A Fistful of Memories

While other people complain about the absence of Westerns, Clint Eastwood continues to make them. “Unforgiven,” the tale of a reformed killer tempted to fall back on his old ways, is his 10th, the latest in a steady skein that dates from Sergio Leone’s “A Fistful of Dollars” in 1964. Eastwood’s associations with the genre go back further still, to his 1959 debut as hard-bitten Rowdy Yates on TV’s “Rawhide.”

Eastwood’s Westerns, usually employing a variant of the emotionless Man With No Name persona he created for his three films with Leone, reached a kind of apocalyptic crescendo with a trio he directed himself: “High Plains Drifter,” “The Outlaw Josey Wales” and “Pale Rider.” Yet he has also done quasi-musical Westerns (“Paint Your Wagon”), modern-day comic Westerns (“Bronco Billy”) and even police dramas that were really Westerns in disguise (“Coogan’s Bluff”).

Given all this, it seemed an appropriate time to explore Eastwood’s thoughts on the Western, and the actor-director, looking fit and relaxed in his quiet bungalow on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, was willing to oblige.

Question: Why did you want to do another Western?

Answer: I never want to do any particular genre or any particular film for the sake of the genre; it’s always the individual story. One of the things I do like is that it goes back to my roots as an actor coming of age in Western films.

Q: How did you come across David Peoples’ script?

A: This is a project that was written years ago, in the late ‘70s. It was optioned to Francis Coppola, but he was going through some hard times and couldn’t get it together. It was called to my attention in the early 1980s, when I was looking for a writer to do some stuff for me. I thought, “Gee, I really like this, it’s too bad it’s all tied up.” But when I called the writer’s agent he said, “Francis gave up the option two days ago; the script is available.” So I bought it and sort of sat on it for years. I always thought it was a little gem, but I figured I had to age into it.

Q: What did you like about it?

A: I don’t know whether it’s revisionist or whatever people want to call it, but it’s different, it’s unusual, and it’s hard to find stuff in the Western vein that’s unusual. You can’t quite predict it; from the very beginning you don’t know quite where it is going. You don’t quite know who’s going to be the hero of the piece, and the protagonist is inept at certain things.

Q: The first glimpse of you, in fact, is very non-heroic, as a farmer falling down in the mud chasing some pigs.

A: I’ve never pictured myself as the guy on the white horse or wearing the white hat on the mighty steed, though I’ve ridden some good horses periodically. I’ve always liked heroes that’ve had some sort of weakness or problems to overcome besides the problem of the immediate script. That always keeps it much more interesting than doing it the conventional way.

John Wayne once wrote me a letter telling me he didn’t like “High Plains Drifter.” He said it wasn’t about the people who really pioneered the West. I realized that there’s two different generations, and he wouldn’t understand what I was doing. “High Plains Drifter” was meant to be a fable; it wasn’t mean to show the hours of pioneering drudgery. It wasn’t supposed to be anything about settling the West.

Q: Have you always been a fan of Westerns?

A: When I was a kid there was no television, but you had Westerns on the second half of the bill in theaters a lot. I grew up watching all the John Ford and Anthony Mann Westerns that came out in the 1940s and ‘50s, John Wayne in all those cavalry kinds of Westerns and Jimmy Stewart. The B-Westerns too, the ones with Randolph Scott. Some of them were good, some were not so good, but we enjoyed them just for the adventure of it all. I grew up through a whole era of them.

One of my favorite films when I was growing up was “The Ox-Bow Incident,” which analyzed mob violence and the power of the mob getting out of control. I saw it again recently and it holds up really well. I don’t know how the public feels about those kinds of films, but I just felt it was time to do one again.

Q: “Unforgiven” also seems to emphasize the cost of violence.

A: I’ve done as much as the next person as far as creating mayhem in Westerns, but what I like about “Unforgiven” is that every killing in it has a repercussion. It really tears people up when they are violent, and I felt it was time for that kind of thing in the world. And it became more contemporary during the last year with law enforcement events here in Los Angeles. An incident will trigger decisions, maybe the wrong decisions or the wrong reactions by people, and then there’s really no way to stop things. But the public may say, “Yeah, I get the morality of it, but I like it better when you’re just blowing people away.”

Q: Did you think you’d be doing Westerns for so long?

A: When I first went and did “A Fistful of Dollars,” there were a lot of predictions in the trade papers that Westerns were through. And I said, “Swell, now that I’m doing one they’re through,” but that film turned out to have its place in the world.

The funny thing was that a few years before I’d gone down to a theater on Western Avenue in L.A. that ran Japanese films. A buddy of mine, a big aficionado of samurai films, had taken me to see this film called “Yojimbo.” I remember sitting there and saying, “Boy, this would be a great Western if only someone had nerve enough to do it, but they’d never have enough nerve.” So it was ironic when, a few years later, someone handed me a script for what became “A Fistful of Dollars,” and about five or 10 pages in I recognized it as an obvious rip-off of “Yojimbo.”

Q: “Unforgiven” is dedicated to the memory of Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, both of whom directed you in Westerns. Is there anything about the film that makes that especially apropos?

A: It is a favorite script of mine. Sergio and I hadn’t seen each other for many years until “Bird” opened in Italy and we hung out for a few days. It was almost like he was just saying goodby because he died right after that. Don and I were really good buddies; I loved his cantankerous, rebellious ways. We had some good times together and made some good films that were important in my life. It seemed a logical film to dedicate to them because either one of them would have liked to have made this type of story. Don, especially, would have loved this script.

Q: “Unforgiven” brings to mind other elegiac Westerns--for instance, Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch.” What did you think of that?

A: It was a good movie, but I’ve never been one for the slow-motion technique, the ballet of violence. It was very effective, and the predecessor to a lot of people trying to do the same thing, but I never liked it. I’ve always thought that drama is really the anticipation before the action happens, the buildup to it, and the action itself is like shuffling a deck of cards, so fast it’s kind of unreal.

Q. And what do you think about “The Searchers”?

A. Well, it’s got some wonderful things in it. I don’t think it holds up in the sense that there’s some sub-characters that wouldn’t play today. I think that whole thing with the ingenue and Jeffrey Hunter would be considered pretty edgy by today’s standards. But I think Wayne gave one of the best performances he ever did.

Q: Having made so many Westerns, how does it feel to get the gear on one more time?

A: It’s like a little nostalgia twinge, all of a sudden you go, “Here I am again, 35 years later.” I wear the gear around for a while, I live in the shirts and pants. Hats especially you’ve got to wear around a little bit.

A lot of modern Westerns have disturbed me because the hairdos make them look like they took place in 1965. If you look back at old photos, people always had their hair short. If they were going to pay for a haircut, they were going to get their money’s worth. For “Unforgiven,” I just took sheepshears and cut.

I thought “Dances With Wolves” was an admirable project, and the visuals were quite stunning. But it was kind of a contemporary guy out West who was interested in ecology and women’s rights and Indian rights. If you did it like it was, people probably could’ve given a crap less about that in those days, but maybe that’s what is needed to get a newer generation of moviegoers interested.

Q: What is it about the Western that makes it so resilient?

A: I guess because of the simplicity of the times. Now everything’s so complicated, so mired down in bureaucracy that people can’t fathom a way of sorting it out. In the West, even though you could get killed, it seems more manageable, like a lone individual might be able to work things out some way. In our society today, the idea of one person making a difference one way or the other is remote.

Q: Would you want to do another Western after this one?

A: If I was ever going to do a last Western, this would be it because it kind of sums up what I feel. Maybe that’s why I didn’t do it right away. I was kind of savoring it as the last of that genre, maybe the last film of that type for me.