PERSONAL QUOTES
"My
father used to say to me, 'Show 'em what you can do, and don't worry about what
you're gonna get. Someday, you'll work for free and make yourself invaluable.'"
To Eli Wallach prior to starting work on
"Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il" (1966)
("The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"): "Never trust anyone on an Italian movie. I
know about these things. Stay away from special effects and explosives."
"That's enough of that shit." - what Eastwood says after a take, instead of
"Cut!"
"I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone.
Even as a kid, I
was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live."
"Right now, the state of the movies in America, there's an awful lot of people
hanging on wires and floating across things and comic book characters and what
have you. 
There seems to be a lot of big business in that, a nice return on some
of those."
"Nowadays you'd have many battles before you blow it up, but eventually you'd
take it down. And that's okay, I don't heavily quarrel with that, but for me
personally, having made films for years and directed for 33 years, it just seems
to me that I long for people who want to see a story and see character
development. Maybe we've dug it out and there's not really an audience for that,
but that's not for me to really worry about."
"And I like to direct the same way that I like to be directed."
On directing:
"Most people like the magic of having it take a long time and be
difficult... But I like to move along, I like to keep the actors feeling like
they're going somewhere, I like the feeling of coming home after every day and
feeling like you've done something and you've progressed somewhere. And to go in
and do one shot after lunch and another one maybe at six o'clock and then go
home is not my idea of something to do."
"One of the first films I went to
- I went with my dad because my mother didn't
want to go see a war movie - was Sergeant York (1941)." My dad was a big admirer
of Sergeant York stories from the first world war. It was directed by Howard
Hawks. That was when I first became aware of movies, who made them, who was
involved."
"I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don't have a toy
they'll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the
time."
"There's really no way to teach you how to act, but there is a way to teach you
how to teach yourself to act. That's kind of what it is; once you learn the
little tricks that work for you, pretty soon you find yourself doing that."
"Again, after you've gone through all the various processes and the film comes
out and is very successful, you're almost afraid to revisit it. You want to save
it for a rainy day."
"...in America, instead of making the audience come to the film, the idea seems
to be for you to go to the audience. They come up with the demographics for the
film and then the film is made and sold strictly to that audience.
Not to say
that it's all bad, but it leaves a lot of the rest of us out of it. To me cinema
can be a much more friendly world if there's a lot of things to choose from."
"You know when you think of a particular director, you think you would have
liked to be with them on one particular film and not necessarily on some other
one."
"At the studios, everybody's into sequels or remakes or adaptations of old TV
shows. I don't know if it's because of the corporate environment or they're just
out of ideas.
Pretty soon, they're going to be wanting to do one on "Rawhide"
(1959)."
"I think I'm on a track of doing pictures nobody wants to do, that they're all
afraid of. I guess it's the era we live in, where they're doing remakes of "The
Dukes of Hazzard" (1979) and other old television shows. I must say, I'm not a
negative person, but sometimes I wonder what kind of movies people are going to
be making 10 years from now if they follow this trajectory. When I grew up there
was such a variety of movies being made. You could go see Sergeant York (1941)
or Sitting Pretty (1948) or Sullivan's Travels (1941), dozens of pictures, not
to mention all the great B movies. Now, they're looking for whatever the last
hit was. If it's The Incredibles (2004), they want 'The Double Incredibles.' My
theory is they ought to corral writers into writers' buildings like they used to
and start out with fresh material."
"I liked the Million Dollar Baby (2004) 'script a lot. Warner Bros. said the
project had been submitted to them and they'd passed on it. I said, 'But I like
it.' They said, 'Well, it's a boxing movie.'
And I said, 'It's not a boxing
movie in my opinion. It's a father-daughter love story, and it's a lot of other
things besides a boxing movie.' They hemmed and hawed and finally said that if I
wanted to take it, maybe they'd pay for the domestic rights only. After that,
I'd be on my own. We took it to a couple of other studios, and they turned it
down, much like Mystic River (2003) was turned down, the exact same pattern.
People who kept calling and saying, 'Come on, work with us on stuff.' I'd give
it to them, and they'd go, 'Uh, we were thinking more in terms of Dirty Harry
coming out of retirement.' And who knows? Maybe when it comes out they'll be
proven right."
