Original subtitles

That's just been five minutes of our conversation.

.

(THEME TUNE TO THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY)

Hello.

I think you can honestly say that Clint Eastwood is a living legend.

That's just been five minutes of our conversation.

I think he is one of very few actual superstars

who represent the Hollywood tradition, still alive and at work.

Are you gonna pull the pistols or whistle Dixie?

Clint Eastwood is like no other Hollywood star.

He's bigger than almost all of them.

And his longevity is extraordinary.

NEIL: Clint Eastwood has made an indelible mark

on the Western genre and on the cop thriller.

His ability to take control of his career -

produce, direct and star - became a template for people after that.

You're looking at a living legend, Lilly.

An amazing actor who you can watch on the screen become who he is

and that's a very rare thing.

I don't know what that means. I thought I might use it someday.

Clinton Eastwood Junior was born on May 31st 1930

in San Francisco, California.

His father, Clinton Senior, was a steelworker amongst other things.

Erm...and his mother Ruth was a homemaker.

In the 1940s, they settled in Piedmont

and he went to the local high school.

He was asked to leave and then he went to a technical college.

He was not a good or enthusiastic student.

He tended to not do well on grades.

He like doing car mechanics and shop and in the end,

there's some doubt over whether he actually graduated at all.

IAN: Coming out of school, the young Clint Eastwood had no direction.

And you have a short period of years where he tried different things.

He worked in a steel furnace. He was a firefighter in a forest.

He worked as a grocery clerk.

But there was no fixed bearing for the young star to come.

So he did what many other young men at the time did -

he joined the army.

NARRATOR: During his service, Eastwood would predominantly work

as a lifeguard at Fort Ord in Northern California.

DEREK: When he left the army after two years,

he had seen no fighting at all.

But by that time, he was determined on an acting career

so he went to Los Angeles which everybody aspiring

did go to in those days.

While drifting around Los Angeles looking for work,

the young Clint ran into an old friend called Chuck Hill.

Now, he know Chuck Hill from his Fort Ord days in the army.

And Chuck Hill, by chance, had contacts at Universal.

And in the young Clint went for his audition,

and the producer who met him could see he was striking

but he said he was terrible. He said he was stiff.

He had this tendency to talk through gritted teeth.

His facial expression didn't change.

Little did he know, this producer, that actually,

that would be the very ingredients in which client would make a legend.

Universal gave him a 40-week contract which was something.

But then he was dropped again because they didn't think

he was really likely to be a very good actor.

He made three or four films for them.

Erm...very, very forgettable. Very forgettable roles.

Completely unsuited to him.

Plays a scientist in a terrible horror film called Tarantula.

Until he landed the role

of Randy Yates in the TV series Rawhide.

# Keep rollin', rollin', rollin' #

BONNIE: I was a little girl then. I remember this series.

I remember him. He was handsome. The theme song was fantastic.

And it was a wonderful series.

He's a kind of greenhorn cowboy. The young guy of the ranch.

He has to, kind of, learn many lessons.

Eastwood often said that he found him a real burden to play.

He was the do-gooder but he was beloved.

And this series would last for six years.

You know. It really was an institution of its day.

Eastwood was almost 30 by then and he...he felt

as a actor that the part wasn't big enough for him.

It couldn't allow him to develop himself.

It was also gruelling. This was television.

You had to turn a show out every week so you're in studio

seven days a week and it was just gruelling.

By the end of his period on Rawhide,

he was even directing trailers.

He never quite got to the level of directing in a visual episode.

He was directing various trailers for the show.

He kind of moved up within the show to become something prominent.

It was towards the end of Rawhide that the Italian director,

Sergio Leone, was casting around for an American actor

to star in his western A Fistful of Dollars.

And he landed on Clint Eastwood and the legend was born.

Don Miguel Rojo, I wanna talk to you.

Don Miguel, I hear you're hiring on men.

Well, I might just be available.

Sergio Leone wanted a hard, silent western.

He wanted the hero to be the character

who Clint Eastwood would go on to play many, many times -

The Man With No Name, the hard guy.

Saying very little, straight mouth, firm jaw.

IAN: Unable to speak English, the direction on set was very minimal.

And Eastwood really had to just, sort of, stand there and grimace

into the sunlight usually with a cheroot cigar

stuck between his teeth.

Cigars that he hated.

