Focus Features

Who would have thought – that the man who rode into cinema history unshaven, wearing a poncho, chewing on a cigar, the Man With No Name; the man who became Dirty Harry – who would have thought that in Gran Torino (which seems to be his last role as an actor), that man would choose a character who eschews violence, a man who – instead of pointing his magnum and saying, "Make my day" – basically throws away his gun and, riddled with bullets, gives up his life to achieve justice for a young immigrant woman who has been sexually assaulted.

Who would have thought – that the man whose first film as a director was about a radio DJ who is stalked by a psychotic woman, who in The Beguiled plays a wounded Civil War soldier taken in by a group of women who not only amputate his leg, but poison him as well – who would have thought that that man – in the same year as he directed Gran Torino – would also direct a searing portrait of a young woman who fights for her rights and those of her child against a corrupt society, enlisting from Angelina Jolie a performance equal to that of Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby.

At the age of 79, Clint Eastwood stands at the summit of his achievement.

In the following piece – which first appeared in the French film magazine, Positif – Clint Eastwood talks about the directors he worked with - and those he wished he had...

Howard Hawks - The first director I ever met! It was a brief meeting. I was helping him round up his horses when I was about sixteen, seventeen.

Frank Capra - I met Capra when I was making High Plains Drifter in Mono Lake, North California. I was staying in Silver Lake, four houses down from Capra, and I got the chance to talk to him. Afterwards, every time I came by, I paid him a visit, but I never worked with him.
Capra's movies have an underlying energy which, although it's difficult to define, he alone possesses. Anyone can shoot a scene, but like all the greats, Capra added something that was neither written nor visualized, but which permeates all his work. All the greats have this gift to some extent. It depended on the material, their enthusiasm, the problems they had to solve.

Eastwood in Gran Torino, supposedly his
last acting role

Preston Sturges - I liked Sullivan's Travels, Joel McCrea especially. Maybe he didn't have the stature of Gary Cooper, but he always gave the impression that more was going on inside him than he was revealing. There were fantastic character actors in Sturges, Capra and Hawks movies. They all had interesting faces. It's very comforting for a director to know he can rely on the same actors movie after movie. I tried to do the same in Every Which Way...and Bronco Billy by getting together people like Geoffrey Lewis, Bill McKinney and so on.

Raoul Walsh - I desperately wanted to be in Raoul Walsh's The Naked and the Dead. My agent couldn't get me an audition so I didn't get to meet him. Small agencies had no power. Walsh was a fantastic character. And he'd been an actor as well. It's always good to work with directors who've been actors. They're much more receptive. When I gave Don Siegel a part in my first film, Play Misty for Me, I told him that that way he'd learn to be more tolerant towards his actors, while I'd learn what it's like to be a director. Often an actor only worries about his performance and his character. He doesn't realize a director can only spend 5 percent of his energy on him, the other 95 percent being devoted to the crew, the other actors and all the rest.

William Wellman - I did work with William Wellman at the end of his career, on Lafayette Escadrille. It wasn't a great movie, the script wasn't up to scratch, but it was a period when Wellman, the eternal rebel, was trying something new. Perhaps he wanted to do something he hadn't been allowed to do before. I remember we had a conversation about The Ox-Bow Incident. It was one of my favorite films. He was surprised by my opinion, because it had been a financial disaster. The movie had been shot fast, in less than thirty days, like a commando raid. That's how Wellman worked best. To save time on Lafayette Escardille, he used two cameras to cover the same scene, something he'd never done before. His idea was that there'd be no continuity problems. He was right, but I think it meant too many compromises with angles and lighting. I've used two cameras very rarely, usually only for action scenes. I prefer using several lenses rather than several cameras. Wellman retired after Lafayette Escadrille, but I carried on seeing him and his family. He had a big influence in encouraging me to become a director.

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Who would have thought – that the man who rode into cinema history unshaven, wearing a poncho, chewing on a cigar, the Man With No Name; the man who became Dirty Harry – who would have thought that in Gran Torino (which seems to be his last role as an actor), that man would choose a character who eschews violence, a man who – instead of pointing his magnum and saying, "Make my day" – basically throws away his gun and, riddled with bullets, gives up his life to achieve justice for a young immigrant woman who has been sexually assaulted.

Who would have thought – that the man whose first film as a director was about a radio DJ who is stalked by a psychotic woman, who in The Beguiled plays a wounded Civil War soldier taken in by a group of women who not only amputate his leg, but poison him as well – who would have thought that that man – in the same year as he directed Gran Torino – would also direct a searing portrait of a young woman who fights for her rights and those of her child against a corrupt society, enlisting from Angelina Jolie a performance equal to that of Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby.

At the age of 79, Clint Eastwood stands at the summit of his achievement.

In the following piece – which first appeared in the French film magazine, Positif – Clint Eastwood talks about the directors he worked with - and those he wished he had...

Howard Hawks - The first director I ever met! It was a brief meeting. I was helping him round up his horses when I was about sixteen, seventeen.

Frank Capra - I met Capra when I was making High Plains Drifter in Mono Lake, North California. I was staying in Silver Lake, four houses down from Capra, and I got the chance to talk to him. Afterwards, every time I came by, I paid him a visit, but I never worked with him.
Capra's movies have an underlying energy which, although it's difficult to define, he alone possesses. Anyone can shoot a scene, but like all the greats, Capra added something that was neither written nor visualized, but which permeates all his work. All the greats have this gift to some extent. It depended on the material, their enthusiasm, the problems they had to solve.

