The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [99]
Why didn’t you follow up on the music?
I was going to. I tried to enroll in Seattle University, where they had a good music program. I got my draft notice before I got there, though, and ended up at Fort Ord [California]. And I guess I just failed away from music.
I served my two years and went down to L.A. City College, where I enrolled in business administration. In the service I had met some guys who were actors—Martin Milner, David Janssen—and when we got out, a cinematographer got me a screen test. I got an offer to go under contract with Universal, seventy-five bucks a week to start. They threw me out a year and a half later. But it was a pretty good deal for a young guy. We had acting classes every day.
Is that when you realized that being introverted could be an asset for an actor? That you could play on it?
I don’t know if I played on it consciously. I know that for many years before I became known for the way I act now, I played characters that were not terribly talkative. Economical characters. Some books—even Stanislavsky’s people—discuss the fact that sometimes less can be best. Sometimes you can tell more with economy than you can with excess gyration.
The Rawhide series was a great training ground. All of a sudden, everything you ever studied about being an actor you could put into play every day. It’s one thing to work for a week in a Francis the Talking Mule picture—which was how it had been going for me—and another thing to be doing it all day for eight years.
It’s like the story of the great classical trumpet player they found one day playing in a baseball orchestra at Wrigley Field. Somebody recognized him and said, “My God, Maestro, what is the greatest classical trumpet player in the world doing playing in a baseball band?” He said, “You must play every day.”
In Rawhide, I got to play every day. It taught me how to pick up and run, how to make things up, wing things in there.
The ‘New York Review of Books’ recently ran an article about you that said, “What is most distinctive about Eastwood . . . is how effectively he struggles against absorption into mere genre, mere style, even while appearing, with his long-boned casualness and hypnotic presence, to be nothing but style.” Do you want to comment on that?
Well, yeah, style. Take guys like Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster. They’re terrific actors, but their style is more aggressive. Both of them did some marvelous things and some films that weren’t big hits but were great all the same: Douglas in Lonely Are the Brave and Paths of Glory; Lancaster in Trapeze. But their style was a little different than, say, Gary Cooper’s or Henry Fonda’s, because those guys were more laid-back, more introverted, and you were always leaning forward, wondering what they were thinking. With the Lancaster-Douglas school, there was never any doubt. Fonda or Cooper: you were never quite sure with them. They had a mysterioso quality.
Which is something you strive for: that little taste of ambiguity.
Exactly.
Let’s go over a few of your films. ‘Dirty Harry.’
There was something there I felt some people missed. One critic said Dirty Harry shot the guy at the end with such glee that he enjoyed it. There was no glee about it at all, there was a sadness about it. Watch the film again and you’ll see that.
‘Every Which Way but Loose.’
All of a sudden Norman Mailer comes out and says he likes this film, and because he’s such a well-thought-of writer, people think, “Wait a second, maybe that wasn’t such a bad movie after all.” I thought it was kind of a hip script myself when I read it. Here’s a guy pouring his heart out to an ape, and losing the girl. I like the correlation with some of my westerns, too. The guy purposely loses the big fight at the end because he doesn’t want to go around being the fastest gun in the West.
‘Bronco Billy.’
It’s about the American Dream, and Billy’s dream that he fought so hard for.