A lot of that strange look of distaste he has on his face

through those films is merely the horrible little cigars

he had to smoke.

Get three coffins ready.

The plot of A Fistful of Dollars was clearly based

on Kurosawa's Yojimbo about a lone Samurai

which causes a bit of a problem because Kurosawa tried

to stop the film being made.

They settled it but the Man With No Name is kind of thought of

as a takeoff from what Kurosawa was doing.

Everybody talks about Ramon. And many speak of you too.

My dear brother included.

Well, I hope they're sayin' nice things.

Leone is an incredible director for him.

First of all, he hires the great Ennio Morricone

to write the score, and tells Morricone

"Do not score in post production"

which is what most composers do. "I want you to do it the night before.

Because what I want, is I want you to play the music

while I'm directing so I want to be able to do this to this music."

He only has this incredible soundtrack which is all dubbed.

The voices are all dubbed but also, the sounds are all dubbed.

It's almost as if every part of the soundtrack is muted.

Every sound of wind, every clash, every gunfight.

It's all very carefully composed and prepared.

This created a slightly strange aura.

A slightly out-of-place way the characters talk

which, somehow, is very effective.

They were completely different to your average American movie.

Less script, more close-ups of people.

And...And of course, the great thing about them was that they had...

They were enormously visual.

(GUNSHOTS)

Intriguingly, the critics hated it.

They called it sadistic, violent, brutal, amoral.

They just showered, sort of opprobrium on it.

That didn't stop the film being an enormous success.

People just loved it. They loved it from the word go.

And they just loved Eastwood. They loved that character.

Eastwood was not yet a star

though he was noticed in A Fistful of Dollars.

No question of that.

But in his next outing for Leone, he certainly became a star.

NARRATOR: Such was the success of A Fistful Of Dollars,

that the following year, Leone approached Eastwood to star

in the film's sequel For A Few Dollars More.

What are you doing here? You're not running away, are you?

No, I'm not running away. I'm going after them and I'm going alone.

Our partnership is dissolved. Let's wait and talk it over.

Yeah? Well, all we've done is talk.

I've been reasonable with no results.

Now take it easy. We only knew the Santa Cruz part of this plan.

Well, you were the one who had the strategy all worked out.

I'm gonna meet Indio. I see. I'd better go along.

A Few Dollars More had the added bonus of Lee Van Cleef

and it was about two rival bounty hunters

going after an escaped convict.

All told with the wonderful sense of timing and flashback.

And again, the lovely textures of Almeria have gone up a notch.

Absolutely wonderful film.

Erm...developed a little bit of the character.

I mean, these are very, sort of, cold, hard, brutalist westerns.

But there was a little bit of humanity creeping in sometimes.

Certainly in the relationship between Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef

which was...erm...beautifully organised.

Of the three, in a funny sort of way, it's my favourite.

(THEME TO THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY)

..according to the power invested in us,

we sentence the accused here before us...

Tuco Benedicto Pacifico, Juan Maria Ramirez...

Known as The Rat. ..and any other aliases he might have

to hang by the neck until dead. And may God have mercy on his soul.

NARRATOR: By 1966, and thanks largely to his work with director Sergio Leone,

Clint Eastwood was a big name in European cinema.

However, due to the films not yet being released in America,

he was still yet to become a household Hollywood name.

This would all change when Leone approached him to star

in the third film of the trilogy.

The fee is now $250,000 which was quite a lot more

than he got paid for A Fistful of Dollars

which was around $15,000.

Eastwood decided to go back and do the third in the series,

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly and very good job he did

because it was the epic conclusion to the trilogy.

This is the first example we see of Eastwood actually understanding

his screen persona, what it's doing to the audience

and how he can, sort of, manipulate it.

The first sight we have of Blondie, as he's known in the film,

is sitting on a horse wearing a white hat.

Clint Eastwood in a WHITE hat? This is the Man With No Name.

It's ridiculous. He's usually got a battered Stetson and a poncho.

He looks positively angelic...

and they actually play that up in it.

The way I figure, there's really not too much future

with a sawed-off runt like you.

What do you mean? Cos I don't think you'll ever be worth

more than $3,000.

What do you mean?

I mean our partnership is untied.

Oh, no. Not you. YOU remained tied.

I'll keep the money and you can have the rope.

You not only have Lee Van Cleef but you have the wonderful Eli Wallach.