Eastwood in Gran Torino, supposedly his
last acting role

Preston Sturges - I liked Sullivan's Travels, Joel McCrea especially. Maybe he didn't have the stature of Gary Cooper, but he always gave the impression that more was going on inside him than he was revealing. There were fantastic character actors in Sturges, Capra and Hawks movies. They all had interesting faces. It's very comforting for a director to know he can rely on the same actors movie after movie. I tried to do the same in Every Which Way...and Bronco Billy by getting together people like Geoffrey Lewis, Bill McKinney and so on.

Raoul Walsh - I desperately wanted to be in Raoul Walsh's The Naked and the Dead. My agent couldn't get me an audition so I didn't get to meet him. Small agencies had no power. Walsh was a fantastic character. And he'd been an actor as well. It's always good to work with directors who've been actors. They're much more receptive. When I gave Don Siegel a part in my first film, Play Misty for Me, I told him that that way he'd learn to be more tolerant towards his actors, while I'd learn what it's like to be a director. Often an actor only worries about his performance and his character. He doesn't realize a director can only spend 5 percent of his energy on him, the other 95 percent being devoted to the crew, the other actors and all the rest.

William Wellman - I did work with William Wellman at the end of his career, on Lafayette Escadrille. It wasn't a great movie, the script wasn't up to scratch, but it was a period when Wellman, the eternal rebel, was trying something new. Perhaps he wanted to do something he hadn't been allowed to do before. I remember we had a conversation about The Ox-Bow Incident. It was one of my favorite films. He was surprised by my opinion, because it had been a financial disaster. The movie had been shot fast, in less than thirty days, like a commando raid. That's how Wellman worked best. To save time on Lafayette Escardille, he used two cameras to cover the same scene, something he'd never done before. His idea was that there'd be no continuity problems. He was right, but I think it meant too many compromises with angles and lighting. I've used two cameras very rarely, usually only for action scenes. I prefer using several lenses rather than several cameras. Wellman retired after Lafayette Escadrille, but I carried on seeing him and his family. He had a big influence in encouraging me to become a director.

Don Siegel worked regularly with Eastwood
and was a directorial influence on him

Sergio Leone - He was a character. I didn't speak Italian and he didn't speak English. One of the assistants spoke English and would give me all the necessary instructions. After a while, Sergio and I got to understand each other quite well. The only time we really used an interpreter was when I wanted to cut dialogue I believed was irrelevant. We talked a lot, discussed what we were doing, and ended up coming to an agreement. I was playing the character as I saw him, very controlled, and with the minimum of gestures. The opposite of playing to the gallery! I showed no emotion whatsoever. If I'd tried to be as baroque as the others, it would have been ridiculous. Sergio understood what I was doing, but when the producers saw the rushes, they thought I was doing nothing, that it was a disaster. When they cut the film together, they changed their minds.

Don Siegel - When Coogan's Bluff came up, Don Siegel heard I'd asked to see some of his movies. The only one I vaguely knew was Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They screened for me his two previous movies for Universal, Madigan and Stranger on the Run. When he found out about this, Don asked to see the films I'd made with Sergio. He liked them, and that's how our association started.
Don could be anything but extravagant. He was always grumbling but, my, he was efficient! He knew what he wanted and he knew how to take decisions. He kept to his budget and to his schedule. His frugality rubbed off on me, I'm sure.

Don knew exactly which shots to shoot. But he wasn't rigid. He could add or change a shot at the last moment. I’ve worked with directors who are completely pole-axed if you suggest a change in a scene. I bumped my head while we were shooting In the Line of Fire. To hide the bruise, I asked the director, Wolfgang Petersen, whether I could enter the shot from the right rather than from the left. Wolfgang had a lot of trouble reorganizing the scene, because he'd imagined it all from the one angle. A detail had changed and it threw him off balance. This was never the case with Don. Sergio would have taken time to think and then would probably have said OK, but Don wouldn't have blinked an eyelid. He believed that there were no rules, or if there were rules, they were made to be broken.

Extract taken from Projections 4.5: Film-makers on Film-making edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue (Faber & Faber, 1995)

Essential Viewing:

Clint Eastwood:
Play Misty for Me [Buy], High Plains Drifter [Buy], Dirty Harry [Buy], The Outlaw Josey Wales [Buy], Bronco Billy [Buy], Bird [Buy], Unforgiven [Buy], Million Dollar Baby [Buy], Gran Torino [Buy], Changeling [Buy]

Howard Hawks:
Scarface [Buy], Bringing Up Baby [Buy], Only Angels Have Wings [Buy], His Girl Friday [Buy], To Have and Have Not [Buy], The Big Sleep [Buy], Red River [Buy], Rio Bravo [Buy]

Preston Sturges:
The Lady Eve [Buy], Sullivan's Travels [Buy], Hail the Conquering Hero [Buy]

Raoul Walsh:
The Big Trail [Buy], The Roaring Twenties [Buy], They Died with Their Boots On [Buy], High Sierra [Buy], White Heat [Buy]

William Wellman:
Wild Boys of the Road [Buy], The Public Enemy [Buy], Other Men's Women [Buy], Night Nurse [Buy], A Star is Born [Buy], Nothing Sacred [Buy], Roxie Hart [Buy], The Ox-Bow Incident [Buy]

Sergio Leone:
A Fistful of Dollars [Buy], For a Few Dollars More [Buy], The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly [Buy], Once Upon a Time in the West [Buy]

Don Siegel:
Riot in Cell Block 11, Invasion of the Body Snatchers [Buy], The Killers [Buy], Madigan [Buy], Coogan's Bluff [Buy], The Beguiled [Buy], Dirty Harry [Buy], Charley Varrick [Buy], The Shootist [Buy], Escape from Alcatraz [Buy]