and the motivation is the thing that will tell you whether it’s going to be successful or not.” Contemplating his behind the camera attitude, Eastwood stated, “If I have any qualities that work as a director, it’s that I try to stimulate everybody to be as creative as they possibly can. I like them to contribute to the film and not just do their jobs by rote; it makes for a better atmosphere and ultimately for a better film.” True Crime earned $17 million domestically and Penny Bae Bridges and Francesca Fisher-Eastwood competed for Best Performance in a Feature Film – Young Actress Age Ten or Under at the Young Artist Awards. “If I don’t take chances, then I don’t deserve to be where I am because what’s the point of getting into a position where you can make certain films and not make others?”

To welcome the twenty-first century Clint Eastwood ventured out into a new frontier – outer space.

Continue to part five.

For more on the legendary actor and filmmaker, visit Clint Eastwood.net and ClintEastwoodSite.com, along with the Dirty Harry fan-site The-Dirtiest.com.

Five Essential Films of Clint Eastwood

Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.

Quick Shooter: A Clint Eastwood Profile (Part 3)

Trevor Hogg profiles the career of Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood in the third of a five-part feature (read parts one and two)...

“You’ve got to keep stretching out and trying other stuff,” observed actor and director Clint Eastwood. “I could have chosen a lot of scripts that were different than Bronco Billy [1980], that were less of a challenge but it was worth trying.” The native of San Francisco, California explains, “It’s about the American Dream, and Billy’s dream that he fought so hard for. It’s all the context of this outdated Wild West show that has absolutely no chance of being a hit. But it’s sweet. It’s pure.” The subject matter resembles the work of two legendary Hollywood filmmakers. “My first thought was that Frank Capra [It’s a Wonderful Life] or Preston Sturges [Sullivan’s Travels] might have done it in their heyday. It has some values that were interesting to explore in contrast to the 1960s, Vietnam and Watergate.” Doubts were raised about the project. “There were suggestions that we needed more action and some sex, but I stuck to the writer’s intent. I didn’t have to prove my commercial value at that point in my career.” Revisions were made to the screenplay for the sake of character development. “I added a number of scenes myself, for example, the one of the holdup at the bank. I attended a match with Muhammad Ali and after his victory the reporters were bombarding him with questions like, ‘How did you place that lightning left hook in the last round?’ All he would answer was, “I just want to say hello to my pals.’ That gave me the idea of the sequence where Billy is asked about the holdup, but his only thought is to promote his show. I also wanted to show that this anti-hero was still capable of accomplishing a brilliant action.”

Accompanying Clint Eastwood in the Western are Sondra Locke (Willard), Geoffrey Lewis (The Devil’s Rejects), Scatman Crothers (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Bill McKinney (The Green Mile), Sam Bottoms (The Last Picture Show), Dan Vadis (The Seven Magnificent Gladiators), Sierra Pecheur (What Women Want), Walter Barnes (Pete’s Dragon), Woodrow Parfrey (Papillon), Doug McGrath (Cold Front), and William Prince (The Paper). An often talked about scene is the one in which the sheriff humiliates Billy when he is trying to bail his friend out of jail. “The audience is really rooting for Billy to blow the sheriff away,” stated the filmmaker. “It’s important that he doesn’t because he’s more interested in his friend than in his own pride at that point.” Not everyone agreed with the decision. “It was suggested that Billy come back at the end and punch this guy out; that would have ruined the picture, the whole theme of loyalty. Billy doesn’t approve of this kid being a deserter, and he doesn’t know enough to intellectualize what his friend’s feelings were about the war in Vietnam. He just knows he doesn’t approve but he’s going to stick by his friend.”

A tricky cinematic moment occurs when Bronco Billy attempts to rob a diesel train single-handedly. “It can be very dangerous in a scene like that because if it isn’t done correctly, you can blow the whole momentum of the picture.” Eastwood found his solution accidentally. “I was on the train with the extras and I saw this extroverted little kid and his mother. He was asking her a lot of questions and I started thinking that I should get a point of view from the train. I said, ‘You look out there when I come riding up, and say, ‘Cowboys and Indians.’ I got him real excited about it and then had the mother take the opposite tack. She’s hardly paying him any attention. It gave the ultimate irony to the whole thing because his imagination is going wild just like Billy’s; they’re both intrigued by this thing with the Old West because, after all, Billy is like a kid himself.”

