{"id":9355,"date":"2021-08-07T06:48:27","date_gmt":"2021-08-07T06:48:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/?p=9355"},"modified":"2021-08-07T06:49:35","modified_gmt":"2021-08-07T06:49:35","slug":"clint-eastwood-on-unforgiven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/?p=9355","title":{"rendered":"Clint Eastwood on “Unforgiven”"},"content":{"rendered":"

August 6, 1992 |<\/strong>\u00a0 Now is the summer of Clint Eastwood\u2019s reassessment.<\/p>\n

It is the best of times for the 62-year-old superstar, as he greets a seemingly endless series of critics, feature writers and enthusiastic well-wishers into the quiet, casual elegance of his Manhattan hotel suite.<\/p>\n

Eastwood is holding court to promote, discuss and reap bountiful praises for Unforgiven<\/em>, a grandly ambitious and darkly ambiguous Western, his finest work to date as director and actor.<\/p>\n

The film, which opens Friday, is the sort of mature, richly textured and classically crafted work \u2014 an instant classic, really \u2014 that demands a whole new appreciation for its creator\u2019s entire body of work. And, indeed, coming so soon after the release of his masterful White Hunter, Black Heart<\/em> (1990), and in the wake of full-scale retrospectives of Eastwood\u2019s earlier directorial\u00a0efforts at the Cinematheque Francaise<\/em> and New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art, Unforgiven<\/em> is more than magnum opus. It also is Eastwood\u2019s bid for a place in the pantheon of the truly great filmmakers.<\/p>\n

And, not incidentally, it should serve as definitive proof \u2014 even to those who refuse to think of Eastwood as anything other than the monosyllabic Man With No Name or the dreadnaught Dirty Harry \u2014 that Eastwood has, in his 36 feature films as a 24-karat movie star, evolved into an actor of impressive skill, precision and emotional eloquence.<\/p>\n

Trouble is, this also is the worst of times for Eastwood. He receives his guests with gracious good humor, but cannot quite disguise his discomfort. By all accounts an intensely private individual, he is at once polite but removed whenever the conversation veers toward the introspective or the analytical. He gives the impression of being someone who finds it unseemly, and not a little embarrassing, to talk about motivation or emotional investment. For him, it is enough to know what you want to do, then do it with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of professionalism.<\/p>\n

To have to talk about it later \u2014 and, worse, to explain why you wanted to do it \u2014 is part of the deal that pleases him not at all.<\/p>\n

So a visitor decides to take a different approach. Instead of digging for revelations, why not ask for observations? Keep it in the third person, and Eastwood might feel freer to comment.<\/p>\n

OK, you’ve been directing movies now for more than 20 years. And throughout your career as a filmmaker, you\u2019ve worked many times with this actor, Clint Eastwood. He played a disc jockey in your very first film, Play Misty for Me<\/em>, and is a retired gunfighter who\u2019s haunted by his past in Unforgiven<\/em>. How has Eastwood matured as an actor since you\u2019ve been working with him?<\/p>\n

Eastwood smiles. He knows what sort of game is being played, and he likes it. He settles back into the plush couch, takes a swig from his bottle of Perrier, and returns the opening serve.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, let’s see. I first directed him in 1970. He was an actor who was well known for Westerns and cop films. People would ask, \u2018Why would anybody want to watch him be a disc jockey?\u2019 But I thought, \u2018Why not be a disc jockey? He\u2019s not a cowboy, he\u2019s not a cop \u2014 he\u2019s an actor playing a role.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cHis versatility has probably increased over the years, but that\u2019s just as everyone\u2019s versatility increases \u2014 by the knowledge you take in. The main thing is, does he have nerve enough to really push it? To keep going, to keep pushing it? Along the way, he\u2019s pushed it. He\u2019s done a lot of different things. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not so. But at least he\u2019s tried.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s stepped up to bat, and he\u2019s taken a few swings. Sometimes against the advice of others, where he\u2019s been successful. And sometimes against the advice of others, where they were right and he was wrong. But he\u2019s still growing. He\u2019s going to grow until the end, hopefully.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope he does, because I\u2019d hate to see him just get mired down. He had a great opportunity in the \u201860s, I suppose, to just stay in Europe and imitate himself, and go on with Italian-made cowboy films. But he broke away from that. He did cop dramas, and then he broke away from that. So who knows what he\u2019ll do?\u201d<\/p>\n

