A Hollywood Legend Talks Politics Actor-director Clint Eastwood, 89, weighs in on Bloomberg, Trump, #MeToo and the dispute over a reporter’s depiction in his latest film. By Tunku Varadarajan
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-hollywood-legend-talks-politics-11582311359?mod=opinion_lead_pos5
‘Many years ago,” Clint Eastwood says—drawing close to me as if to share a secret—“I was in Las Vegas.” The Hollywood actor and director was staying at a hotel owned by Steve Wynn, the casino billionaire. “Steve called me up in the room and said, ‘Do you want to go play golf? We’re going out with Trump.’ I said, ‘Who?’ and Steve said, ‘Trump. You know Trump?’ ”
So Messrs. Eastwood and Wynn ventured out for a morning on the course with Donald Trump. “It was funny,” Mr. Eastwood says, “because every time I was together with Steve”—with the future president out of earshot—“he would say, ‘You know, Trump is doing those damn casinos. He’s going to lose his ass.’ ” And when Mr. Wynn couldn’t hear, “Trump would say, ‘You know, Steve is going to do this big hotel. He’s going to land right on his ass. There are too many hotels now.’ ”
Back and forth the dissing went for hours, Mr. Eastwood recalls: “Together, they were great friends, but separately they were giving each other a hard time. I don’t know how much tongue-in-cheek was in all of that, but it was very amusing for me, the lone guy.”
Mr. Eastwood relates this story over a frugal lunch, in response to my asking for his thoughts on Mr. Trump. We’re seated outdoors at the Tehama Golf Club, which he owns, with views of Carmel Valley and the Monterey Peninsula, among the most expensive slivers of real estate in America.
Mr. Eastwood, 89, has never fought shy of politics himself. Like Mr. Trump, he’s even held political office, albeit on a local scale: He won election as mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea in 1986. He’s known as a Hollywood conservative, but his appeal was bipartisan. He chose to run, he says, because the incumbent mayor “had gotten to be too distant” from the townsfolk. “She used to knit during public meetings.”
His campaign staff “measured Carmel, and it was exactly 50/50, Republican-Democrat,” Mr. Eastwood says. “I was a Republican, but people never thought about their parties except at the national level.” The mayoral ballot didn’t list the candidates’ party affiliation. “I drank a lot of tea and chatted with people,” he says. “I told people ‘I’ll fix this, and I’ll fix that.’ ” He trounced his opponent, 2,166 votes to 799, served a single two-year term, and didn’t seek re-election: “You can’t have the same old people in office all the time.”
One of Mayor Eastwood’s first acts—widely reported at the time—was to reduce the onerous municipal prohibitions on the public sale of ice cream. More than three decades later, he laments that the Golden State is “like Regulation City right now.” An excess of rules is “making California a place other than a democracy.”
Mr. Eastwood describes himself as a libertarian—“somebody who has respect for other people’s ideas and is willing to learn constantly.” He is, he says, always in “a state of evolution,” and he comes across in conversation as much more nuanced than the hypermasculine roles he’s played in films from “Dirty Harry” (1971) to “Gran Torino” (2008).
Yet his voice is the same—that unmistakable tenor that lends itself as easily on screen to flirtation as to husky menace. He talks avidly about some of his films, including “Gran Torino,” which he produced and directed. His character, Walt Kowalski, is a cantankerous Korean War veteran who hates his Hmong neighbors in a rundown inner Detroit suburb. He agrees that the film has a certain relevance in Mr. Trump’s America, where everyone is “pairing off for adversity.”
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The movie grossed $270 million world-wide. “I’ll tell you why I liked it, and I think that’s maybe why Americans did, too,” he says. “It’s about a guy who’s a racist, a hard-ass. He didn’t like minorities much, of any kind. But he learns to appreciate people that he really hated.” His agent, he says, didn’t want him to make the movie—“ ‘The guy is kind of a bigot. Why would you want to do that?’ she said”—but when co-producer Rob Lorenz showed Mr. Eastwood the script, he loved it, “because it’s got a big transition of a person from one extreme to another.”
“Gran Torino,” he says, was made at a time when people were “putting down masculinity.” He has frequently played the archetypal American male, particularly in eras when manliness was unabashed. He notes that times have changed for men. In “The Mule” (2018), his most recent lead role, he’s an 80-year-old Army veteran who gets duped into committing a crime. “He wasn’t unmasculine,” Mr. Eastwood says of the character, “but he wasn’t some of the pseudo-masculine ones I’ve played before.”
