Richard Brody Picks Three Favorite Clint Eastwood Films

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick.

For many of us, for most of our lives, there's been a handful of constants.

Death, taxes, and Clint Eastwood.

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 this is a 44 magnet, 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?

Clint Eastwood is now 95 years old, an actor and a director at a Hollywood institution.

His career longevity is really unprecedented.

He's directed 40 films and he's managed to remain a relevant filmmaker.

and a movie star for seven decades.

This spring, Eastwood confirmed that he has no intention of slowing down and that he is already planning his next project.

He said that there's, quote, no reason why a man can't get better with age.

And while some directors lose their touch as they grow older, as he says, he's not one of them.

The New Yorker's Richard Brody wholeheartedly agrees.

He's one of Eastwood's biggest fans and defenders.

And we sat down to discuss Eastwood's legendary career following the publication of a new biography by writer Sean Levy called Clint, the man in the movies.

Welcome to my friend Richard Brody.

How are you?

David, good to see you.

How are you?

Great to see you.

We are here to talk Clint, Clint Eastwood, who is 95 years old, putting us young bucks to shame.

And he's still making movies?

And he's still making movies.

And why wouldn't he?

Why would anybody who loves what they're doing and is still able to do it physically and mentally and still has the approval of his peers stop doing it?

So he'll never retire?

I suspect he won't unless he has to.

Now, you just read a new biography by Sean Levy of Clint Eastwood.

What did you make of it?

What did you learn?

Oh, it's a fascinating book.

It's a copiously researched book, and it rummages through his life from beginning to the present day.

What fascinated me above all are the origins of Clint Eastwoodness,

the way that he had an aura about him that preceded his career in movies.

He didn't really give it a thought until people said to him, you know, people look at you when you walk into the room.

Maybe you ought to consider the pictures.

Mean when he was a kid, a student?

Teenager, young adult?

That he had the thing.

He had the thing and had no idea how to use it.

I mean, he seems to have mainly used it for seduction at the time.

Successfully.

Successfully, apparently.

Good for him.

Now, he got his start as a TV actor in the 50s in the series that I don't think I watched called Rawhide.

I guess he wouldn't mind if we exercise a little bit.

Riding hard, riding fast, always on the go.

This is just a drover's life, this is all I know.

Rawhide, I saw it a couple years.

Not much.

My father did, so I saw it a little bit.

I mean, he went off the air in 1965, I believe.

So I was kind of a...

But he was...

Did this shape him?

It shaped him in ways...

It shaped him away from doing things like Rawhide.

In other words,

he learned what he didn't like, first of all.

In other words, it bored him to do that sort of repetitive formulaic story.

On the other hand, he got to work with a remarkable bunch of actors ranging from John Cassavettis to Barbara Stanwick, who all did guest appearances in the series.

And I think he learned a tremendous amount from working with classic movie heroes who were on the show.

He also learned that he wanted to direct.

He would be in scenes and he would essentially tell the director, look, there's some stuff going on here that you're not getting.

Maybe give me a camera.

They wouldn't do it.

They claimed union problems.

But it really did inspire him to become a director.

Now, Eastwood is famous as a director for staying under budget, shooting as few takes as possible.

In fact, it mystifies some actors when they work with him at first that he barely says, you know, roll them.

How does it work?

Well, I think that the economics of it have a great deal to do with his aesthetics as well.

Partly because he had his own production company.

When he was working with Sergio Leone, which made him a star on Three Spaghetti Westerns, he said, I'm going to start a production company.

I'm going to star in and direct my own movies.

And he did a lot of work.

But he worked with good, I mean, Sergio Leone is a good director.

Why was he, was he disgusted by working with him?

No, he simply wanted to do things on his own.

He wanted to shape his own career.

And what kind of stories did he want to tell?

I mean, we think of him, at least for a while, in two modes.

One as

in Westerns and the other as a cop.

Clint Eastwood's career has been extraordinarily wide-ranging, which I think is one of the reasons for his endurance and his artistic success.