And you create this kind of dynamic between...

certainly between Eastwood and Wallach that's kind of, almost

Laurel and Hardy like. It borders on comedy.

It's again about bleakness and moral ambiguity.

It's again about a person...

You can't really root for any of these people.

But it makes you look at The West in a kind of ambiguous way...

that it must have been. It was a revolution.

You talked! No, I didn't talk.

If I did, I probably wouldn't be here now.

So only you know your half of the secret?

Hm-mm.

(CHORTLES)

Blondie, I'm very happy you're working with me.

Across the course of all three of those Sergio Leone films,

we now think of Clint Eastwood as being The Man With No Name.

In fact, he had three different names.

Technically, he plays a different character in every film.

He's Manco in A Few Dollars More

and Blondie in The Good, The Bad And The Ugly.

Mainly for copyright reasons.

If you have the same character go on into the next film,

then the previous writer should be paid for the intellectual property.

So...he is. Though at no point is his name ever used.

And that was the marketing.

The marketing in America was The man With No Name.

So these three films that, together, make a kind of trilogy,

were finally launched in America in 1967.

Erm...and became, over the years, you know,

an enormous cultural moment.

If it wasn't certain at the time, looking back, you know,

they changed the texture of the western.

They change a feeling about what European filmmaking could do.

Erm...they changed the attitudes of the studios.

And they created, Clint Eastwood the superstar.

(THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY THEME MUSIC STARTS UP)

It'll be a lot easier with that.

Coming out of the Spaghetti Westerns,

again, Eastwood has learned things.

He's learned a lot from Leone. He always praised him

as a great influence on his career.

But he returned to America now determined

to be the master of his domain.

Clint Eastwood wanted to be dictating to some level

the films he did and how he did them.

So Hang 'Em High, a film he returned to American to make,

was ostensibly an Eastwood production.

This is the point where Malpaso Films,

which is his own production company,

named after a creek on his own land,

erm...the production company he still has today, was launched.

I just came from the Johansson place.

His herd was gone.

I found Johansson and his wife on the kitchen floor.

Gunned down.

Dead.

No.

Hang him.

You're making a mistake.

The story is about a man who is lynched but he survives

and he comes back for his revenge.

This is a theme that will carry on

through many, many, many of Clint Eastwood's film.

Most of them westerns but not exclusively so.

The idea that someone who has been unjustly damaged in some way

erm...returning apparently from the dead,

to seek revenge on his tormentors.

All right, marshal. What did you say I'd done?

You don't remember me, do you? No.

When you hang a man, you'd better LOOK at him.

It was an usual western, quite unlike American westerns generally.

And Hang 'Em High was, really...

Eastwood's attempt to do something rather like Leone

but really in his own image.

And you get a sense with this film, which became an instant hit,

for United Artists, that, in some respects,

Eastwood had taken up the mantel of the American west,

in cinema from John Wayne and James Stewart.

And he had, kind of, moved it on.

He was the next generation star of that genre.

What kept you?

Oh, I was very lucky.

I ran into this fabulous blonde.

She was lying on a snow drift. Did she have a friend?

No, you're out of luck.

Thanks for waiting up for me anyway.

No problem.

1968 is Where Eagles Dare after the book by Alistair MacLean.

Eastwood's agents said, "Why don't you do a picture

with a big actor, a real senior actor?"

Try yourself up against a big guy.

So the big guy was Richard Burton.

The film is about Burton and Eastwood as two commandos

leading a mission to rescue a British officer

who's been captured by the Germans and held in this castle

on unfeasibly impenetrable clifftops with the most outrageous defences.

And so, they have to worm their way around it.

It's a very tense thriller.

One of the chief delights in Where Eagles Dare

is watching Richard Burton eloquently tell us

this, kind of, endless confusion and what's going on.

And then we cut to Clint Eastwood's befuddled face.

You know, completely confused, just as the audience are...

of what on earth is going on.

Lieutenant, in the next 15 minutes,

we have to create enough confusion to get out of here alive.

Major, right now, you got me as confused as I ever hope to be.

It is unusually violent, actually. Even for a war film.

And it has been said, of all the films that Clint has made,

and he has lot of death dealing in most of his films,

either as a gunslinger or whatever it is,

he kills more people in this film than any other movie.

Everybody recognised Eastwood was more than just a star of westerns.

