Kevin Lally on Film

Clint Eastwood turns 93 on May 31, 2023—and he’s still at it, in pre-production on his 40th feature, Juror #2. I was lucky to get him on the phone in 2004 to discuss one of his two Best Picture Oscar winners, Million Dollar Baby. A last-minute addition to that year’s release schedule, Million Dollar Baby shook up awards season and also took home Oscars for Eastwood’s direction and co-stars Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman.

Then 74, Eastwood still had many formidable movies ahead of him, including Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, Gran Torino, Invictus, J. Edgar, American Sniper, Sully, The 15:17 to Paris, and Richard Jewell. I still remember the end of our conversation: I mentioned that the publicist told me I had half an hour. In his trademark gravelly voice, Eastwood responded, “I’m not looking at the clock.”

It didn’t take long for Clint Eastwood to become an icon of modern cinema. Less than a decade after making his big-screen debut as a contract player for Universal Pictures in 1955, the onetime star of TV’s “Rawhide” propelled a new subgenre affectionately dubbed the “spaghetti western” as the scowling Man With No Name in the stylish films of Sergio Leone. A box-office force since the mid-’60s, Eastwood found another iconic role in 1971 as volatile San Francisco cop Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry and its sequels, immortalizing the catchphrase “Go ahead, make my day.”

What no one, including Eastwood, could have predicted when he first sat in the director’s chair for the 1971 thriller Play Misty for Me was that this durable movie star would also become an icon among filmmakers. Eastwood continued to conquer the western as star and director of High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Bronco Billy, Pale Rider, and the Oscar-winning Best Picture of 1992, Unforgiven. But he’s also triumphed with such diverse projects as the Charlie Parker biopic Bird; White Hunter, Black Heart, playing John Huston on the set of The African Queen; the popular love story The Bridges of Madison County; and the disarming aged-astronaut adventure Space Cowboys. Last year, Eastwood earned his second Academy Award directing nomination for Mystic River, the searing tale of three friends scarred by a childhood trauma, winning Oscars for Sean Penn and Tim Robbins.

If there was any doubt after Mystic River that the 74-year-old Eastwood is at the peak of his craft, look no further than Million Dollar Baby, his new Warner Bros. film now in limited release. Eastwood himself seems poised to earn his second Best Actor nomination (after Unforgiven) in the role of Frankie Dunn, a veteran boxing trainer/manager in anguish over his longtime estrangement from his daughter. Frankie’s life changes dramatically when he meets Maggie Fitzgerald (Oscar-winner Hilary Swank, in another award-worthy performance), an aspiring boxer from a trailer-trash background who is determined to make Frankie her mentor. The great Morgan Freeman rounds out the principal cast as Scrap, a warmhearted ex-fighter who manages Frankie’s gym. Adapted by Emmy-winner Paul Haggis from a story in F.X. Toole’s acclaimed collection Rope Burns, Million Dollar Baby is both a flavorful look at the boxing subculture and a poignant character study, with at least one devastating knockout blow along the way. As with Mystic River, the star-director-producer also composed the movie’s orchestral score.

Eastwood was first given the book by producing partner Albert S. Ruddy (The Godfather), who then developed the screenplay with Haggis. “I was pleasantly surprised, because Paul got a little more out of it,” Eastwood declares. “At the same time, Toole had a terrific idea going.”

Initially, the studio had passed on the project. As Eastwood recalls, “It seemed like another one of two pictures in a row where I had a hard time convincing anybody that they should do it, in this era we live in of sequels and remakes. But Warner Bros. finally said we’ll take half of it, we’ll give so much dough and no more, and go ahead and make the film. So I did.”

Audiences may be startled by the emotional intensity of Eastwood’s performance, one of the greatest of his long career. “I think the demands of the role required going there, and the moral dilemma that the character is put in,” he says. “He’s put to the ultimate test, so to speak.”

Eastwood notes that the relationship between Frankie and his estranged daughter “is left rather ambiguous on purpose, so the audience has to draw in there. Obviously, with his background he must have had an unpleasant divorce in his younger days, and maybe the daughter is now in her 40s and he can’t establish a relationship. Then he finds this relationship with this young girl and it becomes a kind of father-daughter story.”

But that relationship is hard-won. “Simultaneously, he has doubts about his religion and his spiritual feelings. All those elements give him tremendous hurdles to overcome. He doesn’t seem to be a person who wants to establish relationships other than with Scrap, his friend—two old dudes around a broken-down gym. Where Scrap seems to see the best in people, Frankie’s a little more cynical.”