“I chose Boise [Idaho] as the central location because it gave us a lot of variation within a few miles,” revealed Clint Eastwood. “It could have been anywhere in middle America, the plains of Kansas or Illinois or Oklahoma.” The movie grossed $24 million domestically and Sondra Locke received a Razzie Award nomination for Worst Actress. “Bronco wasn’t hard or expensive to make in this day of overblown budgets and jaded regard for the financiers. I always think, what would Jack Warner say in this situation? You can say what you will, those guys watched the store, and they pulled the plug when it ought to be pulled. I’m told that the production costs get out of hand because some of the executives know other things but not filmmaking. What I ask is, if they don’t know filmmaking, what is their function?”

“I liked the story and the script,” said Clint Eastwood when discussing Firefox (1982), an action thriller in which he plays an American pilot sent to steal a Soviet military aircraft. “It started out like a classic spy film but then there were some pertinent reflections on the arms race and the imbalance of strengths caused by a new technological advance. What worried me was the special effects. Luckily, they only came up in the last part of the film. The problem, in particular, was that these special effects played out against a background of the atmosphere of our planet, and not some faraway galaxy in the future. I must confess I’m not crazy about special effects. I’d prefer a thousand times over to have to deal with human beings and their problems.” The filmmaker remarked, “I don’t believe we manipulated the public’s paranoia. We only noted that the Cold War was there. Even if it hadn’t been there, you need an antagonist or a certain kind of conflict. As for conflicts, if it isn’t the one that opposes the United States and the USSR, there are enough of them everywhere on the planet.” As for the political leanings of the main character, Eastwood stated, “He’s a professional and he doesn’t have any idea before he goes over there of what his mission implies for the dissidents. He doesn’t know anything about the behind-the-scenes political machinations. Over there, he doesn’t have a single moment when he’s at ease except when he takes command of the prototype because there, at last he’s in his element.”

Politics prevented the principle photography from taking place in the Soviet Union. “We had to find a substitute for the Soviet city,” revealed Clint Eastwood. “Vienna as it turned out. The Russian base was set up in the Austrian Alps. The London scenes were shot here. When I head toward a hangar, the shot was filmed in Austria, but the reverse angle was shot here because we weren’t about to transport the contraption from one continent to the other.” The director had to use storyboards because of the complexity of the production. “The last fifteen minutes required some special effects and I made a set of sketches which I gave to a professional designer for retouching.” Eastwood is not a big fan of the technique. “I hate to be the prisoner of a diagram. The best ideas come to me when the camera is in place, read to shoot. That’s when I’m reinvigorated. Of course, I have a general idea of the sequence but I try to remain as flexible as possible. I’ll always leave the actor latitude to modify one of his movements if he has a good reason. If I’m doing exterior shots, I always take into account the light and the way it evolves during the day, at the risk of having to change a camera position.” Earning $47 million domestically the picture stars Clint Eastwood, Freddie Jones (The Elephant Man), David Huffman (The Onion Field), Warren Clarke (A Clockwork Orange), Ronald Lacey (Red Sonja), Kenneth Colley (Life of Brian), Klaus Löwitsch (Cross of Iron), and Nigel Hawthorne (The Madness of King George). “Firefox was more traditional. It wasn’t about bad guys with pink eyes, but ordinary characters faced with an impossible mission.”