That he could be a genuine actor.

# Her laughter was an April song

# That echoes on and on #

Paint Your Wagon is a very unusual film.

It has Lee Marvin; it has Clint Eastwood.

Lee Marvin is a prospector; Clint Eastwood his buddy.

They are trying to get gold. Get women.

In many ways, a classic western.

What's unusual about it is it's a musical.

Neither Clint Eastwood nor Lee Marvin have what I would describe

as a great singing voice.

But the personality of the film is almost that gruffness.

It's what makes it work - gives it its charm.

His rendition of I Talk To The Trees...er...

is one of the funniest things I've ever heard, actually.

Erm...I'm not surprised that the trees didn't talk back to him...

or sing back to him!

# Then I'll try to find the words to say

# All the things you mean to me #

NARRATOR: In 1970, Clint Eastwood would star

in an ensemble cast for the classic war movie, Kelly's Heroes.

How many more bars of gold like this do you have, cowboy?

Vierzehn.

Come on. Speak English. Come on. Na, ja...

How many bars like this in your trucks?

14. 14 what?

Thousand.

14,000?

Kelly's Heroes, it's a great film.

It's a Second World War movie that's really about Vietnam.

And Clint Eastwood is a grizzled frontline officer who is fighting.

The command don't seem to know what's going on. He's exasperated.

And one of his men discovers that behind enemy lines,

there's a bank which is filled with gold guarded by the Nazis.

What is lovely about this film is that it combines

all the elements of something like Bilko and M.A.S.H,

all those humorous elements and the, kind of,

slightly subversive military operations,

and even Catch-22, and yet...

still makes it an action movie. And the action is authentic.

I have orders this bank isn't to fall into the hands

of the American Army. Sergeant, this bank's not gonna fall into its hands.

It's gonna fall in our hands.

We're just a private enterprise operation.

You are the American Army.

No, baby. We ain't.

You know what's inside that bank, man?

There's $16 million worth of gold in that bank...

sweetheart.

You have Donald Sutherland as the hippy tank driver.

You have Don Rickles, Telly Savalas.

None of these characters fit a kind of tradition

of Second World War heroes.

And Eastwood very easily moves himself into something more modern

that the film depicts.

(BANK ALARM RINGS)

I know what you're thinking.

Did he fire six shots or only five?

Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement,

I've kind of lost track myself.

But being as this is a 44 Magnum,

the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off,

you've got to ask yourself one question.

"Do I feel lucky?"

Well, do you, punk?

NEIL: One of Clint Eastwood's early mentors was the director Don Siegel.

Together, they made Dirty Harry.

Dirty Harry did for the cop thriller

what A Fistful Of Dollars did to the Western.

In many ways, Dirty Harry is a western but set in a city

with people in cop clothes.

I've got a wife and three kids.

I don't want him on the streets any more than you do.

Oh, he won't be out there long.

What is that supposed to mean?

I mean, sooner or later, he's gonna stub his toe and I'll be right there.

This office won't STAND for any harassment.

You know, you're crazy if you think you've heard the last of this guy.

He's gonna kill again. How do you know?

Cos he likes it.

He plays this tough police inspector who's no nonsense.

He doesn't go by the book.

He doesn't follow Miranda Law where you're supposed to read rights.

All that kind of stuff. He just doesn't do this.

Dirty Harry was just a huge, huge hit.

It became in institution.

This fantastic kind of look at San Francisco.

Look at the, kind of, the idea of how a cop operated on the streets.

That was just seminal.

(SIRENS BLARE)

Now you know why they call me Dirty Harry.

Every dirty job that comes along.

A lot of people reacted very negatively to the way

the violence was depicted

and the way that Eastwood rejected certain liberal values

in his work as a cop - he was the cop who got things done

and killed when he had to not someone who was gonna, you know,

give people space and that...that was a very, very divisive...

erm...idea.

This is Dave Garver with a little verse, a little talk,

and five hours of music to be very nice to each other by.

NARRATOR: In 1971, Clint Eastwood would take his first steps

into directing with the film Play Misty For Me.

Caramel, Dave Garver speaking.

Hello. Hi, what'll it be?

Play Misty for me. Misty, huh?

I'll have that right on the play rack. Thanks for calling.

I see you got your little Misty chick calling you again.

All right. Swing along. You take it easy now, huh?

It's such an unusual film for him to start his directing career with.

