Clint Eastwood (3 page)

And he is conscientious in a particular, surprising way. There are always certain combinations of syllables that give an actor trouble. These vary from case to case in unpredictable ways, and one is always prepared to adjust speeches to ease the tongue’s passage through an unfamiliar thicket of words. Clint would have none of that. He would do retakes until he had said exactly, to the word, what I had written. The same held true later when he came in to record his voice-overs. It was, in his mind, I’m sure, a measure of professionalism.

But it was a measure of something else as well: intelligence. If his director would not let him play himself in his usual way, well then, all right, by speaking this foreign language punctiliously, getting the accent just right, he would embrace the formalities of the occasion and, literally “play host”—a thin role, just barely enough of one to cover one’s nakedness. But a role of sorts.

It is one in which he is quite comfortable in other contexts, as I would discover a couple of years later, when I was working on a documentary about the making of
Unforgiven
. It was the first time I had been on one of his sets, and if I was pressed for a one-word description of his directorial manner it would be—well—“hostly”: a genial eye ever alert to the comfort of his guests, an air of confidence in his plans for the affair, the abilities of his staff, the balance of his guest list. As a man used to managing complex occasions—
Unforgiven
was his eighteenth film as a director—he had mastered the art of gracefully dividing his time, making sure that no one felt neglected, but playing no favorites either. His judgment of distance—how close he needed to attend this person or problem, how far he could stray from others—struck me as unerring.

“I feel a director’s job, besides picking a script, the material you want, is casting the right people,” he says. “But then after that the real
responsibility is to make those people feel at home. Make them feel comfortable. Set an atmosphere where everybody is extremely relaxed and there’s no tension.

“I’ve been on every kind of set that exists. I’ve been on sets where everybody was very hyper. But if you start yelling and becoming obtrusive and beboppin’ around you give the [impression] of insecurity. Then that insecurity becomes infectious. It bleeds down into the actors and they become nervous, then it bleeds down into the crew and they become nervous, and you don’t get much accomplished that way. You have to set a tone and just demand a certain amount of tranquillity. And if I’m not in that mood, if I don’t set that tone, then I can’t expect anyone else to follow suit.”

What he’s striving for as a director are, of course, the working conditions he responds to as an actor. “It’s tough to walk on a set,” he continues. “You don’t know anybody. There’s fifty, sixty people standing around—one’s fixing your hair, another’s talking about your wardrobe, and they’re all pulling at you, pushing at you, and you think, God, now I’ve gotta step before a camera, and I’ve gotta be some character.”

In practice, Clint’s directorial style is, as these reflections suggest, largely indirectional. “Sometimes”—actually a lot of the time—“I’ll let the actors play it a little bit—just, ‘Why don’t you guys just walk around and talk,’ and they’ll instinctively do something interesting. Or they’ll do something not so good, but you have an alternative for it. You say, ‘Instead of going to this window, go to that window’ because it’s prettier or it’s more dramatic or what have you. And pretty soon it unravels itself. That’s an expression I use a lot of times, ‘unraveling.’ Because that’s exactly what it is—it’s a bunch of things and you sort of unravel them all and there it is, all straight strands.”

“
He says very little to you,” Gene Hackman observed one day, “which I appreciate. Much of what’s said to you by a lot of directors is all ego. They say it for the people around the camera, to make everybody aware that they are in charge. And that’s not necessary.” What is necessary for him, for most actors, is a certain supportive tolerance. “To do the job really well you have to allow yourself to be vulnerable. And when you’re vulnerable in front of ninety people, or in case you’re on stage, a thousand people, there is a part of you that wants to protect yourself and not make mistakes. But you have to give yourself that freedom to make mistakes. And if you had somebody strong on a set like this, who understands that, that’s a real treat.”

Morgan Freeman put it even more succinctly: “By and large, he leaves you alone,” at most “sidling up” with a gentle comment about the work. “When you make it look easy, that’s when you’re doing it the best.”

But there was more than hostliness in Clint’s directorial manner on the
Unforgiven
set. This was by no means an easy shoot. Big Whiskey, the mean and muddy western town where most of the film’s action takes place, was constructed on a remote hilltop deep in the ranch country of Alberta, Canada, where neither the living nor the working conditions were easy. One day, contemplating its difficulties and the exigencies of his own double duty as star and director (“You get brain tired—it’s an assault on the central nervous system”), a more militaristic term occurred to Clint: “You’re just a platoon leader with a backpack on your back the same as everyone else. You just get to point the direction we’re going, whether it’s east or west.” There was modesty even in this metaphor; most directors assign themselves a general’s rank when they talk about what they do.

Tom Stern, who had by that time worked as Clint’s gaffer for over a decade, summarized his style more simply: “
Zen and the art of control.” Saul Rubinek, the actor who played W W. Beauchamp, the movie’s mythomanic journalist, observed him passing by one day and said: “
He’s not an exclamation point, he’s a question mark.”

There was a note of surprise in the actor’s tone. Clint, of course, established himself in the movies as an exclamation point—a tall, lean punctuation mark towering over films that were, in effect, short, sharp declarative sentences. But now, Clint only occasionally satisfies this need. These moments occur, as Meryl Streep observed three years later, on
The Bridges of Madison County
set, when “
someone’s violated his world—when people talk outside or trucks don’t stop or time doesn’t stop for the moment he wants to get.” Then the outrage blows up out of nowhere, attaining full volume instantly. “My God,” says Streep, summarizing the universal response to these outbursts, “where did that come from? Because all day we haven’t seen anything, not even a whisper. Then everybody kind of flattens into the walls and furniture.”