"They might have been a
little more interested if I said I wanted to do 'Dirty Harry 9' or something." -
on trying to get "Million Dollar Baby"
made at Warner.
"Plastic surgery used to be a thing where older people would try to go into this
dream world of being 28 years old again. But now, in Hollywood, even people at
28 are having work done. Society has made us believe you should look like an
18-year-old model all your life. But I figure I might as well just be what I
am."
2005 Academy Awards acceptance speech for Best Director:
"Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'd like to thank my wife, who is my best pal down here. And my mother, who was here with me in 1993. She was only 84 then. But she's here with me again tonight. And she just -- so, at 96, I'm thanking her for her genes. It was a wonderful adventure. It takes a -- to make a picture in 37 days, it takes a well-oiled machine. And that well-oiled machine is the crew -- the cast, of course, you've met a lot of them. But there's still Margo and Anthony and Michael and Mike and Jay and everybody else who was so fabulous in this cast. And the crew, Campanelli. Billy Coe and, of course, Tom Stern, who is fantastic. And Henry Bumstead, the great Henry Bumstead who is the head of our crack geriatrics team. And Henry and Jack Taylor, and Dick Goddard, all those guys. Walt and everybody. I can't think of everybody right now. I'm drawing a blank right now. But, Warren, you were right. And thank you, for your confidence earlier in the evening. I'm just lucky to be here. Lucky to be still working. And I watched Sidney Lumet, who is 80, and I figure, I'm just a kid. I'll just -- I've got a lot of stuff to do yet. So thank you all very much. Appreciate it."
[1985]: "My old drama coach used to say, "Don't just do something, stand there."
Gary Cooper wasn't afraid to do nothing."
"Most people who'll remember me, if at all, will remember me as an action guy,
which is OK. There's nothing wrong with that. But there will be a certain group
which will remember me for the other films, the ones where I took a few chances.
At least, I like to think so."
"The plan was, when I first started directing in the 1970s, to get more involved
in production and directing so at some point in my life, when I decided I didn't
want to act anymore, I didn't have to suit up."
"I feel very close to the western. There are not too many American art forms
that are original. Most are derived from European art forms. Other than the
western and jazz or blues, that's all that's really original."
"In The Bridges of Madison County, Kincaid's a peculiar guy. Really, he's kind
of a lonely individual.
He's sort of a lost soul in Mid-America.
I've been that
guy."
"I think people jumped to conclusions about Dirty Harry without giving the
character much thought, trying to attach right-wing connotations to the film
that were never really intended. Both the director [Don Siegel] and I thought it
was a basic kind of drama - what do you do when you believe so much in law and
order and coming to the rescue of people and you just have five hours to solve a
case? That kind of impossible effort was fun to portray, but I think it was
interpreted as a pro-police point of view, as a kind of rightist heroism, at a
time in American history when police officers were looked down on as 'pigs', as
very oppressive people
- I'm sure there are some who are, and a lot who aren't.
I've met both kinds."
"You have to trust your instincts. There's a moment when an actor has it, and he
knows it.
Behind the camera
you can feel the moment even more clearly. And once
you've got it, once you feel it, you can't second-guess yourself. You can find a
million reasons why something didn't work. But if it feels right, and it looks
right, it works. Without sounding like a pseudo-intellectual dipshit, it's my
responsibility to be true to myself. If it works for me, it's right."
"This film cost $31 million. With that kind of money I could have invaded some
country."
"None of the pictures I take a risk in cost a lot, so it doesn't take much for them to turn a profit. We don't deal in big budgets. We know what we want and we shoot it and we don't waste anything. I never understand these films that cost twenty, thirty million dollars when they could be made for half that. Maybe it's because no one cares. We care."
"I'd done "Rawhide" (1959) for about five years.