You would have expected a western or some kind of thriller.

But this is a different kind of movie.

It's a story of a DJ who is, you know, a bit of a womaniser.

And gets involved with a fan.

And she turns into a stalker.

It's strange to watch him and feel that he's in terrible danger,

when, normally, he's the one dealing the danger out.

It's a great contrast to his career.

Are you trying to say you don't love me anymore?

I never told you that I loved you!

Well, not in words maybe but Dave...

there are lots of ways of saying things

that have nothing to do with words. I'm sorry you read it that way.

People were surprised that Eastwood should play such a part.

But they... They certainly approved of it.

The critics liked the film.

They recognised that Eastwood was a pretty good director.

This film is a blockbuster.

Nobody thought that would come out of him.

And it's... It is...

about the most feminist thing you'll ever see

but in terms of what he breaks through in convention,

it is a very, very important piece of work.

And absolutely unexpected.

Howdy.

Howdy. The name's Josey Wales.

I've heard of that name.

Some said you'd be headed this way.

And they said a man could get rich on reward money...

..if he could kill you. Seems like you was looking to gain money here.

The Outlaw Josey Wales is about a Missouri farmer

who joins a Confederate gorilla unit and...

During the Civil War, the American Civil War, and is on the run.

It was originally directed by Philip Kaufman.

A very fine director, in fact. But Eastwood and he fell out.

And he got him fired from the picture

and then took over the direction.

The Directors Guild of America didn't approve

and they introduced something called The Eastwood Rule -

no star could sack the director and take over directing themselves.

All right, you can let him up now, boy.

Let him up!

Get up, goddamit!

(GASPS RAGGEDLY)

Whupped them again, didn't we, Josey.

Whupped them again, boy.

It is expansive. It is humane. It has humour.

It has a very big canvas.

And again, essentially, it is about a man who is seeking revenge

for the death of his family at the hands of...Union soldiers.

It's about people who don't fit in.

You know, don't fit in this great idea of America.

So it's his first great exploration, I think, from Eastwood,

about...erm...America's working class, almost.

You know, a subject he would come back to repeatedly

and was very interested in.

What does this country offer people? What does it do? What does it mean?

I'm looking for Josey Wales.

That'd be me.

You're wanted Wales. Well, I'm getting right popular.

You a bounty hunter?

A man's got to do something for a living these days.

Dying ain't much of a living, boy.

That was a huge feather in his cap with the critics

who, many of them thought,

it was one of the best westerns of all time.

And they certainly do today.

Now...

Clyde, this has gotta stop. People are gonna talk, you know.

NARRATOR: By the late '70s, Clint Eastwood was not just an acting star

in Hollywood but also a renowned director

which made his decision to appear in the offbeat comedy

Every Which Way But Loose, all the more surprising.

Every Which Way But Loose is Clint Eastwood being silly, really.

He does it occasionally. He's sort of silly in Kelly Heroes.

But most of the time, he's hard.

What they do here, they set his hard man persona

alongside an Orangutan.

He basically plays an itinerant bare-knuckle fighter

who wins this Orangutan in a fight

and then is, of course, saddled with him.

Now, on paper, this sounds absurd.

And it kind of IS absurd.

But what's really good about this picture,

and why it became a massive, massive hit,

is two reasons -

one is the soundtrack which is all Country and Western

which became really iconic for bikers,

for truck drivers who used to play the soundtrack on the radio.

And the character, it's Clint Eastwood with this...

with this lovely animal next to him.

And they go into these adventures. That's really what it is.

What you gonna do with the baboon?

Orangutan, ma. Clyde's an orangutan.

Well, what's the difference?

12 ribs, just like you and me.

What you gonna do with him? He's comin' with me. Come on, Clyde.

When are you comin' back?

When are you comin' back? Whenever it's time, ma.

This was madness, you know.

All Eastwood's advisors were, like,

"Whatever you do, don't do the monkey picture."

And, of course, that was red rag to Eastwood.

And he said, "The reason I did Every Which Way But Loose

is cos they all told me not to."

It's got all of the ingredients of the Eastwood film,

but it's also got slapstick. It's got very, very broad humour.

It became a huge hit because I think, really, it spoke to people.

You know, it really communicated with people

that Hollywood weren't providing films for.

# Shall-a-bam, oo-shal #

# Any which way but loo-oo-se #

How long's it been since you fired a gun at a man, Will?

