Clint Eastwood (90 page)

He was still a decisive director. As he once said to an interviewer, “
if it works immediately, you’ve got to have enough wherewithal to say, ‘That’s it. That’s good. That’s what I want.’ Because you have to have the picture in your mind before you make it.… If you don’t, you’re not a director, you’re just a guesser.”

He was still a director who believes boredom is the enemy of quality, believes as his executive producer, David Valdes, put it, “
that moving quickly on the set, breaking the angle, changing a lens, helps everybody keep moving a little faster and that translates onto celluloid.”

Above all, he remained a director appalled by noisy hysteria. “
You’ll never find a bullhorn on an Eastwood set,” Lloyd Nelson, who had been his script supervisor for two decades, said one day. Instead, you’ll find that stillness about which a wondering and grateful Richard Harris never stopped talking: “
Nobody has to shout, nobody says ‘Quiet please’ because everybody
is
quiet.” He added, “I’ve made forty-something movies, and one of the things that compels me not to work anymore has been the general sense of chaos on these big Hollywood pictures.” Here, by contrast, he found himself surrounded “by the comfort and security of an organization that is absolutely working like a clock. Nothing goes wrong. And if something goes wrong it’s dealt with with absolute calmness and authority.”

And, if possible, a joke. The scenes in Greely’s saloon were hard on everyone. They were shot at night, on a set that was small and jammed with actors and technicians, with fog machines befouling the air as they pumped out what the camera would read as the haze created by cigar smoke and a wood-burning stove. Moreover, the staging—of Little Bill beating Will, of the final deadly confrontation between them—was intricate and time-consuming. The company was cramped in there for the better part of a week. A crucial shot, obviously, was of Daggett knocking Will to the floor and kicking the stuffings out of him, after which he turned to the bar and poured himself a drink. When he and Hackman
had completed this action to Clint’s satisfaction, the director, from his prone position, rasped “Pour me one of those,” instead of calling “Cut.”

A couple of nights later, the situation was more serious: In the climactic shoot-out, the blanks in Clint’s pistol kept jamming. These mishaps spoiled several takes—and Clint’s concentration as well; he blew up, cursing the quarter-load blank cartridges, which lacked the power to clear the weapon’s chamber. As soon as Eddie Aionna, his longtime property master, replaced them with half loads, the gun worked properly, and Clint was restored to himself. “Take that!” he cried triumphantly once the close-up of him blasting three or four subsidiary bad guys into eternity was safely in the can—the B-movie cliché banishing the accumulated tension.

“When the day comes that I don’t enjoy it, I’ve socked away just enough to maybe be able to coast it out,” Clint said one day, comically understating the resources available for his sunset years, but confirming what an eyewitness to this production had begun to suspect, that Clint had not so much thought of this film as a farewell but more so as a kind of test. If with a script of this moral weight and actors of this professional weight he could not be happy in his work and its results, well, then, yes, it might be time to reexamine some premises.

Not even a desperate conclusion to this happy time would cause him to do so. Even Malpaso weather does not last forever, and with just two days left on the schedule the first blizzard of the winter was forecast: twelve inches of snow, with a week of freezing weather to follow. Crisis. Should they proceed as planned, hoping the weatherman was wrong or the storm would be delayed? Or should they—could they—devise a crash schedule that would cram two days’ work into one? Valdes proposed a virtually nonstop shoot, with just one four-hour break for sleep, no meals included. It was a dangerous plan. If the storm did not materialize, he would be faced with a huge, unnecessary bill for golden time and meal penalties. On the other hand, if the snows came, the cost would be infinitely higher, for they would have to hold everyone on salary waiting for a break in the weather. He and Clint decided to plunge ahead.

The ground froze. The water in the rain machines froze (among other sequences, they were doing Clint’s storm-tossed exit from Big Whiskey). The star’s teeth were chattering so badly he had trouble saying his lines. In the wee hours of the final night a delegation from the crew demanded a pizza run, and the normally unflappable Valdes blew his stack. “
We’re in bumfuck, Alberta,” he yelled, “and there’s no Domino’s around the corner.” They got their last shot as dawn broke, and the first
snowflakes of a blizzard, every bit as severe as predicted, began to fall. A few days later a small group moved on to Sonora, California, and its narrow-gauge railroad, for the sequences in which English Bob arrives in town. There, at last, the picture wrapped.

By mid-January, just two months after completion of principal photography, Clint and Joel Cox had a rough cut ready to screen. Even without music—Clint would contribute a theme to Lennie Niehaus’s very spare score—the picture played powerfully. There was some talk, apparently, among Warners executives about asking him to trim it slightly, but no one had the nerve to broach the subject. Clint agreed to make an appearance at Sho-West, the annual Las Vegas convention of exhibitors, where all the studios present samples of their forthcoming wares at expensive, star-studded parties.
Unforgiven
was slightly misrepresented in the Warner Bros. product reel, which cannily combined violent moments from previous Eastwood westerns with similar shots from the new one to suggest a return to Clint’s most profitable territory. It went over very well.

The film itself did the same when Clint invited David Webb Peoples to the studio to see it in finished form. It was their first meeting, and the writer, fearing the worst, sat well apart from Clint so his reactions could not be read. He noticed, but made nothing of, a few small changes in his script, principally because everything he really cared about was present. Peoples had the experience, uncanny for a screenwriter, of seeing his work come to the screen essentially as he had written it; only, he said, better. “
I’d never seen or imagined anything so dark and relentless and powerful,” he later wrote. “Without changing the words, Clint made the script … tougher, more uncompromising, without slickness, and the heart was still in it.” Like Clint, who never takes them, Peoples is opposed to possessory credits, but graciously added: “If ever there was a picture that belonged to its director it is Clint Eastwood’s
Unforgiven.”
In Clint’s mind, though, it belonged to his mentors. He placed a dedication on the closing credits: “For Sergio and Don” (Siegel had died in 1991).

