Clint, by Candlelight : Dirty Harry bathed in a romantic glow? In ‘The Bridges of Madison County,’ Eastwood is a tall, mysterious stranger, all right--but he shows his soft side, not his Smith & Wesson.

He liked the idea of a middle-aged love story that didn’t have anybody dying of an incurable disease or involve a female stalker, Clint Eastwood says quietly, as he says almost everything. This, to explain how it is that he, of all people, came to make “The Bridges of Madison County” with, of all people, Meryl Streep in, of all states, Iowa.

“Lili Zanuck called me up one day and said, ‘Have you read this book?’ And I said, ‘No, I’ve heard about it, it’s on the top of the bestseller lists, but I don’t know anything about it.’ She said, ‘Read it because you’re in it.’ ”

The producer of “Driving Miss Daisy,” offering purely friendly counsel, saw a resemblance between author Robert James Waller’s lone-wolf photographer and thwarted artist Robert Kincaid and the former High Plains Drifter Eastwood, by then newly decorated with the first Oscars of his career for the revisionist Western “Unforgiven.”

Steven Spielberg saw the resemblance, too, and wanted to direct the movie with Eastwood as Kincaid, the “shamanlike” traveler who sweeps an Iowa farm wife off her feet and then is gone with the wind, changing both their lives forever in four days. (Spielberg’s company, Amblin, bought the rights to the book before it was even published.)

It wasn’t until Spielberg decided to take a year off after “Schindler’s List,” and directors Bruce Beresford and Sydney Pollack had come and gone from the project that Eastwood asked to direct the film himself, casting Meryl Streep as the Italian-born farm wife, Francesca, his partner in sudden midlife romance.

Eastwood, who is well known for working fast and using little rehearsal, says he found Streep as an actress to be “like Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman--she’s just one of those people who are ready to roll.”

For her part, Streep says, “he didn’t really speak to me for the first half of the film, and I was getting alarmed. Finally, one day he said”--and here Streep lowers her voice to imitate Eastwood’s famous whispery delivery--”You know, I don’t say much unless I don’t like it.”

Now it’s May, and Eastwood has the movie under his belt, waiting only for it to be unspooled to a world that has not seen him in such a role or in such a film, one that finds him navigating long-simmering scenes of unhurried dialogue with the classically trained Streep. No guns are fired. No cars explode. Eastwood, the director, believes he has made a movie more in a European style. “It might not even have been done here without the book as a guide. So give the book credit.”

*

Ah, yes, that book. The one that has sold 8 million copies and been parodied in “Doonesbury” and held up to general scorn by critics. Eastwood has his own thoughts about the book, as does Streep.

Eastwood, who at 65 still has the muscular, wind-sanded appearance of an outdoorsman, has just walked into a room on the lot at Warner Bros. carrying a glass of carrot juice. He still has his hair, graying now and flowing in waves. The bushy eyebrows are salt and pepper. “I got up playing around with my daughter this morning,” he explains, meaning his 21-month-old, who also happens to bear the name Francesca. “So I didn’t get to eat. They’re very demanding, you know: ‘Come sit here,’ ‘Do this.’ ”

The walls of his office are covered with framed posters of the actor-director’s more than 30 films. The largest one is in Italian: “Per un Pugno di Dollari” (“A Fistful of Dollars”), where it all began with Sergio Leone in 1964.

Ten years ago, when he had just made the cop thriller “Tightrope,” with Genevieve Bujold, Eastwood said, “I like to use gals who bring a substance to the picture.” Still, it would have seemed a stretch at the time to predict that he would one day be matched with Streep (who was then making “Plenty”) in a story small enough that it might have been a play.

“The cowboy and the lady?” Eastwood says, grinning at the thought. “Yeah, but certainly there’s been precedents for that kind of pairing over the years. Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. And Gary Cooper wasn’t really a cowboy either, he just played one. I’m not a cowboy or a detective. There are some elements maybe in your soul that let you portray ‘em.”

In the book, Kincaid, in fact, is described a little tendentiously and more than once as “the last cowboy,” a phrase that has been excised from the script, along with other flowery prose descriptions of Kincaid that frame him as some sort of god. The screenwriter, Richard LaGravenese, who worked with both Spielberg and Eastwood, pared away some of this embroidery while adding a plot shake or two to Waller’s prairie-flat love story, including the idea that Francesca’s children not only find her diaries after her death but are both shocked and profoundly affected by them.

But “The Bridges of Madison County” on screen remains a bare-bones drama that recalls the stark setting and spareness of Beresford’s “Tender Mercies.” “What I tried to do with the movie,” Eastwood says, “is show a lot of real time between people, where in movies today, because of our MTV mentality or whatever, we cut to the action here and the chase--quick, get the dialogue out so we can get to some movement. And this is a lot of real time between people where they’re just standing there talking.

“As a director you have to be careful with a story like this not to try to be razzle-dazzle. I tried to be more in the Ford or Hawks tradition of allowing things to happen on the screen. Otherwise it can get like you’re shooting a commercial or something, with the camera sliding all over the place.”

Watching the film, one can’t help but imagine how it might have been different if Spielberg had directed it. Spielberg seems to agree.

“I think that Clint told the story in a way that I wouldn’t have told the story and I think told the story better than I could have told the story,” Spielberg says one morning, calling from his car phone on the way to work. “I admire Clint’s restraint, telling a story that could have been gaudily sentimental, and he avoided all that. I think he did a wonderful job in not pushing all the buttons.”

Spielberg, whose comments are hardly unbiased since Amblin is a co-producer of the film, nevertheless says when he saw the picture for the first time, “I cried my eyes out. I have a low tolerance in the weeping area, but the movie touched me in a very mature way.”