Nine, ten years?

11.

Jeez. Hell, I don't know that it was all that easy even back then.

And we was young and full of beans.

I mean, if you was mad at 'em, Will. If they'd done you some wrong,

I can see shooting 'em. We've done stuff for money before, Ned.

Well...we thought we did.

All right. So what did these folks do?

Cheat at cards? Steal some strays?

Spit on a rich fella? What?

No, they cut up a woman. What?

NARRATOR: In 1992, Clint Eastwood made the critically acclaimed Western Unforgiven.

NEIL: Unforgiven came as a complete surprise.

It was a period when the western had fallen out of fashion.

Clint Eastwood single-handedly revived it.

Unforgiven is the film, I think, that takes Clint Eastwood

from...just being a star of the '80s

and being an older star,

and elevates him to, you know, a kind of legendary status.

You think he's gonna die?

You think we killed him?

They shot me.

Yeah.

We killed him. I guess.

As a performance, it's just astonishing, I think.

You know. Everyone talks about Unforgiven very much as like...

Eastwood the director at work.

If you watch it again and just look at Eastwood the actor,

the subtleties he puts into it.

The idea of a man reacquainting himself

with the dark centre of his person. You know.

He's been a farmer; he's raised his kids; he's lost his wife.

It's a man who knows he's betraying the spirit of his wife

who, clearly, has saved him from himself.

It shows how the reality of the West was pretty dirty.

It was pretty unpleasant. It was not in the slightest bit heroic.

And it also shows very clearly,

and this is something that Eastwood had, of course, not done in the past,

the real human impact of violence.

You be William Munny out of Missouri.

Who killed women and children.

That's right.

I've killed women and children.

Killed just about everything that walked or crawled

at one time or another.

And I'm here to kill you, Little Bill...

..for what you did to Ned.

It's a fabulous exploration of not only the mythology of the West,

and debunking it... So you have Eastwood's kind of old gunfighter,

a gun for hire, dragged out of retirement cos he needs the money.

I think it's been called one of the best westerns ever made.

It won the Oscar for Best Film.

He won Best Director and Gene Hackman won Best Supporting Actor.

So it was a huge success for him.

Man, what a day. What a day.

My wife had to work early so I took my kid to his new school.

He won't stop crying. Says he wants to move back to Chicago.

Broke my heart, Frank. Any more excuses?

No. Good.

When you work with me, you be punctual. You got it?

1993, In the Line Of Fire...

..stars Clint as a CIA agent looking for a maniac, basically.

In The Line Of Fire tells you Eastwood was just

on the hottest of hot streaks.

You're into the '90s, he's a much older man,

yet he's reinforced himself now...

as a superstar again.

He is the ageing presidential bodyguard

who is burdened by the sins of the past.

Burdened by the fact he couldn't stop JFK being killed.

Eastwood allows himself in this one, not only to, sort of,

carry the weight of guilt but also to do it in such a minimal way

you don't feel he's overplaying it.

You're looking a living legend, Lilly.

The only active agent who ever lost a president.

The further on in his career he goes,

the more vulnerability he allows to show.

And, in this case, it's a man whose life was broken.

Who's trying to put his life together.

I was just picking you some flowers.

Oh.

Men still do that, don't they? I'm not out of date, am I?

Picking flowers for a woman as a sign of appreciation.

No, not at all except those are poisonous.

Bridges Of Madison County was originally a best-selling book.

And when Clint Eastwood took on directing and producing it,

people weren't sure that he was the right man for the job.

IAN: It's about an Italian wife who has had this happy marriage

but her husband went off in the summer.

And into her life wafts this very handsome photographer.

A dream of a man, totally at ease with his soul and being an artist,

who loves to take photos of these covered bridges over the rivers.

It's a cornball idea.

First of all, the book was a huge success.

It was one of the things everybody was dying to see.

Meryl Streep plays the Italian housewife.

She gets an Oscar for it but she's supported by Clint Eastwood.

Clint Eastwood gives her the space and you can see his generosity

as this photographer.

I'm not gonna apologise for who I am. Nobody's asking you...

I'm not gonna be made to feel I've done something wrong. No.

You're not gonna be made to FEEL anything!

You carved out this part for yourself in the world

where you get to be a voyeur and a lover whenever you feel like it.