Like Frankie, Eastwood developed a healthy respect for co-star Swank. “I thought she was a little on the slim side at first, but we bulked her up with some heavy weightlifting and boxing training, and we put about 18 or 19 pounds on her. She has a wonderful work ethic. We had four months to do this, and she started training and she was the most diligent person I could imagine. And it shows in the film—she got herself quite ripped. She doesn’t look like a starlet bouncing around, not Paris Hilton bouncing around in the background. She could probably do well against a lot of the female boxers.”

As for Freeman, his co-star in Unforgiven, Eastwood says, “He’s terrific. Morgan is one of those guys who’s so great and so effortless to work with that it’s just a tremendous pleasure. He’s so consistently good that a lot of times people take him for granted. He comes well-prepared and then makes it very easy.”

Eastwood also has a natural comfort level with his remarkable production designer Henry Bumstead, an Oscar-winner for To Kill a Mockingbird and The Sting, still going strong at the age of 89. This is Bumstead’s ninth film for Eastwood’s Malpaso Productions. “Bummy is a solid citizen and always has been. He’s great. He knows what I want, and he’s very, very sharp. It’s amazing for a guy his age: His hearing is impeccable, his sight is great, and his mind is a steel trap. I just think the world of him, and I’m just glad that he still wants to work. I intend on using him into his tenth decade.”

Now in his fourth decade as a director, Eastwood says he never envisioned such a substantial career when he debuted with Play Misty for Me. “I liked the idea of doing it, and Don Siegel [his director on five features] had always been encouraging—he always felt I should do it, and he encouraged me on that particular project to go ahead and jump in feet first. I didn’t know where it was taking me, but I knew that someday I probably would not want to be an actor anymore, and I thought I could always be behind the camera.”

So why has Eastwood not just survived, but thrived? “I haven’t the slightest idea. I just kind of keep going. If there’s any secret to it, it’s to never stop learning. You learn something new on every picture. I just forge ahead, and I don’t feel inhibited. I don’t feel I have to repeat myself. I’m not going back and doing films that I did 20, 30 years ago. And if you play a role, play roles that suit you, that suit your age.

“Living in a dream world, living in Hollywood, sometimes you can lose contact with the world. But if you keep reaching out to stories that are challenging and interesting, then it’s a great advantage to be older, because you have the experience of everything you’ve been exposed to. The main thing is to keep expanding, or you decline. It’s sort of like exercise—if you stop exercising, it becomes very difficult to get back to it. A mind is like that, too. If you stop exercising your mind, it’s very difficult to get it percolating again.”

Eastwood is known as an economical director, often coming in under budget and ahead of schedule. “I’m not as fast as the reputation,” he insists. “It’s just that I know what I see when I see it. I’m not afraid to print and move on. But, by the same token, I stay till I get it.

“One thing I learned from Don Siegel is that you’re always trying for it. I’ve noticed over the years in working with a lot of different people that sometimes people are fiddling around, and the director’s trying to talk himself into having the confidence on a sequence, so they use the actors as a springboard. But with Don, he was always trying for it the very first time. I’ve even carried it to extremes, to the point where I don’t even rehearse—I rehearse with the camera going. Basically what you’re trying to do as an actor is to make everything sound like it’s never been thought or said. So sometimes I figure: Let’s try it. Certainly it doesn’t always work that way, and sometimes you have to do coverage, but if you’re trying for it [right away], the actors are always on their toes, they have to be looming within their character. That goes for myself, too—I have to think and be the character, and if you do, everything else takes care of itself.”

Next up for the director is the DreamWorks project Flags of Our Fathers, based on James Bradley’s best-selling book about his father and the five other men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima. “It’s nice for America to understand what these people went through, because they were all kids—their average age was 19,” he says.

As one of the essential contributors to the genre, will Eastwood ever do another western? “You know, people always ask that, and I never really have an answer. When I did Unforgiven, I always felt that was going to be the last one. When I bought it in 1982, ten years before I made it, I felt: This would be the perfect last western for me, this one sort of wraps it up. Now, I’m not going to be one of these guys who keeps un-retiring, but if somebody comes up with a script as original and interesting as that one was, but in a different direction, I would certainly never say never. Unfortunately, because everything in the movie business is so dictated by fad, people aren’t making too many westerns and consequently no one’s writing them.”

Though his new film is generating Oscar buzz, Eastwood refuses to get caught up in the frenzy. “When you make a film, you do the best you can do. When I finish it, I say: This is what I intended, so there it is. At some point you have to give the film over and say: Okay, that’s it. Now we’ll take it out and show it, and audiences will see it and either like it or dislike it, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I don’t get wrapped up in anything, I’m just glad to be making films and enjoying it.”

Pictured: Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Million Dollar Baby is available to stream on Max.