Clint: A Retrospective

Despite being worshipped, Clint Eastwood is very much a regular guy, his biographer tells Kathy Foley

WHEN Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa in 2004, his immediate challenge was to foster harmony in a divided country.

As part of his plan, he got behind the Springboks – the country’s almost entirely white rugby team which was long hated by black South Africans – and encourage everyone to support them in the Rugby World Cup of 2005 in South Africa.

Against the odds, the Springboks triumphed and won the hearts of South Africans from every racial background. It was an inspiring tale and one well suited to the silver screen. So when Morgan Freeman suggested to Clint Eastwood they should make a movie about the team’s success, Eastwood didn’t hesitate. And so Invictus came about.

The newly-released film has received glowing reviews around the world and shows, once again, Eastwood’s flexibility and scope as a director. Long associated with westerns and cop movies, the star has branched out in recent years, says Richard Schickel, a long-term friend of Eastwood’s and author of a glossy coffee table book on his life and times – Clint: A Retrospective.

“In recent years, in the movies of his late, great period – Mystic River, Letters from Iwo Jima, Million Dollar Baby, Invictus and so on – these are less genre movies than movies about subjects that are sort of surprising for him,” says Schickel.

“I’m not saying he has totally abandoned genre, but it is not quite as important in the last 10 years as it was earlier in his career. He is reaching out to things that are really very different to him.

“Invictus is a very inspirational story. Clint’s never been big on doing inspiring movies. He is very much a realist when it comes to movies. This is a movie where he really gets the message that Nelson Mandela made with his involvement with that rugby team. He thinks that is an important plot for people to bear in mind and that was the whole reason he did it.

“The other reason is that he and Morgan Freeman have this mutual admiration society,” laughs Schickel.

While Eastwood remains most impressed in the public consciousness as either Dirty Harry (“Do ya feel lucky, punk?”) or as the taciturn lone cowboy, Invictus is just the latest in a string of films that have earned Eastwood critical acclaim as a director, from his directorial debut, Play Misty For Me (1971), through The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), all the way to his most recent work which includes Changeling (2008) and Gran Torino (2008).

The picture painted of Eastwood in Clint: A Retrospective is certainly that of a realist, a pragmatist, an unpretentious man who feels a profound sense of duty and someone who avoids the glitzier excesses of Hollywood.

“When I say dutiful, I mean he is a man who makes a commitment,” says Schickel. “It could be a large commitment like making a movie or a small one like where should we have dinner tonight. He will fulfil that obligation no matter what else happens. Clint is a very reliable human being, emotionally, intellectually, in all the important ways and it makes for a very interesting friendship.”

Eastwood’s personality was hewn during his childhood in the Depression when his father struggled to find work and the family moved regularly around California. “He learned good habits of frugality and of not taking anything for granted. He’s behaved that way all the rest of his life. Obviously, he has prospered in his moviemaking activities, but there is nothing terribly showy about the way he conducts his life. He is just pretty much a regular guy. He doesn’t eat fancy; he doesn’t drive fancy; he doesn’t live fancy.”

He doesn’t make fancy movies, either. It’s clear from Schickel’s book that Eastwood tends to make old-school films that tell a story, usually a story revolving around working-class outsiders or families in trouble or examining the nature of American masculinity. “One thing that is important about Clint is that he tends to operate on quite a small scale,” says Schickel. “He’s not an epic filmmaker. Clint is never going to do Avatar. He likes to move quickly and he doesn’t want to do a major picture that will take two or three years of his life to complete.

“He’s not a big special effects guy and the special effects he does use tend to be realistic. For example, in Invictus, there are hundreds of special effects there. All the crowd in the stadium is basically special effects, but they are in service of realism. They are not in service of fantasy.”

As an actor, Eastwood began as a rookie on a Universal Studios talent-development programme, earning $75 a week. He got bit parts in seven films and supplemented his income by digging swimming pools. After bigger parts in a war movie and a western, he landed the role of Rowdy Yates in a new TV series called Rawhide. The series would run for seven years and launch Eastwood into acting proper.

Although they didn’t produce remarkable work at the time, his early experiences on the studio lot helped to shape his style as a director. “In a way, in the modern movie world, he is kind of a throwback,” says Schickel. “His movies, in scale and subject matter, are the kind of movies that studios routinely made back in the days when there was a studio system with stars on the lot and writers writing out genre movies.

“This is the kind of thing we grew up on and we don’t see any particular reason why those movies should not be made. I don’t think it’s reactionary. I don’t think he is lost in the kind of filmmaking that went on 40 or 50 years ago. It is very much a matter of taste.”

Fans will enjoy the book, which includes 325 photos, an introduction by Eastwood, an essay by Schickel and articles on each of Eastwood’s 54 movies as an actor and director (31 of which he both directed and acted in). Schickel was well placed to write the book, having been a friend of Eastwood’s for decades, but also having been a film critic for 40 years and having made dozens of documentaries and written numerous books on film.

Much as Schickel admires Eastwood’s work, he respects him even more as a friend. “Why would I have become a friend of Clint’s? I admire the spirit in which he leads his life, to say nothing about his relaxed attitude. I don’t know a lot of movie stars. I’ve reviewed movies for about four decades, made a lot of films about them and written a lot of books about movies.

“He is the only one I’ve ever become at all close to. There are others I would be glad to see and shake hands with, but Clint is just a guy I have dinner with. We tell jokes, we talk about movies we’ve seen or books we’ve read, or gossip. It’s not like being awed in the presence of the great man or anything at all.”

Words of which the great man would approve. After all, as Eastwood says himself: “I’m just a guy who makes movies.”