The rest of us are supposed to be incredibly grateful

for this brief moment you touched us. Go to hell!

It isn't human not to be lonely. It isn't human not to be afraid.

You're a hypocrite and you're a phoney.

It's a very, very adult film. Very mature.

And it sounds soppy but there is absolutely nothing soppy about it.

The two of them work terrifically well together

and I think that a lot of people who had grown up with Clint Eastwood

and those who didn't particularly like his films,

were very, very pleasantly surprised by it.

I'm gonna need that speed bag back. This bag?

Yes, that bag. That's my bag, and if you're hitting it,

people'll think I'm training you. Is that such a bad thing?

Yes. Yes, it is. Every time you touch it, you're losing me business.

I got it. Can't have me here embarrassing myself.

Yeah. Well, I can't just lend it to anybody, you know. I understand.

Million Dollar Baby, the next big Oscar winner for Eastwood,

I think is one of his great performances.

Million Dollar Baby is one of those really extraordinary films

I can't think of anybody who could have made it in the same way.

It's about a female boxer and her ageing trainer.

Clint Eastwood plays the trainer; Hilary Swank plays the boxer.

Having trained her, promoted her

and got her into her first big championship fight,

she is so badly damaged, she becomes a paraplegic.

It's about guilt and what do you do? And how do you accommodate it?

And if anyone argues that Clint Eastwood couldn't act,

I'd direct them towards the scenes in Million Dollar Baby

where he goes into the church.

And you see the anger, yet, his own guilt.

And the, kind of, tears come to the surface.

But now, she wants to die.

And I just want to keep her with me.

And I swear to God, Father,

it's committing a sin by doing it.

By keeping her alive, I'm killing her.

Do you know what I mean? How do I get around that?

You don't. You step aside, Frankie. You leave her with God.

She's not asking for God's help, she's asking for mine!

In terms of awards,

Million Dollar Baby was one of Eastwood's most successful films.

That's my mum Vu, I'm Sue and that's my brother, Thao. We live next door.

So?

Thao wants to say something.

I'm sorry. Sorry for what?

For trying to steal your car.

Let me tell you something, boy,

you step on this property again, you're done.

As a late entry in this twilight years,

to come up with a film like Gran Torino,

is little short of remarkable.

I think Gran Torino shows, once and for all,

how well Eastwood understood his own screen persona.

He's a grizzled old man, you know, who looks after his lawn

and looks after his car, his Gran Torino.

It's another one of Clint's very car films -

an embodiment of the American dream.

Erm...who is forced to kind of...

come between these young immigrant kids and the gangs.

He begins to break down his prejudices.

And it's really about the coming together of people in the community.

He understands that his neighbours aren't just the rude names

he thought of them and that... It's very nicely done.

It's about never being too old to learn, I think.

What happened to your knuckles?

I slipped in the shower. No big problem.

Now, look, now Yum-Yum... If he doesn't ask you, I'm gonna ask you.

Look, don't listen to him, Wa Xam,

he's a white devil. Yeah, I am. I'm the white devil.

It's something about Clint, the elderly Clint,

that's much more charming, in a way, than his middle career.

His frown has become one of the great special effects...

on the cinema screen. There's just something indomitable about it.

Gran Torino was a huge hit.

It's not always talked about in terms of his canon.

But I think it's one of his most touching films.

You've come a long way. I'm proud to say that you're my friend.

But you've got your whole life ahead of you. Me, I finish things.

That's what I do. And I'm going it alone.

No! Wait! Walt!

Walt!

Clint Eastwood is still making motion pictures.

He's still a one-off.

Go ahead.

He had an extraordinary ability to be himself

in whatever part he played.

An extraordinary man.

He was the man who brought the western to American city streets.

What the hell are you doing? Have you lost your mind?

I think what's staggering about Eastwood's career as an actor,

is that how he has remained the same - indomitable, fixed, an icon.

And our pleasure in going to see his films

is knowing that we'll get Clint Eastwood on the screen.

You get those holes a-leaking, I'm gonna whupp you with a knotted plough line.

He was someone who was as big a star

as anybody had ever been in Hollywood.

He is the only actor I can think of who...

understands the value of his screen persona

to the extent he can manipulate it through a variety of nuances.

I've never known an actor to explore the idea of his own mythology

quite as much as Eastwood has and I think that makes him priceless.

Adios.

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