What does he mean by pseudo-masculine? “They were abrupt,” he explains. “They didn’t have the niceties of civilization. I’ve played some masculine guys who were a little bit dumb at times. They overlooked society—the nice, genteel part of society.” He cites “Dirty Harry,” in which he plays a cop who takes the law into his own hands. It was the role that made him a star. “Harry Callahan was fun to play at that particular point in life,” Mr. Eastwood says. “He’s a man who’s been through a lot, but he’s also kind of relentless.” People were afraid of crime in those days, “afraid to say anything.”
He likens that fear to the mood in America now and cites the #MeToo movement. “The #MeToo generation has its points,” he acknowledges. He appreciates that women “are standing up against people who are trying to shake you down for sexual favors.” Sexual predation, he says, has been in the movie business since the days he started as a bit-part actor. “It was very prolific back in the 1940s and ’50s.” He pauses then wryly adds, “And the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s . . .”
But Mr. Eastwood is concerned that the policing of sexual relations is getting out of hand. He believes people are “on the defensive because of Harvey”—Weinstein—“and all of these guys.” He professes no sympathy for the movie mogul, whose fate is currently being decided by a New York jury. But he worries that the “presumption of innocence, not only in law, but in philosophy,” has been lost in accusations of sexual misbehavior.
He says his most recent film, “Richard Jewell, ” suffered because it got sucked into a #MeToo-like controversy over its portrayal of Kathy Scruggs, a reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Scruggs, who died in 2001, broke the false allegation that Jewell, a security guard, had planted a bomb that killed two people in Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Olympics. Jewell was exonerated after “88 days of hell” (Mr. Eastwood’s phrase) in which he could barely leave the apartment he shared with his mother. The newspaper, Mr. Eastwood says, was “ultimately responsible” for Jewell’s death in 2007 at 44. (The proximate cause was heart failure from complications of diabetes.)
The film, which Mr. Eastwood directed and was released in December, depicts Scruggs (Olivia Wilde) getting her scoop by sleeping with a source from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A letter to Warner Bros. from the newspaper’s lawyer called the portrayal “entirely false and malicious, and . . . extremely defamatory and damaging.” The studio replied that the Journal-Constitution’s accusation was “baseless.”
Mr. Eastwood sidesteps the paper’s accusation directly, preferring to invoke a director’s right to cinematic license. “Well, she hung out at a little bar in town, where mostly police officers went,” he says. “And she had a boyfriend that was a police officer. Well, we just changed it in the story. We made it a federal police officer instead of a local.”
Mr. Eastwood says the Journal-Constitution is trying to obscure its “guilt” for a “reckless story” that led to the persecution of an innocent man. He says he wishes Warner Bros. had told the Journal-Constitution “to go screw themselves.” (The studio did vow to fight any lawsuit in the matter.) Mr. Eastwood imagines himself daring the newspaper to sue: “Make my day!” He pronounces the iconic line from “Dirty Harry” with relish. “If you want to just go call more attention to the fact that you helped kill the guy, go ahead and do it—if you’re dumb enough to do that.”
I ask Mr. Eastwood which of the movies he’s directed makes him proudest. He cites the Japanese-language “Letters From Iwo Jima,” released in 2006. While working on “Flags of Our Fathers”—which tells the battle’s story from the American point of view and made its debut two months earlier—Mr. Eastwood got to wondering what it was like to be a man who was “drafted into the Japanese military, sent to Iwo Jima, and told, ‘By the way, you’re not coming back.’ ” He thought to himself: “You couldn’t tell a person that in America. An American soldier would go, ‘What do you mean I’m not coming back?’ ”
The film tells the stories of a Japanese private and Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the commander on the island, who’d served as a military attaché in the U.S. before the war. Mr. Eastwood was particularly attracted to the character of the general, who “knew a lot about America,” even as he fought its soldiers to the death. “Letters From Iwo Jima” was a critical success, especially in Japan, where it won that country’s equivalent of the Academy Award for best foreign picture.
Would Mr. Eastwood make a film about other enemies of America—say, “Postcards From Guantanamo” or “Missives From Mosul”? “It may be too fresh to do that,” he says. He was drawn to the Japanese “by the fact that we’re on good terms now, and we appreciate some of their history and background.” He wanted to understand what they went through. “I don’t think we know enough about al Qaeda and ISIS.” But he also says it’s “too early in history” for him to make a movie about 9/11 from America’s point of view.
As for the domestic political scene, Mr. Eastwood seems disheartened. “The politics has gotten so ornery,” he says, hunching his shoulders in resignation. He approves of “certain things that Trump’s done” but wishes the president would act “in a more genteel way, without tweeting and calling people names. I would personally like for him to not bring himself to that level.” As he drives me back to my hotel, he expresses an affinity for another former mayor: “The best thing we could do is just get Mike Bloomberg in there.”
Mr. Varadarajan is executive editor of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
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