Reminded of Zanuck’s recommending the book to Eastwood, Spielberg says, “When I wanted to cast Clint as Kincaid it was not based on the other characters Clint has played in previous films, it’s because I know Clint personally. The part of Clint that friends of his know well but have never seen acted is what Clint has brought to ‘The Bridges of Madison County.’ ”

*

It was Eastwood’s idea to cast Streep as Francesca, although he had heard that she didn’t like the book. And he had heard right. “Clint called and said, ‘I know you’re not interested in this,’ ” Streep says, “ ‘and I’ve heard that you don’t like it. But maybe you might be interested in reading this treatment that this writer has done. I really want you to read it.’ ” So it came and I read it in the morning and called back in the afternoon and said I very much wanted to do it.

“One of the things that made me nuts in the book is that the woman was invisible. I couldn’t picture her in any way with any specificity. But this person that Richard [LaGravenese] had conceived was very visible to me.”

The thought of acting in what is nearly a two-character piece with the former Dirty Harry and Man With No Name apparently did not strike Streep as oddly as it might have struck some of her admirers.

“I think actors are much less disparaging about each other’s possibilities than people outside of the profession,” she says. “We all know that we all do all sorts of different things and like to and don’t imagine that you have to be limited.

“When I thought about doing this and saw the most recent films that he’s made--I guess I’d seen ‘Play Misty for Me’ and then I saw ‘In the Line of Fire’ and ‘A Perfect World’--those didn’t seem out of the realm of the landscape in which I work. And it intrigued me that he would want to do something so emotional that a lot of actors would be afraid to touch. And that he had the nerve to think that he could direct it, too. I was very intrigued by that level of confidence.

“He must have had some attachment to it. Part of it is that there are resonances in the writing that refer obliquely to something he’s felt about being an artist or not regarded as one for a while in his career. And about his own solitary nature.”

*

As imagined by Robert James Waller, Robert Kincaid is a globe-trotting free-lance photographer sent to Iowa by National Geographic in the year 1965 to take some nice pictures of covered bridges. He’s also, at age 55, a sexual athlete and vegetarian who quotes W.B. Yeats, drops the names Rachel Carson and John Muir, plays fair-to-good folk guitar and sees himself as “the last cowboy in a world getting way too organized.” He’s that kind of hero. In the film there’s no guitar-playing and no sexual athletics.

Eastwood says he found the “Doonesbury” panels lampooning the making of the movie “funny” and “great,” but he raises a voice for the author as well. “There are a lot of nice things in the book: the simplicity and the fact that it doesn’t fit into a mode that’s out now, even in book form let alone movie form. He created some sort of magic and no one really knows what that magic is. It’s easy to be critical of it, but all those people who read the book, men and women, were drawn to it.

“The idea that life isn’t over, that the love that never happened isn’t behind me or maybe it is behind me and I never realized it at the time. That kind of thing. They’re not just promiscuous people out looking for a good time.”

He says he imagines the headline over some review will be “He Made Her Day,” a play on Dirty Harry’s lasting contribution to the American vernacular. “And if I never hear that line again it will be too soon.”

Eastwood chose not to record the transforming sex between Robert and Francesca as graphically and ornately as Waller did. “I wanted to do a romantic story,” he says. “I didn’t want to do a hump-and-sweat story, which are very popular. But I wanted to do it in the older style of real romance.”

It may be an older style, but it doesn’t go back quite as far as the days of the Motion Picture Code that proscribed moral behavior in movies into the 1950s. How the values of the film will be judged by audiences, critics and fundamentalists is anyone’s guess. The ending can be called conservative, yet this is still a story about a mother of two who commits adultery.

“She commits adultery,” Eastwood acknowledges, “and you’re kind of with her in it, but at the same time she has feelings that most people would probably have if they were in that situation--and the doubts and anxieties about it all. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But politically I never thought about it. I’d say it’s kind of a liberal movie in some ways because they’re outcast people.”

Asked about this, Streep says, “I hope it’s received as a story and either moves people or doesn’t. As for its emblematic importance, I’m not able to speak about it.

“My considerations are more aesthetic ones, like, ‘Is this telling the truth?’ To me the people seem real and this could have happened to these people, and if that’s true, then that’s all it is. It’s about two sides of a kind of longing for another life that you don’t have. That sort of yearning is all through it. His for what she has, and hers for what he has. And the dream of what that is together.”

*

As often happens on movie sets with movie stars in movie love stories, rumors emerged that Eastwood and Streep had carried the intense romance of the script off camera. Both scoff at the suggestion.

Streep laughs, then says, “It’s not even worth responding to. It’s like, ‘I can’t act this?’ ”

Hearing the same rumor, Eastwood’s eyes freeze for a moment and then narrow into one of those squints that can be heard in the next room. “Meryl? She lives in Connecticut, she’s got a family.”

So he’s still with Frances Fisher, the actress of “Unforgiven” and the mother of his 21-month-old?

“I’m not with anybody,” the actor says.

Eastwood has never met Robert James Waller, the former business professor at the University of Northern Iowa who is now a gentleman rancher in West Texas. But he knows that Waller has been married to the same woman for 30 years.

“I’m more free and clear like Kincaid than he is,” Eastwood reasons, reckoning with the comparison. “I don’t know who is more like who. I don’t think anybody is where they are by choice. He might be married for 30 years by choice. That’s very admirable. I’m envious of that. I’ve been married once, and I wasn’t very successful at that. Maybe some day. I’m not against it. But at the same time I’ve never wanted to be one of those people who go in and out of marriages, time in and time out. I’d like to do it again right.”