“I knew Honkytonk Man [1982] was going to be very risky,” admitted Clint Eastwood of the cinematic adaptation about a country musician during the 1930s. “Red Stovall is based a bit on some self-destructive people I’ve know. He’s funny but has been a coward in his time. He won’t face up to his ambitions. He’s not a great singer but writes some interesting things. When he gets his moment, he’s already destroyed himself…He’s a collage. A mixture of Hank Williams, Red Foley, Bob Wills, all those country singers who drank their whiskey neat, burned up their life on the road and ended up self-destructing.” The filmmaker is a fan of country music. “I discovered it at the age of 19 when I was working as a lumberjack in Oregon. At that time, I only liked jazz, particularly West Coast jazz, Dave Brubeck, and Gerry Mulligan. I was looking for girls and I landed in the town’s only nightclub. Bob Wills and his band were playing there. Since I didn’t know anybody and I didn’t know how to dance to this music, I spent hours listening to the band, after which I started listening regularly to the small local country radio stations.” Eastwood added, “I certainly meet characters like Red Stovall. That probably helped me to recreate the atmosphere. But it was for me love at first sight for the book by Clancy Carlile and, although we pruned it a little, we remained very faithful to it.”

To authentically recreate the era, Clint Eastwood turned to his own experiences. “I browsed through piles of books on the 1930s and the Depression. I was also inspired by the photo albums of my family.” Not everything is downcast, as the first half of the period drama displays a sense of wit. “That’s the way it was designed: a humorous story that becomes a tragedy.” Cast along with Clint Eastwood are his son Kyle Eastwood (Summer Hours), John McIntire (The Asphalt Jungle), Alexa Kenin (Pretty in Pink), Verna Bloom (The Last Temptation of Christ), Matt Clark (Return to Oz), Barry Corbin (WarGames), Jerry Hardin (Missing), Linda Hopkins (Disorderlies), and Marty Robins (Lucky You). “Honkeytonk Man was a painful experience, and the chief blame for the failure lies with me,” readily admitted Eastwood when analyzing why the movie grossed $4 million domestically. “I simply misgauged the reaction of the public at the time.” The moviemaker has concluded that cinemagoers do not like him in self-destructive roles, as was also the case with The Beguiled (1971). “I thought they were enjoyable films to do and have no regrets about doing them.”

In the fourth installment of the Dirty Harry franchise titled Sudden Impact (1983), a rape victim extracts revenge against her attackers. “Inspector Callahan was always on top of the situation and he was in permanent conflict with the bureaucratic system,” observed the Californian when discussing his signature character who administers vigilante justice. “He had so many hours to solve the case and as far as he was concerned, he was more interested in the victim than the law.” Clint Eastwood recognizes how he is perceived. “I get accused of being old-fashioned, of dreaming of an era where things were simpler, more obvious and honest. The power of bureaucracy is increasing in the proportion that the planet is shrinking and the problems of society are getting more complicated. I’m afraid that individual independence is becoming an outmoded dream.” Besides the cast which features Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Pat Hingle (Shaft), Bradford Dillman (The Way We Were), Paul Drake (Beverly Hills Cop), Audrie Neenan (The Departed), Jack Thibeau (The Hitcher), Michael Currie (The Philadelphia Experiment), and Albert Popwell (The Buddy Holly Story) the crime thriller features a famous line of dialogue. “I knew that, ‘Make my day” would have a certain amount of impact in the film, but I didn’t realize it would become a sort of ‘Play it again, Sam.’” Eastwood was quick to point out, “There are a lot of comic elements in all the Dirty Harry series, if only because Inspector Callahan’s cynicism calls for a cynical kind of humour.” Sudden Impact earned $68 million domestically making it the most profitable of the five-part series. “I do my best and I can only hope the audience will like the movie and the critics will be more sensitive to its positive aspects than to its negative aspects.”

