THE MOVIES : Eastwood Talks Bluntly (What Else?) on Eastwood

Few movie stars--we can think of only one other, John Wayne--have shown the box-office longevity of Clint Eastwood. Since the mid-’60s, when he invented the Man With No Name in three Sergio Leone “spaghetti Westerns,” Eastwood has been a perennial on American exhibitors’ annual lists of top 10 marquee names.

Having started his career as young wrangler Rowdy Yates on TV’s “Rawhide” and then having sprung into big-screen prominence with the Leone films, Eastwood easily could have pigeonholed himself in a doomed genre. But his lanky good looks and steely determination--attributes of the idealized American screen hero--worked as well in contemporary action dramas and comedies, and fans have lined up for five Dirty Harry movies, two Philo Bedoe (and his orangutan buddy, Clyde) movies and others in which he played everything from a naive Wild West show trouper (“Bronco Billy”) to a radio deejay being harassed by a psychotic fan (“Play Misty for Me”).

Eastwood, who turns 60 Thursday, has two pictures coming out. “White Hunter, Black Heart,” an adaptation of the Peter Viertel novel inspired by events on the exotic set of “The African Queen,” is due to open in a few months. In it, Eastwood plays a film director, a character based on the late John Huston, who becomes so obsessed with shooting an elephant that he jeopardizes the production. The second film, for Christmas release, is “The Rookie,” a Los Angeles-set police drama in which Eastwood co-stars with Charlie Sheen. When Times Film Editor Jack Mathews visited the actor-director in his office at Burbank Studios recently, he noticed two books of arrangements of Charlie Parker music sitting on the piano. Eastwood, a jazz fan who has composed songs for a couple of his movies, directed a film about Parker two years ago--”Bird.”

Jack Mathews: Have you been practicing your Charlie Parker?

Clint Eastwood (laughing): Oh, I’ve been trying to fiddle with it. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. As I heard me say in a movie once, “A man’s gotta know his limitations.”

JM: Parker never knew his limitations; that’s what made him what he was.

CE: Well, that’s true. He was never complex about it; he just jumped in and did what felt right.

JM: John Huston did that, too. In “White Hunter,” you play him as a man obsessed. To hell with everybody else.

CE: At that time in his life, I guess that’s right. Peter (Viertel) took very careful notes of what went on with John every day, and there was that side of him. He was determined to get his elephant while he was in Africa, and the rest just didn’t seem that important to him.

JM: You have a reputation for being a very economical filmmaker, and you’re playing a filmmaker who, in this case at least, was pretty reckless. What did you find that you had in common with Huston?

CE: When people ask me which of the characters that I’ve played (are most like me,) I say there’s a little of me in all of them; none are entirely me. There is some- / Continued thing in each of them I liked, though, or I wouldn’t have done them. I suppose that John Wilson (the Huston character) is as different from me as any character I’ve played. There’s an element there that . . . we would all like to have--being bold, daring, doing whatever it is you want to do without thinking (of the consequences). You’d like to be that free. But it’s against my nature to go against the people who put their trust in me.

JM: The money people?

CE: Sure. I always feel a responsibility to do the best I can for the people who are putting money up. But at the same time, I have to do it the way I believe. In “White Hunter,” John Wilson jumps on his producer for bringing up what audiences will think. I agree with him on that. You can’t try to make your film based on what people may want.

JM: Back to knowing your limitations, you’ve certainly taken some chances in films like “Honkytonk Man” and “Bronco Billy.”

CE: I don’t think (studio executives) are always happy to hear what I want to do. You should have heard the arguments I made to get them to let me do “Play Misty for Me.” “Who the hell wants to see Clint Eastwood play a disc jockey?” I said, “Well, who the hell wants to see me do anything?” It’s good for me, and it’s good for them to try other things. If I’d stayed in the (Western) genre, I don’t think I’d still be around. I don’t think I’d ever been able to do “Escape From Alcatraz” or “Bronco Billy” or “Honkytonk Man.” I wouldn’t have been able to branch out into directing. People get tired of seeing you do the same thing.

JM: But there are expectations. Whenever you do a Western, people expect some variation on the Man With No Name, and you’ve fooled them a couple of times--”The Beguiled,” for one.