Unforgiven
provided the best—or worst—example that I’ve ever witnessed of Clint in a rage. It occurred when an assistant director tried to make haste too obviously, during a tense night shoot, when the wind was up, causing torches to flare and spook the horses. The man loudly summoned two absent actors to the set, shattering the decorum everyone was nervously trying to maintain. Worse, the players ran to oblige the call, also disrupting the tenuous calm. This brought a roar from the director: “That’s not the way we work, you know that”—along with more hot words to that effect. It was just the kind of thing Meryl Streep would later describe—an offense against the mood he was trying to capture. And, yes, everyone who could find a wall flattened into it, including, one thinks, some part of Clint Eastwood’s soul. For when you
touch on his anger you touch both the core of his talent and the core of his nature, some knotted place that puzzles and sometimes frightens him as much as it does anyone else.

Up to a point, Clint is forthright on this subject. “I’ve always felt there has to be something burning inside you. I’ve always felt that an actor has to be in touch with his own anger about something.” All the actors he admires, who in some sense formed him, share this quality, beginning with his favorite, James Cagney, and including, among others, John Garfield, Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum.

It is a surprising list, in that it is weighted toward urban types and excludes the great western figures, the ones Clint has most often been compared to, Gary Cooper and John Wayne. Only James Stewart, who did some of his best work in westerns, but came to them relatively late in his career, after he had established a rather different image, is mentioned—again, somewhat surprisingly, but also very shrewdly—in this context: “I think he was more in touch with his anger than any actor of his generation.” He’s referring to the affronted innocence boiling under the surface of the youthful charm Stewart delivered for Frank Capra as well as to the hard-pressed, hard-bitten westerner he played in the movies he made with Anthony Mann.

Clint also thinks it’s fine if this kind of anger spills beyond the character an actor is playing and washes over the audience, too. “I’ve always had the theory that actors who beg their audience to like them … are much worse off than actors who just say, ‘Fuck you, if you don’t like this don’t let the door hit you in the ass.’ ”

Or as David Thomson has put it, somewhat more politely: “
Eastwood has an uncanny urge to make heroic figures into anti-heroes. In other words, the actor refused to be ingratiating, to seek our love and sympathy. He wondered, instead, just how far he could stretch the audience’s support.”

Having acknowledged anger’s shaping force in his screen presence, Clint suggests its source. “I guess it’s just we become sensitive to certain subjects—certain subjects piss you off and then you can play being pissed off.” This he sometimes oversimplifies, as when Norman Mailer touched on this topic in an interview: “
Oh, yeah, it’s easy.… All you have to do is have a good memory”—in his case, for slights of his early acting days—“[of] knocking on doors and going through auditions and having people blow cigar smoke in your face and not getting the job over and over again.”

I think that his anger actually comes from a slightly more mysterious and ambiguous place. It is 1996 as I write this. Since beginning this book more than three years ago, I have been obliged to think obsessively about Clint Eastwood. The best part of that time has been spent in his company, asking him precisely the kinds of questions I could not have asked him in the early years of our acquaintance. Our conversations have frequently circled back on this subject, and out of them a theory of sorts has evolved.

I think his is a rage for order, and also a rage against order. The first of these observations is supported by simple resort to the public record. This is an actor who, as soon as he was able to, formed his own company—Malpaso—and quickly converted it into something much more than the conventional loan-out operation. In the fullest sense of the word he has been his own producer for more than two decades and, oftener than not, his own director. He has, as well, arranged his relationship with the studio with which he has been allied for twenty years so that he functions with virtual autonomy. Once Warner Bros. has agreed to one of Clint’s projects, there is no interference from its executives. Of this relationship, unique in Hollywood both for its longevity and its lack of acrimony, Clint says simply: “I watched their money as carefully as they watched it, probably more carefully in some instances. Consequently, they don’t meddle with me.” As important, the studio is also “very supportive about reaching out and letting me try projects that are provocative.” If, as I believe, Clint is, in his essence, a subversive character, we can discern a kind of benign subversion in his working methods—a subversion of those careless, spendthrift and often-hysterical ways in which most movies are made, and which most movie people believe to be inevitable.

Be that as it may, a visitor to his sets quickly sees that, having blunted the possibility of disorder descending on him from above, his directorial manner assures that it will not arise from below. An Eastwood set is a patriarchy. There is nothing remarkable in this. All shooting companies aspire to this condition, and few do so more self-consciously than “the Malpaso family,” as its members often—quite without irony—refer to themselves. Clint’s crews are largely composed of people who have worked with him for years, often enough decades, and many of them have been promoted through the ranks over time. Similarly, he tends to cast supporting players who have worked with him previously. He believes this is simply common sense, a way of guaranteeing efficiency and pleasant working conditions for all concerned: “It’s better if people can anticipate. You don’t have to sit there and explain every detail. You can say, ‘I’d like a shot that gives me this effect,’ and the camera department
will go, ‘Well, gee, what about this?’ or ‘What about that?’ and all of a sudden they’re making suggestions that are right in line with what you’re thinking about. It’s really not an auteur thing.”