Original subtitles

I was a kid the first time I saw Clint he was the cowboy

you know the tall laconic kind of tough Cowboy an admirable heroic figure a guy

with a gun and a mission you know this is something that he owns So

majestically Clintwood is the abstracted essence of the American hero the personification of

the Great Western of the American all the things we think we all are would like to

be there's very few people that you can put in Boots and a hat that the audience buys as

a cowboy character Clintwood embodies the West a man a few words stoic very tough he just seemed

to have you know the thousand yard thereare of a guy who shot too many guys it was great

to sit in the theater and eat your popcorn and watch him just selflessly shoot all these

bad guys and and keep our streets safe Clint was a student of John Ford and John Wayne he

took the best of each of those two and he took that to the next level [Music]

as a child of the West California born and bred kennywood's love for Western started

early when I was a kid I liked um westerns a lot I grew up uh watching uh Gary Cooper and

Joel McCrae and Randolph Scott Eastwood's first Big Break was playing Rowdy Yates on

the television series Rawhide the part fit him like a well-worn pair of boots

when we did Rawhide which was the first steady job I ever had as an actor it seemed like everybody

thought I was the natural to be in it for some reason I guess because I was a you know sort of a

rangy kid hanging around the back lot of universal and the secretaries around the lot used to call me

Coupe you know as a nickname so I guess they thought they had that Gary Cooper corrective

shoes on or something like that and I was looking rather looking rather awkward but the era of Gary

Cooper was over after Decades of reliable success Hollywood westerns were now dead at the box office

it took a Maverick Italian filmmaker named Sergio Leon to rejuvenate the genre having already been

turned down by Henry Fonda James cobor and Charles Bronson Leone offered the lead role in his new

Western to the rangy kid from rahy they sent the script to my agent and said does would Clint want

to do an Italian Spanish German co-production of a Japanese Samurai story into a western and I

said not particularly so he reads this thing it's very wordy it explains everything and it has lots

of problems with it but there's something there it's basically a transposition of kurosawa's movie

yimbo the samurai film into a western setting and that's unusual I was a huge fan of Yojimbo and so

when I uh started reading the script and realized it was Yojimbo I said yeah I'll I'll I'll do it

even though it was a very small production I I didn't know Leone he wasn't very well known

he'd only made one [Music] picture Sergio Leone's films were a new kind of Western and they inspired

Eastwood to break some new ground of his own I had always wanted to be a film director when I

went to Italy I kind of got reins stilled uh a little bit because Leone was very uh free and

I thought yeah I'd like to do this someday Eastwood's first Western as a director paid

homage to the genre's past and to his mentor the film was High Plains Drifter I've always seen High

Plains Drifter as kind of his investing in living in the Italian form and taking the Reigns from

those he had been learning from and whose films he had been in and making honestly an Italian

Western who are you and there's a very interesting press still for high Plaines Drifter which has

Clint Eastwood and he's standing there in his frock coat and he's leaning on a gravestone and

on the gravestone it says Donald seagull and the gravestone next to it says Leone he's saying those

are my two mentors and I'm saying goodbye to them I'm now on my own having established himself as a

western director in his own right Eastwood's next film cemented a reputation that would only grow

in the years to come Josie Wales the moment for me when Eastwood pops into kind of his own brand and

his own complete idea of what a western could be is Outlaw Josie Wales I kind of think with

Josie Wales that Clint had escaped the shadow of Leon in some ways I don't know it just feels like

a Clint movie to me it feels like Clint's Western why you going to pull those pistols and whistle

Dixie The Outlaw Jersey Wales begins as if it's going to be a traditional

Revenge Western his wife and son are massacred by the red

legs I don't think I'll ever forget that opening it's so economical and fast and

brutal the Man's family getting completely wiped out murdered burned alive you can't imagine any

man recovering from that loss and I think the question he poses at the front of that picture

is can a man survive that loss and what do you become it may seem like a cliche to start a movie

with a guy loses everything he has his family and then for the rest of the life he's going to

make up for it bad movies do that badly and good movies can take that theme and try to find the

humanity in it the level of understanding that goes with that kind of loss rain's giving us the

it in Eastwood's hands this well-worn Western theme became a deceptively complex tale of

redemption and Reconciliation instead of it being a bloodthirsty Revenge Weston it's about someone

who says I don't want nobody depending on me she's not going to Mexico with us with us now

wait a minute I got you a horse you're on your own now here's where completely subverts Western

conventional storytelling most westerns if you break them down if you analyze them are about a

character or a group of characters who have death nipping at their heels I hope you die that'll be

the day and they'll either Embrace death at the end or or buy some clever means avoid death Josie

Wales turns that Paradigm on its ear it reverses it here's a guy who goes out to seek death and

life won't leave him alone life keeps nipping at his heel you're all alone now whales not quite

alone he's trying to be alone and wants to be left alone but the more he travels the more people

gather around him even a dog dog he picks up at one point and the dog keeps following him and he

spits this W of tobacco hits the dog between the and the dog comes back wagging its tail he can't

even get rid of the dog you might as well ride along with us H everybody else is at the end he

has a he has kind of a whole family that is built around him and he's stuck with it and

slowly as he goes on his Odyssey he he understands what responsibility is so by the end he's become

the father of this extended family it's like Frank AA made a western to me you know filtered

through Clint Eastwood's greedy sensibilities but it's almost like a Frank kaer Western having been

raised on the films of John Ford and Howard Hawks and inspired by the boldness of Sergio