“Richard Tuggle was anxious to direct it,” explains Clint Eastwood of his decision to not helm Tightrope (1984). “He had written the script, which was excellent. Why not let him direct it?” A 1996 biography on the filmmaker by Richard Schicknel, claims this was not entirely true. “A compromise was worked out,” states Schicknel. “The writer would stay on, contribute what he could in a collaborative way and receive directorial credit while [Eastwood], literally, called most of the shots.” The craft of writing is something Eastwood admires. “I have an enormous respect for anyone who can write a book or a script because that’s where the real work of creation is; the rest is interpretation or illustration.” A series of murders involving prostitutes calls into question the innocence of the homicide detective leading the investigation. “What attracted me to the script was that there’s this cop who’s been abandoned by his wife, he’s got custody of the children, he’s intrigued by Geneviève Bujold [Anne of the Thousand Days] but doesn’t want to get involved with her because he’s got enough problems in his life…he seems determined to destroy himself and to drag his family with him.” The crime thriller stars Clint Eastwood, Geneviève Bujold, Dan Hedaya (The Usual Suspects), Alison Eastwood (Poolhall Junkies), Jenny Beck (Troll), Regina Richardson (Nine Deaths of the Ninja), Randi Brooks (The Man with Two Brains), Jamie Rose (Lady Blue), Margaret Howell (Girls Just Want to Have Fun), and Janet MacLachlan (The Thirteenth Floor). “He wants to do his job well, but as crime follows crime and the crimes get closer and closer to him, you begin to wonder, ‘Could it be him?’” Contemplating how things turn out after the movie, which grossed $48 million domestically, concludes, Eastwood stated, “I assume he continues his relationship with this girl [Geneviève Bujold]. She’s the first woman for whom he has felt something more than just a passing, sexual night kind of thing like he comes across so many times.” For her acting efforts, Alison Eastwood (the filmmaker’s daughter) was nominated for Best Young Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical, Comedy, Adventure or Drama at the Young Artist Awards.

“On Pale Rider [1985], the screenwriter wanted to be involved until the end and he was in charge of the modifications I asked for,” revealed Clint Eastwood. “In Pale Rider the situation is similar [to High Plains Drifter], but this time the hero is really an archangel. He helps a small community of miners to organize themselves like a trust, he inspires them with the courage to resist and defend their rights… Although he doesn’t belong to the community, he gets close to two of its members in spite of himself because they had become attached to him.” The title refers to the line in The Book of Revelation which reads, “And I looked and beheld a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” Eastwood explained, “It’s got numerous biblical references. However, since it’s about miners, I had to read a lot of works about the topic and the Gold Rush era. We filmed it in Idaho, in the region of the Sawtooth Mountains; it’s a magnificent country. As we did for High Plains Drifter, we constructed a whole town, from A to Z.” Performing in the Western are Eastwood, Michael Moriarty (Courage Under Fire), Carrie Snodgress (Wild Things), Chris Penn (Reservoir Dogs), Richard Dysart (The Thing), Sydney Penny (Enchanted), Richard Kiel (Moonraker), Doug McGrath, John Russell (Rio Bravo), S.A. Griffin (Near Dark), and Jack Radosta (The Great Debaters). Pale Rider grossed $41 million domestically, received a Palme d’Or nomination at the Cannes Film Festival, and screenwriters Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack were lauded with a Spur Award by the Western Writers of America.

Turning his attention to the small screen, Clint Eastwood helmed an episode of Amazing Stories (NBC, 1985 to 1987) titled Vanessa in the Garden (1985). A grieving husband attempts to bring his dead wife back to life through his art. The story which runs for 25 minutes stars Harvey Keitel (The Piano), Sondra Locke, Beau Bridges (The Descendants), Margaret Howell, Randy Oglesby (The Island), Jamie Rose, and Milton Murrill (Pale Rider).

“What warriors do when they haven’t got a war has always interested me,” responded Clint Eastwood when asked what drew him to Heartbreak Ridge (1986). “I thought, ‘Here’s a character, lets see how he interacts with people, especially with women.’ It was an interesting story, also about a soldier who hasn’t done anything but fight wars; he discovers that he’s reached the end of his career. He has nothing to look back on and all he can concentrate on now.” To portray Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Highway, Eastwood found inspiration from within his own family. “The voice in Heartbreak Ridge was my uncle’s. He had damaged his vocal chords and always had to talk rather slowly and deeply. He always had an embittered expression…I spoke with this voice for days, and I didn’t notice it at all.” The war film stars Clint Eastwood, Marsha Mason (The Goodbye Girl), Everett McGill (My Fellow Americans), Moses Gunn (Ragtime), Eileen Heckart (The Bad Seed), Bo Svenson (Inglourious Basterds), Boyd Gaines (Fame), Mario Van Peebles (Ali), Arlen Dean Snyder (Marked for Death) and Vincent Irizarry (Marie); it earned $43 million domestically, received an Oscar nomination for Best Sound, won a BMI Film Music Award, and was lauded with an Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture (Mario Van Peebles).

