David Remnick: For many of us, for most of our lives, there's been a handful of constants. Death, taxes, and Clint Eastwood.

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 kind of lost track myself. Ian, this is a .44 Magnum, 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?

David Remnick: Clint Eastwood is now 95 years old, an actor and a director, and 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 7 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 "no reason why a man can't get better with age." 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. We sat down to discuss Eastwood's legendary career following the publication of a new biography by writer Shawn Levy called Clint: The Man and the Movies. Welcome to my friend, Richard Brody. How are you?

Richard Brody: David, good to see you. How are you?

David Remnick: Great to see you. We are here to talk Clint, Clint Eastwood, who is 95 years old, putting us young bucks to shame. He's still making movies?

Richard Brody: He's still making movies. 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?

David Remnick: He'll never retire?

Richard Brody: I suspect he won't unless he has to.

David Remnick: Now, you just read a new biography by Shawn Levy of Clint Eastwood. What did you make of it? What'd you learn?

Richard Brody: 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 Eastwood-ness, 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, "People look at you when you walk into the room. Maybe you ought to consider the pictures."

David Remnick: [laughs] You mean when he was a kid, a student?

Richard Brody: Teenager, young adult.

David Remnick: That he had the thing.

Richard Brody: 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.

David Remnick: Successfully.

Richard Brody: Successfully, apparently.

David Remnick: Good for him. Now, he got his start as a TV actor in the '50s in the series, I don't think I watched, called Rawhide.

Clint Eastwood: It's called a guitar. I guess he wouldn't mind if we exercised a little bit.

[MUSIC - Clint Eastwood: Rowdy]

Richard Brody: Rawhide, I saw it a couple of times.

David Remnick: Did you watch that?

Richard Brody: Not much, my father did, so I saw it a little bit. It went off the air in 1965, I believe, so I was kind of--

David Remnick: Does it shape him?

Richard Brody: 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 Cassavetes to Barbara Stanwyck, who all did guest appearances in the series. 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.

David Remnick: [laughs]

Richard Brody: It really did inspire him to become a director.

David Remnick: 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 roll them. How does it work?

Richard Brody: 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. I'm going to star in and direct my own movies." He did so.

David Remnick: Sergio Leone is a good director. Was he disgusted by working with him?

Richard Brody: No, he simply wanted to do things on his own. He wanted to shape his own career.

David Remnick: What kind of stories did he want to tell? I mean, we think of him, at least for a while, in two modes. One is in westerns and the other is a cop.

Richard Brody: 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 Huston.

David Remnick: He himself is a fairly decent jazz pianist.

Richard Brody: He's a fairly decent jazz pianist who was struck by the thunderbolt of Charlie Parker in the mid-1940s.

David Remnick: Wow. In real time?

Richard Brody: In real time. I think that when you asked 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.

David Remnick: We can't get through a conversation about Clint Eastwood without mentioning politics. 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.

Clint Eastwood: What do you want me to tell Romney? I can't tell him to do that. Can't do that to himself.

[laughter]

Clint Eastwood: You're crazy. You're absolutely crazy.

David Remnick: Is he comfortable as a conservative cultural icon?

Richard Brody: He's put himself out there enough that he is 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 political pundit.

David Remnick: I think that's fair to say.

Richard Brody: 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.

David Remnick: In front of 20,000 people on national television.

Richard Brody: 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.

David Remnick: [laughs] Now, Richard, you're going to recommend three Clint Eastwood films directed by him that you think are, if not his greatest and at least among his greatest as a filmmaker. Is that correct?

Richard Brody: That is correct.

David Remnick: What is the first?

Richard Brody: Well, the first is his first feature as a director. Play Misty for Me from 1971.

Dave: I never lied to you.

Evelyn: Big deal. He never lied to me. Well, what do you want for that? The Congressional Medal of Honor? What am I supposed to do? Sit here all dressed up in my little horror suit, waiting for my lord and master to call?

Dave: Nobody asked you to wait for anything.

Evelyn: You're not jumping me, Buster Blue Eyes.

Dave: Get off my back, Evelyn.

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.

David Remnick: Snappy repartee. Clint Eastwood is lousy in bed.

Richard Brody: Yes, the headline. No, Dave Garver, the jazz DJ, is not good in bed. Oh, okay. I feel better already.

David Remnick: [laughs] What's that movie about? It's a film that I think a lot of younger people may not have gotten to yet.

Richard Brody: It's a thriller. It's a Hitchcockian-style thriller in which Eastwood plays a DJ who is essentially being stalked by a listener. The story, which, of course, has to do with jazz, a longtime love of Eastwood, reaches very far into, let's say, his intellectual life, something that people wouldn't be inclined to say with Eastwood very often. In fact, there is 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. Now, it goes a little further than he had anticipated.

David Remnick: Did he direct the Dirty Harry movies?

Richard Brody: He directed only one, which has the line in it.

David Remnick: Ah, "Make my day."

Richard Brody: Yes.

David Remnick: What do you make of those movies?

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

David Remnick: You want him to repent, or he's actually repenting?

Richard Brody: 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.

David Remnick: I was watching one of them a couple of months ago, and it feels like a racist film.

Richard Brody: Yes, 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. More or less throughout his career, he, as Shawn Levy points out in the biography, has taken on the theme of the moral and emotional burden of acts of violence.

David Remnick: Richard, let's talk about your second pick from the Clint Eastwood canon. Am I wrong? I think we saw this movie together many, many years ago.

Richard Brody: We did indeed. It's Bird, his biopic of Charlie Parker.

David Remnick: 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.

Speaker 5: Hey, Bird, what's going on?

Bird: When did Buster start playing rhythm and blues?

Speaker 5: Whoa, whoa. Ain't no such thing as rhythm and blues, man. DJs don't like to call it that. This is rock and roll, man. The music of today. Yes, go. Don't fit.

Bird: All this stuff, I'm playing on B flat.

Speaker 5: Since you figured it out, man, B flat tonight, F sharp tonight. 12 notes in the scale. Buster's got himself 12 different shows without repeating himself once.

Bird: Don't fit

David Remnick: 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. 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.

David Remnick: Yes. The third film is?

Richard Brody: The third film is Sully. [laughs]

David Remnick: I'm so surprised by this one. Let's hear a little clip, and then we'll talk about it.

Captain Sully: 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.

David Remnick: 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.

Richard Brody: 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. It's a reenactment of the flight that he safely landed in the Hudson River.

David Remnick: Why does he see it as a tragedy?

Richard Brody: 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.

David Remnick: Why do you see it as a tragedy? He succeeded in not having that happen.

Richard Brody: 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. 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 of Sully in the movie.

David Remnick: That things could so easily have been a horrific disaster.

Richard Brody: Exactly.

David Remnick: You're not naming the one that's the most obvious. I guess Unforgiven is the Western that people always allude to.

Richard Brody: 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 reason we were discussing, namely, the moral price of violence. 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.

David Remnick: What about his last movie, his most recent?

Richard Brody: Oh, I like Juror Number Two very much. The story of it is nothing unusual. The story of it is like many popular novels. What's original about it is the tone and the ideas.

Justin Kemp: They found her body in a creek bed about a quarter mile from Rowdy's Hideaway last October.

Kemp's Lawyer: What are you telling me?

Justin Kemp: Maybe I didn't hit a deer. I don't know what to do.

Richard Brody: 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.

David Remnick: Richard Brody, thanks so much.

Richard Brody: Thank you, David.

[music]

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

 

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