Has he ever let you down? Have you ever thought of casting someone else in a role you gave him to play?<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve thought about that a lot of times, a lot of times. But by and large, the material that he\u2019s chosen to do is material that he felt he was suited for at that time. Maybe another actor could have done it differently \u2014 better, maybe. Or maybe not better, but with a different interpretation that might have been more appealing to audiences. It\u2019s hard to tell \u2014 nobody will ever know.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut he\u2019s a cooperative guy. He does what I tell him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yes, indeed. But now, in the spirit of fairness, the other half of the team must be given equal time.<\/p>\n

OK, you\u2019ve been working with this director, Clint Eastwood, throughout the past 20 years. He\u2019s cast you as everything from a would-be Wild West Show star in Bronco Billy<\/em> to a mountain-climbing spy in The Eiger Sanction<\/em>, from a broken-down country-music singer in Honkytonk Man<\/em> to a John Huston soundalike in White Hunter, Black Heart<\/em>. As an actor, what do you think of his abilities as a filmmaker?<\/p>\n

\u201cWell,\u201d says the actor, shifting slightly in his seat, as if to jokingly indicate a shifting of his sensibility, \u201che\u2019s a guy who absorbs a lot around him. He has a good memory of the cinema he saw growing up. He learns just as much from the directors that he\u2019s worked with that were maybe not so great as he has from the good ones. But, fortunately, he\u2019s had a few good ones.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s a guy who never had the opportunity to work with the lauded directors of the \u201840s or the \u201850s \u2014 the Fords, the Hustons, the George Stevenses, the William Wylers, those kinds of guys. But he managed to work with some newcomers that had good ideas in Europe. And he worked with a B-movie director (Don Siegel, the auteur of Dirty Harry<\/em> and Escape from Alcatraz<\/em>) who knew a lot, but who had never had opportunities to do A-films. And I think he picked up a few pointers from him.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd he’s fairly observant. Hopefully, he keeps progressing along the way. He\u2019s given himself harder challenges as time goes on, and that\u2019s good. He\u2019s not afraid to fail. And that\u2019s good, I think those are his virtues.\u201d<\/p>\n

What are his weaknesses?<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the early days, he became known as very efficient for his speed. But nobody really cares much about that anyway. And so that didn\u2019t mean much. He has a good respect for the financiers\u2019 money. But maybe he tried to do things a little too fast in the early ones. Maybe he\u2019s hit more of a happy medium these days.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eastwood the actor and Eastwood the auteur are of one mind in viewing Unforgiven<\/em> as a revisionist Western, one that is in many ways more cynical \u2014 and in many more ways more realistic \u2014 than the nihilistic carnage of A Fistful of Dollars<\/em>.<\/p>\n

As Unforgiven<\/em>\u2019s William Munny, \u201ca man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition,\u201d Eastwood gives us an anti-hero who claims he is done with killing, who he insists his wife \u201ccured me of drink and wickedness.\u201d Unfortunately, Munny\u2019s wife died two years before the movie\u00a0begins. Even more unfortunately, Munny\u2019s pig farm is failing, and he\u2019s desperate to support himself and his two young children.<\/p>\n

So when a prostitute is viciously assaulted in Big Whiskey, Wyo., and her co-workers advertise for hired guns to extract bloody revenge against her attackers, Munny takes his guns out of storage. With the help of a grizzled old friend (Morgan Freeman) and a cocksure young upstart (newcomer Jaimz Woolvett), Munny rides into Big Whiskey \u2014 and runs against the local sheriff,\u00a0Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), who\u2019s a mite too eager to maintain law and order.<\/p>\n