Peoples’s response was heartening. But neither it, nor the enthusiasm of other early viewers, affected the prerelease campaign for the picture, which Clint insisted be low-key. He did not want to stir excessive expectations for the movie, or openly acknowledge his own. He also believed it was a picture that would profit by letting people come away from it with a sense of discovery.

In press previews of the summer’s releases,
Unforgiven
was scarcely mentioned. In the spring all eyes were fixed on the supposedly erotic thriller
Basic Instinct;
in the summer the media were transfixed by high-risk sequels—
Lethal Weapon 3, Batman Returns, Patriot Games
—and low-rent comedies like
Sister Act
and
Wayne’s World
. No one was paying much attention to an oater, all of whose stars were in their fifties and sixties.

But
Unforgiven
was lucky in the order. There comes a time in early August when reviewers are overdosed on mindlessness, and a portion of the public, too, finds itself yearning for the finer things—or, at least, for something structurally coherent and dramatically meaningful. It’s not a large window of opportunity, but it exists, and
Unforgiven
slipped through it, emerging with ecstatic reviews.

Besides “revisionist” the word most frequently attached to the film by reviewers was “masterpiece.” Precisely because the movie so openly questioned western conventions, it allowed critics a chance to parade their analytical skills and their historical knowledge. More important, Clint was challenging them in a way they thought appropriate to him. He was not stretching as he had with
White Hunter
or
Bird
or
Honkytonk Man
into territories they believed to be foreign to him. Rather, as with
Tightrope
, he was exploring the limits of a genre in which his authority was unquestionable.

As it turned out, he was shrewd in the order, too. Let us take him at his word: It was purely an actor’s choice to wait until he had aged into this part. But let us also note that he had now attained an age when a leading player, if he is still vigorous and active (and lucky) may begin to achieve legendary status. This role, with its tragic overtones and its summarizing undertones, called out for such an acknowledgment. Richard Corliss caught this sense of things very well. He described
Unforgiven
as “
Eastwood’s meditation on age, repute, courage, heroism—on all those burdens he has been carrying with such grace for decades. On Clintessence.” Possibly some of these preoccupations might seem—especially to the young—old-fashioned. “But to anyone who appreciates what Clint Eastwood has meant to the movies, old-fashioned is just another way of saying classic.”

Corliss noticed something else as well, that the movie took its time “letting you watch Clint turn into Clint”—that is, into the righteous avenger the popular audience always wants him to be. But when the transformation was finally achieved it was “not thrilling but scary,” a descent into temporary insanity. In short, there was something for everyone here—irony for the enlightened, a measure of simple kick-ass bliss
for the groundlings, who did not notice—or care—in exactly what spirit Will Munny achieved his rough justice.

And so they all came in their millions. The film grossed a solid $15 million on its first weekend, leading the competition and giving Clint his best opening in six years. Moreover, it had legs. The film stayed in profitable release for about nine months, while the press, which had so largely ignored the film prior to release, tumbled over itself with follow-ups, reactions, second thoughts. Clearly,
Unforgiven
was going to be a serious contender for critical awards, especially when the late fall and early winter produced less-than-daunting competition.

On the whole, the film did very well in the Oscar preliminaries, winning four major prizes from the National Society of Film Critics and five from the Los Angeles Film Critics. Golden Globes were also acquired. The only disappointment was the New York Film Critics Circle, where, Hackman aside,
Unforgiven
was narrowly defeated in all the major categories. The big winner was
The Crying Game
, in which an IRA hitman falls in love with a transvestite, whose surprise revelation of his sex was a gimmick so cleverly managed that it was widely mistaken for art. Clint, among others, wondered if this late starter was going to emerge as an Oscar spoiler. Early on the morning of February 17 (5:30 a.m., in order to maximize p.m. coverage in the eastern time zones), when the Academy nominations were announced,
Unforgiven
received eight, two more than the Irish film, one less than
Howard’s End
, with the other best-picture nominations including
A Few Good Men
and
Scent of a Woman
, humanistically flavored dramas of the kind usually favored by the Academy.

Clint was, he said, asleep in Sun Valley when the nominations were announced, receiving word of the results from a message left on his answering machine. “
When I heard, I thought, well that’s nice,” he told a reporter. Surpassing cool! Though there were some among his friends, who know that he is a late sleeper, but who also knew how keenly Clint wanted this recognition, who did not entirely credit it.

If he did snooze through the Oscar announcements, it was his last inattentive moment until the morning after the awards. Just as he had refused all along to admit how much this film meant to him, he now refused to admit how much he wanted this recognition for it. He would just quietly do everything possible to assure the right outcome. The strategy was to remain tastefully present in the minds of Oscar voters, without looking as if he was desperate for their favor. Something like a half-dozen major profiles appeared in important magazines during the first three months of 1993 when Academy members had their ballots in hand. He sat for television interviews with Barbara Walters and David
Frost and appeared in a retrospective documentary about his career. He accepted a Director of the Year Award from Sho-West, a career achievement award from the American Cinema Editors, something from the Publicists Guild and a California Governor’s Award for the Arts—much meaningless metalwork, but reminders to the Academy that others were reckoning seriously with him.