DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli. This week, we're featuring our classic films and movie icons series of interviews from our archives. Today, Westerns. First up, Clint Eastwood. He became a TV star as Rowdy Yates on "Rawhide" but left that series in midstream to go overseas and make movies with Italian film director Sergio. Eastwood's stoic and vengeful character who appeared in several films was dubbed the Man with No Name. But those Italian films made Eastwood not just a star but an icon. Terry Gross spoke with Clint Eastwood in 1997. At the time, he was the subject of a biography by film critic Richard Schickel.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
TERRY GROSS: Well, in some of your action roles in some of your Westerns and, like, "Dirty Harry" films, you not only don't say a lot, but what you do say you're saying often through clenched teeth, you know, in that really guttural voice. How did you develop that style of speaking?
CLINT EASTWOOD: (Imitating Dirty Harry) I don't know what you're talking about.
(LAUGHTER)
EASTWOOD: Well, I think that the character just drives you in that as a character who is maybe frustrated with the things that the common person on the street is frustrated with - the bureaucracy that we live in, the nightmare that we as a civilization have placed on ourselves. And it - I think this is a person who is frustrated with that, especially if you're trying to solve the case in a limited amount of time. So make my day line or the, do you feel lucky, punk kind of lines were lines that people gravitated towards.
GROSS: Did you have a sense of that reading the script that, you know, presidents would be (laughter), you know, making - you know, improvising on those lines and that they'd be - people just - they would just enter the general vocabulary? Could you read a script and say, these lines are going to last beyond the film?
EASTWOOD: Nobody can say that for sure. But I think the appeal of some of those early characters was the fact that the man would have the right answer. And it was always usually very terse and kind of right to the point but with a little bit of humor involved. So everybody said, God, I would love to be able to do that.
GROSS: Have you ever been able to do that, have just the right comeback at just the right moment?
EASTWOOD: Very rarely.
GROSS: Right.
EASTWOOD: (Laughter).
GROSS: Now, when you're doing a line like, make my day, and you know, OK, this is a really good line, do you, like, go home and do line reading - does it go, MAKE my day, make MY day, make my DAY? And just do it over and over until you figure out exactly how you want to do it?
EASTWOOD: Looking into the bathroom...
GROSS: Right (laughter).
EASTWOOD: ...Mirror and doing some of your best acting.
GROSS: Are you talking to me?
EASTWOOD: No, I don't go over the lines. I don't play them out loud. I just - I'd rather play them for the first time when I do them.
GROSS: No. Really?
EASTWOOD: And I usually do them by the motivation of what the feelings are at the time. So I start them from what the intent is and then let it kind of go out. It's sort of like blowing through a trumpet or something. You start, and the sound magnifies as it comes out. If you sit there and practice line readings to yourself, you'll just get confused.
GROSS: I want to get to your spaghetti Westerns, the films you made with Sergio Leone. You started the Sergio Leone films when you were still making "Rawhide," the TV Western. How did Sergio Leone get to see "Rawhide" and decide you were the one to star in His Western?
EASTWOOD: He had seen an episode that an agency had in Rome. And he had seen an episode, and they thought, well, here's a chance to hire an American actor who has been doing Western but is not very expensive.
EASTWOOD: They didn't have any...
GROSS: (Laughter) Right.
EASTWOOD: They didn't have any money to spend, so they didn't have a lot of choices as far as names of the moment.
GROSS: There's a lot of really interesting facial close-ups in your movies with Sergio Leone, and he had a very iconographic way of shooting faces, particularly your face. And your face in those close-ups is often, well, mysterious, unknowable. Instead of the facial close-ups like revealing this essence of who you are, they reveal the unknowability of who you are. And I've always wondered, what were you thinking during those close-ups to get the right expression on your face?
(LAUGHTER)
EASTWOOD: The first response would be to say absolutely nothing to get the - George Kuko used to say - he'd tell Greta Garbo, sometimes, to look into the camera and stare and don't think about a thing. But that's maybe a little oversimplification or a way to got a certain effect out of her at that time. But you think about what the demands are of the plot. Usually, because this character, though he wasn't saying a lot, he was plotting a lot, and so you just thought about what your next moves were. It's just a question of thinking like you would in regular - in real life. You have an inner monologue. Every actor plays an inner monologue as you're playing your outer character. And sometimes your outer character is saying, good evening. It's wonderful to see you. But underneath, you might be saying, dirty, rotten. So you really don't - so that's your inner monologue, and so I might have been saying something like that to myself at the time as, you know...
GROSS: You develop...
EASTWOOD: Like, these guys - I'd like to blow them all away, but I'd be very pleasant at the moment.
GROSS: You developed a squint, also, in some of those close-ups.
EASTWOOD: Well, that was just the sunlight.
GROSS: Was it?
EASTWOOD: Yeah. They bomb me with a bunch of lights, and you're outside, and it's 90 degrees. It's hard not to squint.