Leone Eastwood had begun to reinvent the Western in his own image I think of Clint Eastwood as kind

of the uniting force that kind of emerges from the spaghetti western comes back to this country

takes up the the lines that were coming from Allan lad and John Wayne and connects them to the kind

of urgency of the films coming out of Europe and the way he guided the rest of us in what a western

could be was in being proud of both sides Eastwood also brought to the screen a new kind of Western

hero a complex character with more ambiguity than most of the men portrayed by James Stewart or John

Wayne I know Don seagull when he did the shooter he he told John Wayne he was asking him says you

come in you see the guy in the mirror and then you shoot him and then and you come around and

you crawl down the bar and then you come up and the other guy is there and he says and you shoot

him right in the back and he said there was a long pause this is Don seagull telling me

this story and he said a long pause and he said John Wayne turned to him and said he says I don't

shoot anyone in that back you know and he goes oh and Don made the biggest error he could have

ever made after that he said well well Clint would have would shoot him right in the back

and and he said John Wayne got his r as a beat he was ready to kill him at that particular point he

says I don't give a goddamn what that kid's doing he just say you know and and it it went off and

he had a had good laugh telling the story for years after that Eastwood's willingness to play

characters of questionable virtue was on full display in his next we Western pale Ryder pale

ryer was a movie we did in 1984 it was a movie that had some of the elements of the serg leion

movies where Clint played sort of this preacher with no name well in pale ryer the the character

is uh another ambiguous character coming down out of the mountains much like the High Plains Drifter

one of the things that struck me about pale Ryder was the confidence that Eastwood keeps developing

in his style of film making and I think that there's a kind of greater and greater economy

less of an effort to wow with a shot Pale Rider signals for me and it's kind of almost

a preparatory work for Unforgiven in which it's kind of it's the refining of this style which I

think he will then kind of hit completely out of the park I'm heading up north in through

neera up to Wyoming going to kill a couple of no good Cowboys for what for cutting up a

lady Unforgiven was one of the real Great surprises when I I read that as a script it

was um it was extremely well written uh and it was very different but the time I thought

this would be a great script for me to do when I'm just a little bit older and finally at the

end of the 80s I thought I think I'd better revisit that so I I pulled it out and reread

it and it was still as good as ever Ned you remember that drover I shot through the mouth

his teeth came out the back of his head I think about him now and

again he didn't do anything to deserve to get shot if you see the The Arc of uh American

movie Western Good Guys the white hats bad guys and the black hats that whole thing has gone all

the way up to Unforgiven where characters are not quite so cut and DED in terms of good and

bad everybody had a purpose and everybody had an interest in something else and uh so nobody was a

villain outright they were just villains because of circumstances the Jee Hackman character was

written so well I mean he was a violent guy I guess you think I'm kicking you bop but he was

a guy who just wanted Comfort he just wanted to have a nice retir the Jee Hackman character

wasn't a buffoon he was a very tough guy right to the end and westerns and the heroics that go

with them never suffer when the bad guy is strong well I ain't gonna hurt no woman I'm going to hurt

you not gentle like before but bad I sore I I would never be involved in a picture uh with

this much violence in it but the more I read it and the more I I I came to understand the

the purpose of the film The more fascinated I became with with with this idea more than

perhaps any Western before it no Unforgiven presents an unflinching look at the cost

of violence on those who perpetrate it it's a hell of a thing killing a

man he take away all he's got and all he's ever going to have we don't don't often want to deal

with those themes you know too often the bad westerns people just they move on and everything's

happy and it's not you're marked with the killing of another human being it marks you forever coming

out of the tradition of the American Western which reflected America in the first half of the century

he seems to be tackling what is ultimately the truth about it and Unforgiven The Marvelous

thing about the picture was that he's actually looking back at his own past and John Wayne's past

and the other Western pasts and blowing it us under and saying you know the West was never

really like that this picture in a strange way debunks it all there's something about kind of

the nihilistic aspect of it that was like I mean he's telling everybody he's going to like you know

come back and murder their whole family you know I mean it's like and this is the hero of the of

the peace you better not cut up no otherwise harm no [ __ ] we're all come back and kill every one

of you sons of [ __ ] so it's not your classic Shane rides off into the sunset kind of thing

he rides off yeah but you know that if they mess around he's coming back and he's going to burn

down the whole town you know which is kind of cool if I were proposing that East would emerge

from Spaghetti Westerns and all this kind of chaos of style and then on the other side came and was

raised clearly on the kind of the American Western it is the movie in which it all comes together

the darkness the Revenge the level of dynamism that the early westerns American westerns never

really approached and then at the same time this kind of Panache in his reinvention of the western

Clint Eastwood never forgot the rich traditions of the Giants who came before him I have always

been so impressed with with Eastwood because he has always been so deeply respectful to

those filmmakers that he learned from in fact wasn't Unforgiven dedicated to Sergio and Don

filmmaker subsequent to him and have studied him I for example have studied what Eastwood

has done as a director and been inspired by it when you look at the pantheon of uh of American

filmmakers that that Clint is is right there I don't know how anybody can be a movie star for

40 years performing at a very high level as both an actor and a director he's had a journey and uh

whatever his offering is you know as an artist because I think that that's how he's approached

his career we honor what he he's trying to make and go watch it he's a natural filmmaker just has

such Clarity and purpose when you work with them you feel that you know there ain't no forgetting

[Music]