Changing Their Ways : Eastwood Pulling Away From Roles That Made His Career

In a movie career spanning 35 years, Clint Eastwood has played a host of tough-guy characters ranging from gunfighter to cop, from mountain climber to jet pilot.

But the craggy-faced actor and director has branched out in recent years toward more artistic projects.

“I’d like to reach out and do a lot of things. I think that keeps you healthy, keeps you analyzing films,” said Eastwood, whose nearly 20-year directing career is the subject of a three-week retrospective at the Walker Art Center.

“It’s better for me. If I’d just done genre films--detectives and Westerns--when I started back in ‘64, I could be pretty self-bored by now. I’d probably be retired by now.”

His latest film, “White Hunter, Black Heart,” explores the obsession of a movie director bent on bagging an elephant in Africa.

The need for change may be why Eastwood said Wednesday that he plans no more sequels to his popular “Dirty Harry” movies.

“I don’t know where you’d take him,” said Eastwood, who has starred in five “Dirty Harry” pictures, starting in 1971.

“The Dead Pool,” his last film about the San Francisco police detective who taunted bad guys to “make my day,” was released in 1988.

“The very dangerous thing about doing sequels is you can fall into a pattern of self-imitation. You’d have to have an awfully good script to take you away from that,” he said.