Eastwood optioned the Unforgiven<\/em> screenplay by David Webb Peoples (Blade Runner<\/em>) nearly a decade ago, then \u201cput it on the shelf, figuring that I\u2019d mature into it.\u201d He never doubted he would eventually bring it to the screen, with himself in the role of Munny, because \u201cI liked the whole idea of taking the West and de-mythicizing it, and putting another spin on the whole deal \u2014 the whole exaggeration, the whole romanticizing of the West.<\/p>\n

\u201cI liked the idea of the women being treated like property, very second-class, and striving for justice. And the character of Little Bill, I liked particularly, because I thought he was a good guy in a way, an affable character. But he set into motion a series of events that there was no\u00a0stopping.\u201d<\/p>\n

And William Munny? Eastwood says Munny\u2019s the one to whom the title really refers, for the ex-gunfighter \u201chas never really forgiven himself\u201d for the crimes he has committed. And he certainly doesn\u2019t feel forgiven by the victims who return, unbidden, to haunt his dreams. \u201cHe is caught by his demons,\u201d Eastwood says. \u201cWhen he says, \u2018I\u2019m not like that anymore,\u2019 he\u2019s definitely trying to convince himself more than anyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n

By contemporary standards, there isn\u2019t a lot of violence in Unforgiven<\/em>. But what there is, is intensely, ferociously brutal. When Munny and his companions find and shoot one of the prostitute\u2019s attackers, the movie forces us to consider the full horror of dying, and killing, with sudden savagery. (\u201cWell, he had it coming,\u201d the upstart says by way of rationalization. \u201cWe all have it coming,\u201d Munny responds.) Little Bill, obsessed with keeping his town free of \u201cassassins,\u201d makes an example of the foppish English Bob (Richard Harris) by beating the gunfighter bloody in the town\u2019s main street. In the film\u2019s final minutes, Munny has only one chance of surviving \u2014 by once again turning himself into a remorseless, relentless killing machine. \u201cI\u2019ll see you in hell,\u201d says one of his victims. Munny doesn\u2019t argue. Hell will hold no surprises for him.<\/p>\n

Throughout Unforgiven<\/em>, Eastwood says, \u201cViolence is painful, and not the comedic thing that it might be in other types of stories. And I like that in this. I thought it was very, very timely.<\/p>\n

\u201cLike, when the violence starts, when (Little Bill) becomes so violent with English Bob, you can see the deputies are all thinking, \u2018Wait a second \u2014 what are we doing this for?\u2019 It\u2019s almost like an officer watching from the outside in the Rodney King beating or something. How would an officer react to that? Maybe he’d say, \u2018Hey, wait a minute \u2014 do we have to hit him this <\/em>many\u00a0times?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Does Eastwood think Unforgiven<\/em> will be viewed in some circles as an act of self-criticism?<\/p>\n

\u201cYou mean, doing penance for the mayhem of the past?\u201d he asks \u2014 not testily, exactly, but not altogether playfully.<\/p>\n

OK, take two: Does Eastwood think some of his earlier films \u2014 say, the Italian-made Westerns, if not the Dirty Harry melodramas \u2014 may have helped desensitize audiences to violence?<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe,\u201d Eastwood replies. \u201cBut at the time, it didn\u2019t seem like a big deal. We all have grown up with films that had Jimmy Cagney shooting somebody down, or drilling somebody in the trunk of a car \u2014 and that didn’t make us all violent people.<\/p>\n

\u201cI must say, though, that in recent years, I\u2019ve viewed a lot of films where the violence has turned into a gruesome dismembership thing. Not very pleasant. But, then I start thinking, \u2018Am I just getting older, and I\u2019m criticizing someone else who\u2019s coming along, maybe doing something that makes me feel the same way that people felt about some of my things at some point?\u2019\u00a0I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

\u201cReally, there\u2019s no conscious effort in this thing to correct anything, or look back over my shoulder. It\u2019s just, this is the way I feel today. I\u2019m not haunted by anything, like William Munny. But today I feel that, with the way the world is now, maybe violence shouldn\u2019t be treated as too humorous. Maybe Harold Lloyd walking into a wall, or Tom and Jerry in a cartoon, that\u2019s different. But in reality, killing is not justifiable.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true: These days, even Clint Eastwood is having second thoughts about Clint Eastwood movies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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