GROSS: Now, in Richard Schickel's book about you, he says that, you know, "Rawhide" followed the strict production code of the time. You couldn't show a fired gun and the victim of the bullet in the same shot. There had to be an edit in between. What was your reaction to Sergio Leone's really vivid approach to violence?
EASTWOOD: Well, that was true. The Hays Office at that time had a rule for Westerns only, ironically, and you couldn't show the shootee and the shooter in the same shot. It couldn't be a tie-up shot, in other words. So you'd have to do it as an individual cut. And if you look at even later American Westerns - "High Noon" - you won't see the tie-up. But Sergio didn't know about all that. And I wasn't about to tell him because I was really enjoying this. It was breaking - we were trying to break all the molds. And in breaking all the molds, it made those pictures a hit or somewhat of a revisionist idea or certainly an outsider's point of view.
They became popular, but they also brought with it some resentment. There were a lot of people felt, who was this upstart? We didn't come in and bless this guy to come along, and we didn't bless these movies to come along, an Italian interpretation of the great American genre. So there was a certain resentment that hung around with those pictures for some time. Now as people look back on them, they enjoy the fact that there was a different period, and then it went on to somebody else, and Sam Peckinpah came along later, and he did another look at the Western. Then someone else comes along and does another one. And I come back to them and take another shot. And somebody else down the line - that way, it keeps the great American art form alive.
GROSS: Clint Eastwood, I thought that your choice of directing and starring in "The Unforgiven" (ph) was such an interesting choice because it's a movie about a man who goes from bad man to good man to myth. And it's also interesting because it's about the difficulty of killing someone and what it takes out of you when you do kill someone. And you'd been in so many mythic movies and been in so many movies where the character that you played killed a lot of people. So I'm interested in how you related to the story in "The Unforgiven" and how it dealt with myth making and with violence.
EASTWOOD: Well, those exact things that you mentioned are what attracted me to the project. The fact that - but - even though I had done pictures where I've been a police officer and Western films where I had done - had a lot of gunplay and stuff, it's not that I approved of that sort of thing. And I don't necessarily approve of the romanticizing of gunplay. And I don't think it's - and I thought here was a chance - here was a story that had sort of shot holes in that, if you'll pardon the pun...
(LAUGHTER)
EASTWOOD: You know, and it was - it brought out the truth about gunplay and the fact that there is some loss to your soul when you commit an act of violence. And to play a person who was deeply affected in his life because of some of the mayhem that he'd been responsible for was to me - made the character more interesting and was more interesting for me to play. And that particular - in fact, I never thought the film would be really commercial when I was making it because it had all these statements about mayhem and violence. And I thought maybe this might not be a straight-ahead action movie that people wanted. But I like the story, and I felt it was worth telling.
GROSS: Well, Clint Eastwood, I feel like I must talk with you a little bit about music. Let's listen to this.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DON'T FENCE ME IN")
EASTWOOD: (Singing) Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above. Don't fence me in. Let me ride through the wide-open country that I love. Don't fence me. Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze, listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees. Send me off forever, but I ask you please, don't fence me. Just turn me loose. Let me straddle my old saddle...
Terry, you should have seen the pain in this room, right?
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: And that's from the album "Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Favorites." And there's a picture of Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates on the cover, "Rawhide's Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Favorites."
EASTWOOD: That was - actually, I was the Milli Vanilli of the moment there.
GROSS: (Laughter)
EASTWOOD: That wasn't me (laughter).
GROSS: Oh, yes, it was. I actually like your singing voice. I really do. I mean, this is a strange album with strange arrangements and not always good songs. But I really like your singing. I imagine you're also, like, influenced by Chet Baker in your singing.
EASTWOOD: Well, that wasn't - first place, that wasn't the kind of songs that I would normally like to sing.
GROSS: The songs on here, I'd imagine not. But you got to sing Cole Porter, "Don't Fence Me In."
EASTWOOD: There's nothing wrong with that. Cole Porter is certainly wonderful. But what happened is that somebody had the brilliant idea that I should do some cowboy songs, not country-western songs, Nashville type, but real straight cowboy songs. And I wasn't sure whether I like the idea, but they said, well, you'll do it, and we have a session tomorrow. And I said, well, tomorrow, I'm leaving. Well, you do it. You just stop by the studio on the way to the airport.
So I did a whole album. You think about people who take six months to make an album, but this one that - we did the whole album in one session. And I didn't know the songs. I had to come in and, you know, learn them real quick. And some of them I knew. Some songs like that, you've heard as a child, but you don't really know them. And so it was a little frustrating. It wasn't my favorite musical experience in life. But it was, you know - there, again, you learn something every day.
GROSS: Would you like to sing more or play more or...
EASTWOOD: No. I don't have any - one of my key sayings...
GROSS: Yes?
EASTWOOD: A man must know his limitations.
(LAUGHTER)
BIANCULLI: Clint Eastwood speaking with Terry Gross in 1997. Coming up, we hear from actor Eli Wallach, who co-starred with Eastwood in the classic Sergio Leone Western "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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