CE: I’m not quite sure what happened there. I don’t want to blame the distribution people, but it wasn’t the kind of Western people came thinking they were going to see. They wanted a hero and a lot of action. I wasn’t playing a hero and there wasn’t a lot of action . ... Some people don’t want you to take that big a swing. It’s just not what they expect or want from you. But I can’t let that stop me. If you think about that, you’re going to make decisions for all the wrong reasons. If you don’t take some chances, why do it?

JM: Some critics are evaluating your overall work very seriously. “White Hunter” is your third film in 10 years to get invited to the Cannes Film Festival. But you still get raked over pretty good. Are you surprised by their reactions to some of your films?

CE: Yeah, I’ve been surprised. A lot of critics didn’t like “Every Which Way But Loose.” I remember this one critic saying I owed my audience an apology. I didn’t understand what this lady was looking for. After all, it was just a movie, and I thought there was a lot of entertaining stuff in it. I didn’t feel a need to apologize.

JM: Who were your movie heroes when you were growing up?

CE: I was just like everyone else. I liked all the big stars of that era--Cagney, Bogart, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable. I liked Westerns and I liked good action films, but I also liked comedies a lot. When I grew up there was no television, so going to a movie was just something you’d do a couple of times a week. We’d look at the movie ads, same way people do now, and if there was something that looked good, we’d go.

JM: You grew up in Oakland and went to high school in the late ‘40s. Were drive-in movies a part of your social life?

CE: Oh, yeah. I had a ’34 Ford two-door coupe. It was just a junker that ran sometimes and sometimes it didn’t . ... We’d jump in somebody’s car, though, and go to the drive-in, buy some milk shakes and garbage out. There wasn’t much else to do for entertainment.

JM: Did you watch people like John Wayne and Gary Cooper on the screen and think, “Ah, that’s for me”?

CE: It never even occurred to me. Movies seemed a world away. It was just out there somewhere and didn’t have anything to do with my life.

JM: Movies and TV shows have come under a lot of fire for violence, and some of your pictures--the Dirty Harry ones in particular--have stirred up a lot of the debate. What is your attitude about violence in movies?

CE: Everybody has certain reservations about violence. I have reservations. I don’t mind sexy movies and I don’t mind violent movies, but I don’t like sex and violence together. That bothers me. But what relationship violence has to society, I don’t know. I don’t know which is imitative of which. I think movie violence is a convenient fall guy; when you haven’t got anything else to blame, blame it on that. My generation grew up watching Paul Muni, George Raft, Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney blowing people away, and it didn’t make us criminals . . . . I’m not sure it does today. People have to monitor what their kids see. I guess that’s what the rating system’s all about.

JM: Some psychologists feel that film violence acts as a release mechanism. Do you buy that?

CE: (Violence) has always been there, long before movies. There’s been (dramatized) violence since literature began. Greek mythology . . . that had some tough stuff in it. The Old Testament has some pretty violent stories in it. Shakespeare. So I don’t know if it’s ever going to go away. I suppose if you took it away, you’d be left with documentary programs based on true violence, which might be worse. I see news shows where they can’t wait to go to the violence, go right into the blood. I’m sure it’s really happening out there, but do we really need to see it? I’ve seen my kids watching news on TV and going, “Oh, gross,” “Oh, God.” It’s a different kind of reaction than when they’re seeing violence in a drama.

JM: You mentioned the line, “A man’s gotta know his limitations.” The one you’ve really made famous is “Go ahead, make my day.” How does it feel to have that line keep coming back at you?

CE: When I was going over the material for “Dirty Harry” with (screenwriter) Joe Stinson and came to that line, I said, “This is really good . . . .” I knew it would click, but I never thought it would click the way it did. I remember going to a golf tournament (shortly after the film came out) and everybody was saying, “Go ahead, make my day.” One lady hired an airplane to tow a banner saying, “Clint, make my day,” signed Kathy or whatever it was. It was just crazy. But it hasn’t changed any. It’s everywhere I go. Reagan was using it. Carter used it. Pretty soon, Gorbachev will be using it.