He's told mysteries, he's told true crime stories, he's told political thrillers, he's done biopics of characters ranging from Charlie Parker to John Houston.

He himself is a fairly decent jazz pianist.

He's a fairly decent jazz pianist who was

struck by the thunderbolt of Charlie Parker in the mid-1940s.

Wow.

So in real time.

In real time.

But I think that when you ask about his methods on the set, I think that they're very connected to his love for jazz.

In other words, that his one-takeness, sometimes even films rehearsals, has a lot to do with the desire to make his films be and feel spontaneous.

The way that Meryl Streep put it when she acted with him in The Bridges of Madison County is: it only has to happen once, and he understands that.

The New Yorker's Richard Brody.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, more to come.

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We can't get through a conversation about Clin East Woody without mentioning politics.

And I think it's probably fair to say that he's positioned on the right.

I recall him talking to an empty chair at the

2012 Republican convention.

What do you want me to tell Romney?

I can't tell him to do that.

Can't do that to himself.

You're crazy.

You're absolutely crazy.

Is he comfortable as a conservative cultural icon?

He's put himself out there enough that he's obviously not completely uncomfortable with it.

On the other hand, Clint Eastwood is not the only filmmaker who is much more intelligent as a filmmaker than as a a political pundit.

I think that's fair to say.

And I think that the level of curiosity that he has with respect to his characters is far greater than the level of curiosity than he and that most people have when they're just opinion making.

One thing about the chair is that that too was an improvisation.

He walks to the stage, sees a chair, and says to himself, hey, maybe I'll use that.

It did not please the managers of the convention.

In front of 20,000 people on national television.

They also had no idea what he would say.

He had no idea what he would say.

They vetted everybody's speech except his because they said, we don't vet Clint Eastwood.

Perhaps they should have.

Now, Richard, you're going to recommend three Clint Eastwood films directed by him that you think are, if not his greatest, then at least among his greatest as a filmmaker.

Is that correct?

That is correct.

So, what is the first?

Well, the first is his first feature as a director, Play Misty For Me from 1971.

I never lied to you.

Big deal.

He never lied to me.

Well, what do you want for that?

The Congressional Medal of Honor?

So

what am i supposed to do sit here all dressed up in my little horror suit waiting for my lord and master to call nobody asked you to wait for it you're not jumping me buster blue eyes get off my back evelyn get off your back that's where you've been keeping me isn't it

you're nothing you're not even good in bed

Snappy repartee.

Clines would is lousy in bed.

Yeah, that headline.

No, Dave Garver.

Dave Garver the Jazz DJ is not good in bed.

Oh, okay.

I feel better already.

What's that movie about?

It's a film that I think a lot of younger people may not have gotten to yet.

Yeah, it's a thriller.

It's a Hitchcockian-style thriller in which Eastwood plays a DJ who is essentially being stalked by a listener.

But the story, which of course has to do with jazz, a longtime love of Eastwood, reaches very far into his, let's say, his intellectual life, something that people wouldn't be inclined to say with Eastwood very often.

But in fact, there's one theme that has dominated his career, and it's the fraught nature of the relationship between public and private life, the danger of demagogy.

Here's a DJ who is a very successful serial seducer and makes great use of his public image to do so.

And now it goes a little further than he had anticipated.

Did he direct the Dirty Harry movies?

He directed only one which has the line in it.

Ah, Make My Day.

Yes.

And what do you make of those movies?

I think he's been repenting for them his entire career.

You want him to repent or he's actually repented?

No, no, I think that the character fascinates him in a way that has also been a through line of his work, namely the accidental hero, somebody who's thrust into a situation that is larger than they'd anticipated, and they go above and beyond and find that, on the one hand, they manage to do things they didn't anticipate, and on the other hand, it takes control of their lives in ways they didn't anticipate.

I was watching one of them a couple months ago, and it really

feels like a racist film.

Yeah, and he's repented for that.