The agency called and asked if
I was interested in doing a western in Italy and Spain. I said, 'Not
particularly.' They said, 'Why don't you give the script a quick look?' Well, I
was kind of curious, so I read it, and I recognized it right away as Yojimbo
(1961), a Kurosawa film I had liked a lot. Over I went, taking the poncho with
me
- yeah the cape was my idea." - On how he decided to do
"Per un Pugno di Dollari"
(1964)
"There's a rebel lying deep in my soul. Anytime anybody tells me the trend is
such and such, I go the opposite direction. I hate the idea of trends. I hate
imitation; I have a reverence for individuality. I got where I am by coming off
the wall. I've always considered myself too individualistic to be either
right-wing or left-wing."
"I don't like the wimp syndrome. No matter how ardent a feminist may be, if she
is a heterosexual female,
she wants the strength of a male companion
as well as
the sensitivity.
The most gentle people in the world are macho males, people who
are confident in their masculinity and have a feeling of well-being in
themselves. They don't have to kick in doors, mistreat women, or make fun of
gays."
"I don't believe in pessimism. If something doesn't come up the way you want,
forge ahead."
"The reason I became a Republican is because Eisenhower was running. A hero from
World War II, a charismatic individual, a military man, a non-attorney - even
then I liked that! I was a very young person voting for the first time. A lot of
people joke that a conservative is a liberal who's made his first $100,000 and
then decides, wait a second, I want to save this, why are they taxing it away?
Today the country's in kind of a turmoil over taxing. Being raised in the
thirties, watching my parents work hard to make ends meet, with jobs scarce, and
then the war years - it tends to make a person a little more fiscally conscious
than if you've been born into a wealthier family. You know, if you go to most
people who are self-made and ask them what their political philosophy is,
usually they're a little more conservative than people who had a better start."
Asked if he is still registered as a Republican: "Yes, I am. I started - I
enrolled as a Republican in 1951 when Dwight Eisenhower was running.
And I was
in the military. I was a fan of his.
And that's how I got started off. I was
never - my parents were mixed,
I think one Republican, one Democrat, so I didn't
have any grand-pappies to influence me."
On former President Ronald Reagan: "Yes, I liked him very much. When he was a former president of the Screen Actors Guild, I don't think he had the vast support that a lot of other presidents have had. So I don't know why that is, it's just the nature of things."
"They say marriages are made in Heaven. But so is thunder and lightning."
"I've always supported a certain amount of gun control. I think California has
always had a mandatory waiting period, so we were never concerned about it like
the rest of the country. Some states didn't have any at all. So I've always
supported that. I think it's very important that guns don't get in the wrong
hands, and, yes, I would support most of that. I don't know too much about
trigger locks. I've never really discussed that with anyone. But I do feel that
guns - it's very important to keep them out of the hands of felons or anyone who
might be crazy with it."
"I've thought about retiring for years now."
"When I did "Play Misty for Me" in
1970, I thought that if I could pull this off maybe I could step behind the
camera, and it would be time to see the end of me.
Every year I have threatened
to do that - and here I am. So it may come sooner than you think."
"I feel terrible for both sides in that war and in all wars.
A lot of innocent
people get sacrificed. It's not about winning or losing, but mostly about the
interrupted lives of young people."
- On World War II
"I've done a lot of violent movies, especially in the early days.
My recent
efforts, like The Bridges of Madison County (1995),
weren't too violent. In
recent years I've done less, and, yes, I am concerned about violence in film. In
'92, when I did
Unforgiven (1992),
which is a film that had a very anti-violence
and anti-gun play - anti-romanticizing of gun play theme, I remember that Gene
Hackman was concerned about it, and we both discussed the issue of too much
violence in films. It's escalated ninety times since Dirty Harry (1971) and
those films were made."
"Maybe I'm getting to the age when I'm starting to be senile or nostalgic or
both, but people are so angry now. You used to be able to disagree with people
and still be friends. Now you hear these talk shows, and everyone who believes
differently from you is a moron and an idiot
- both on the Right and the Left."
"I like to play the line and not wander too far to either side. If a guy has
just had a bad day in the mines
and wants to see a good shoot 'em up, that's
great."
"My involvement goes deeper than acting or directing. I love every aspect of the
creation of motion pictures and I guess I'm committed to it for life."
"I've always had the ability to say to the audience, watch this if you like, and
if you don't, take a hike."
"I've actually had people come up to me and ask me to autograph their guns."
"Whatever success I've had is due to a lot of instinct and a little luck."
