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CLINT EASTWOOD

by Tim Cahill

July 4, 1985

You are, by some accounts, the world’s most popular movie star. Do you sometimes wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and say, “Can that possibly be me?” I mean, does it surprise you?

If I thought about it enough, it might. Yeah, I guess so. I guess you’d look back and say, “How did a kid from Oakland get this far?” I’m sure other people do that to some degree. It’s like waking up with a hooker—how the hell did I get here?

Let’s start with ‘A Fistful of Dollars.’ How did that come about?

Well, at that time I’d done Rawhide for about five years. The agency called and asked if I was interested in doing a western in Italy and Spain. I said, “Not particularly.” I was pretty westerned out on the series. They said, “Why don’t you give the script a quick look?” Well, I was curious, so I read it, and I recognized it right away as Yojimbo, a Kurosawa film I had liked a lot. When I’d seen it years before, I thought, “Hey, this film is really a western.” Nobody in the States had the nerve to make it, though, and when I saw that someone somewhere did have the nerve, I thought, “Great.”

Sergio [Leone] had only directed one other picture, but they told me he had a good sense of humor, and I liked the way he interpreted the Yojimbo script. And I had nothing to lose, because I had the series to go back to as soon as the hiatus was over. So I felt, “Why not?” I’d never been to Europe. That was reason enough to go.

You’ve said that in the original script, the Man with No Name shot off his mouth more than his gun.

The script was very expository, yea. It was an outrageous story, and I thought there should be much more mystery to the person. I kept telling Sergio, “In a real A picture, you let the audience think along with the movie; in a B picture, you explain everything.” That was my way of selling my point. For instance, there was a scene where he decides to save the woman and the child. She says, “Why are you doing this?” In the script he just goes on forever. He talks about his mother, all kinds of subplots that come out of nowhere, and it goes on and on and on. I thought that was not essential, so I just rewrote the scene the night before we shot it.

Okay, the woman asks, “Why are you doing this?” and he says . . .

“Because I knew someone like you once and there was nobody there to help.”

So you managed to express ten pages of dialogue in a single sentence.

We left it oblique and let the audience wonder: “Now wait a minute, what happened?” You try to let people reach into the story, find things in it, choice little items that they enjoy. It’s like finding something you’ve worked and hunted for, and it’s much more enjoyable than having some explanation slapped into your face like a wet fish.

So you have a lot of faith in your audience.

You have to. You don’t play down to people, you don’t say, “I’d better make this a little simpler, a little more expository.” For instance, in Josey Wales, when he rides off at the end of the picture, the editor and I had wanted to superimpose the girl’s face over him. He said, “We want the audience to know that he’s going back to her.” Well, we all know he’s going back. If he rides off on the other side of town, the audience will say, “Well, he’s gonna turn left.” It’s really looking down on an audience to tell them something they already know. Or tell them something they can draw in because it arises out of the story. I try to make that part of their job.

To . . .

To think about it a little bit.

You did two more of the Italian westerns with Leone: ‘For a Few Dollars More’ and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

Yeah. The other two, the productions were glossier, more refined. The stories didn’t mean a whole lot. They were just a lot of vignettes all shuffled together. I enjoyed them, they were fun to do. Escapism. And the American western at that point was in a dull period. But when Sergio approached me about being in some of the subsequent westerns, I thought it would