From 1986 to 1988, the filmmaker took up a different profession by becoming the mayor of Carmel, California. “I enjoyed the time,” stated Clint Eastwood. “There were some things that had to be done and I put the necessary plans into action; but I’d planned in advance to run only once.”

Stepping behind the camera again, Clint Eastwood chose to do a biopic about a legendary jazz musician. “Charlie Parker was an exceptional human being, his story had never been told…When I was growing up, there was a Dixieland revival in the San Francisco area, and that was when I saw Bird for the first time.” A deal had to be struck by Warner Bros. to secure the project for the filmmaker. “We were having a meeting about another project. Somebody mentioned Revenge [1990], which was a script I knew, and during the discussion, it occurred to me that Columbia had the Parker project. I started to exert some pressure which I had to do because it took two years before the trade was settled.” Columbia had planned to have Richard Pryor portray Charlie Parker but when selecting his leading man for Bird (1988) the director made a different choice. “I’d enjoyed him in his supporting roles, particularly in The Color of Money [1986],” said Eastwood referring to actor Forest Whitaker. “He always conveyed a truthfulness. I looked at a few other actors but I decided in favour of him very early. That was the second decision. The first was Diane Venora [The Insider] as Chan [Parker, the wife of the musician]. I’d seen her on a videotape in New York, and I said, ‘Get her!’” Other cast members in the $9 million period production include Michael Zelniker (Naked Lunch), Samuel E. Wright (Me and Him), Keith David (Platoon), Michael McGuire (Hard Times), James Handy (The Rocketeer), Damon Whitaker (First Daughter), Morgan Nagler (Domino), Arlen Dean Snyder, and Sam Robards (Beautiful Girls).

“Columbia was going to hire a musician who would re-record Parker’s music because they wanted to have the sound in stereo,” revealed Clint Eastwood. “There are some very good alto sax players, but I was of the opinion that Charlie Parker was a unique musician and that it would have been a shame not to use his music. I found some outstanding recordings Chan had made. In some cases, she had recorded almost nothing but Charlie’s solos, so we ‘only’ had to add the rest.” At the time, musicians Ray Brown, Walter Davis, Buddy Alexander, Ron Carter, Barry Harris, and Red Rodney were hired to re-record the solos Parker had played 40 years ago. “Because Bird is a movie about musicians who often play at night, there are a lot of night scenes, a lot of blackness. After all, the greatest part of their life takes place at night. I like the hard contrasts that arise through the extreme darkness.” A stylized approach was adopted. “Instead of a straight-on-approach, it had flashbacks and a lot of jockeying around because the story was woven, much like a musician playing a solo.” Chan Parker was given an advance screening of the biopic. “She was speechless. I told her to take her time to make up her mind. After a few hours, she came and let me know that she liked the picture very much.” Eastwood recalled, “I never forgot how Parker moved, how he walked and stood, and of course the sound; this stirring, joyous music which didn’t hint at the player’s tragic fate.” Despite winning an Oscar for Best Sound, receiving BAFTA Awards nominations for Best Score and Best Sound, Forest Whitaker winning Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival, Clint Eastwood being lauded with Best Director at the Golden Globes (Whitaker and Diane Venora contended for Best Actor – Drama and Best Supporting Actress), Bird grossed $2 million domestically. “We found out how a jazz movie shouldn’t be marketed.”

With the emergence of the 1990s, Clint Eastwood headed into the heart of Africa to shoot his next cinematic effort.

Continue to part four.

For more on the legendary actor and filmmaker, visit Clint Eastwood.net and ClintEastwoodSite.com, along with the Dirty Harry fan-site The-Dirtiest.com.

Five Essential Films of Clint Eastwood

Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.