I'm not saying he's publicly repented in words.

I'm not sure whether he has or he has not.

But more or less throughout his career, he, as Sean Levy points out in the biography, has taken on the theme of the moral and emotional burden of acts of violence.

Richard, let's talk about your second pic from the Clint Eastwood Canon.

And am I wrong?

I think we saw this movie together many, many years ago.

We did indeed.

It's Bird, his biopic of Charlie Parker.

Which I have to say, I expected to be awful, and it was really kind of good.

Let's hear a little bit from it.

This is rock and roll, man.

The music of today.

Yeah, go.

Don't fit.

All this stuff I'm playing on B-flat.

Said, you figured it out, man.

B-flat tonight, F-sharp tomorrow.

12 notes in a scale.

Buster's got himself 12 different shows without repeating himself once.

Don't fit.

What makes Eastwood original is both his methods, which is to say, he filmed Bird with the same level of jazz-like spontaneity that he films throughout his career, but also he understood something personally about Charlie Parker that connects thematically with him.

And that is the secret.

The contrast between Charlie Parker's knowledge of

what he's got in the way of music filling his head and on the one hand the limitations of what he's able to do on the bandstand and also the awareness that his role in the world is not commensurate with his musical ability.

The scene that we've just heard is one in which he realizes that his place in the world is being taken over by pop music, by rock and roll.

One of the key themes in the movie is the inability of a jazz musician, especially a modern jazz musician like Charlie Parker, to even make a living?

Yeah.

And the third film is.

The third film is Sully.

I'm so surprised by this one.

Let's hear a little clip and then we'll talk about it.

This was dual engine loss at 2,800 feet, followed by an immediate water landing with 155 souls on board.

No one has ever trained for an incident like that.

No one.

This, of course, is the story of an airline pilot who managed to land an about-to-crash plane in the Hudson River with no loss of life.

Exactly.

Chesley Sullenberger.

The world was receiving Chesley Sullenberger as a hero.

He did not feel like a hero.

He was haunted by tragedy.

This has one of the greatest openings of any movie I know.

And it's a reenactment of the flight that he safely landed in the Hudson River.

And why does he see it as a tragedy?

But with his imagining of how it could have gone wrong.

In other words, it looks like another September 11th.

It looks like him crashing an airplane into skyscrapers in Manhattan.

He's a haunted man because he knows that the responsibility for the lives of his passengers is far greater than his ability to actually control the situations

in question.

Why do you see it as a tragedy?

He succeeded in not having that happen.

He sees it as a tragedy.

That's why it's fascinating.

He's haunted by what could have happened.

He understands precisely that there is no way to prepare for an incident of this sort.

And the fact that he pulled it off against all odds is what haunts him.

It's the against all odds part that dominates the character sullenly in the movie.

That things could have so easily have been a horrific disaster.

Exactly.

But you're not naming the one that's the most obvious, I guess, Unforgiven is the Western that people always allude to.

I am sorry to say that Unforgiven is not one of my favorite Clint Eastwood films.

I think that it plays a very significant role in his career for exactly the reasons we were discussing, namely the moral price of violence.

But I think that he was so taken with the theme that it actually comes off as a fairly literal film.

Not a bad movie, but not one of his most spontaneous or inspired films.

And what about his last movie, his most recent?

Oh, I like Juror Number 2 very much.

The story of it is nothing unusual.

The story of it is like, you know, many popular novels.

What's original about it is the tone and the ideas.

They found her body in a creekbed

about a quarter mile from Rowdy's Hideaway last October.

What are you telling me?

I don't know what to do.

He turns it on its head and turns it into a film of

dire forebodings and a prosecutor's demagogy.

He connects it to the very start of his career.

Richard Brody, thanks so much.

Thank you, David.

The New Yorker's Richard Brody.

You can find more of Richard's writing on film in his column, The Front Row, on New Yorker.com.

I'm David Remnick.

Thanks for listening, and see you next time.

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