I heard that you had to agree to do ‘Ghostbusters’ in order to get the backing for ‘The Razor’s Edge.’ Is that how it worked out?
What happened was, John Byrum and I had The Razor’s Edge in a developmental stage at Columbia—they’d given us a little dough to write the screenplay, but nobody was getting into work early to find out how the rewrites were going. Then Dan Aykroyd called me up with this Ghostbusters idea, and I said, “Yeah, this is great.” He sent me about seventy-five pages, and within an hour there was a deal. They had a producer, they had a caterer, they had a director, they had everything. But it wasn’t at any particular studio yet; it was just a project floating in space. Then all of a sudden, all of the studios found out about it, and they all wanted it. So Dan said, “Well, we gotta get going on this.” I said, “Well, you know, I’m really trying to get this other thing done. I’m trying to convince the studio to give us the go.” And he said, “Well, tell ’em they can have Ghostbusters if they do The Razor’s Edge.” So, another forty-five minutes later, we had a caterer and a producer and a director for The Razor’s Edge. We went out and shot it last summer. Columbia started getting impatient about Ghostbusters. All the time we were in Ladakh we’d get these messages that were like three days old, saying, “Is Bill finished? He’s supposed to be doing Ghostbusters on the twenty-fifth.” I made the mistake of calling America from Agra, that white building—you know, the Taj Mahal. There’s a phone booth at the Taj. They said, “You gotta get right back.” I wanted to take ten days off. I was so tired that I couldn’t even get out of the hotel room in Delhi for four or five days. I didn’t really do anything except sleep. Then I found out that they were going to have the rough version of The Razor’s Edge ready by the end of the week, so I decided to fly to London and see it. Flew to London, saw it. The next day I got on the Concorde, flew to New York and went from the airport to the set on Madison and Sixty-Second Street. I weighed about 171 pounds, I think. I’d lost 35 pounds. So I started eating right away [laughs]. A production assistant said, “Do you want a cup of coffee?” And I said, “Yeah, and I want a couple of doughnuts, too.”
For the first few weeks, I was getting beaten to go to work. It was like, “Where’s Bill?” “Oh, he’s asleep.” Then they’d send three sets of people to knock on the door and say, “They really want you.” I’d stumble out and do something and then go back to sleep. I kept thinking to myself, “Ten days ago I was up there working with the high lamas in a gompa, and here I am removing ghosts from drugstores and painting slime on my body.” It was kind of tough to get into it for about a month. I thought, “What the hell am I doing here?” I mean, you’d look around on the set in Ladakh, and there were thirty-five monks looking at you, just looking at you. And you realized that they were looking for a reason. It was a reminder all the time. A reminder that you’re a man and you’re going to die, so you’d better not waste this time here. So when I got to New York, I would be sitting there looking across the street, and there’d be the entire staff of Diana Ross Productions waving out of the window, then coming over to get autographs. That was the first day on the job. All of a sudden, it was like a whole different world. But after a while it became nice, working on the movie, and I sort of got into the rhythm of Hollywood again, as opposed to Ladakh. It was fun being with Dan and Harold Ramis. Acting-wise, they’re fantastic. But also, they’re very much aware of the situation, that you are just a guy, and then for thirty seconds or a minute and a half, you’re a movie star, and then you’re a guy again. And then you’re a movie star again. They know the difference, and they see the hilarious things that are happening all around, while you’re supposedly being a movie star.
Had you had time to think about your part in ‘Ghostbusters’ at all? I mean, there you were, wham, off the ‘Concorde’ onto the set.
Not a bit. I just did it. Harold and Dan wrote the script. Wherever there wasn’t a line, they’d say, “Well, we gotta have a line here.” We just made stuff up. When I saw the movie the other night, I realized more of it was improvised than I thought. Especially the action stuff.
I’d never worked on a movie where the script was good. Stripes and Meatballs, we rewrote the script every single day. I think most movie actors change their lines nowadays. I didn’t use to think so. Then I worked for Dustin Hoffman [in Tootsie]. Dustin changed all his lines a lot of the time. He gave a different performance every single take. He shot five different movies. Even if he didn’t change the lines, he would change the meaning. How they cut that movie, I don’t know. I think it’s the only way to work. I don’t believe that you can give the same performance every take. It’s physically impossible, so why bother? If you don’t do what is happening at that moment, then it’s not real. Then you’re holding something back.
Are you fed up with comedy?
I think all the comedies that we all do, they all get better. And even though they’re not perfect or maybe silly to some people, we learn each time about how to do it. People don’t expect master carpenters to get it right after they do six chairs, and we’ve only done six movies. You’ve got to do a lot of them, and it takes time, there’s just so much pressure because the money is so big. There’s only so many movies made a week. I mean, in the old days, I would have made fifty-five movies by now, and I’d have worked with a lot of people and learned a lot. As it is, I’ve worked with six directors, seven directors, eight directors, something like that. You know, that’s peanuts compared to what the old guys did. And I’d like to work with a lot more actors, too, though it’s the directors that really teach you something, and cinematographers. Those are the guys that know. There’s like a pure knowledge there; there’s no clowning around. They either know it or they don’t. You can’t lie about it.
Are you expecting to do more serious parts in the future? Does that depend on whether ‘The Razor’s Edge’ is a success?
Well, to a certain extent, it does depend on whether The Razor’s Edge is a success or a failure, because if directors see it and they say, “That guy can act a little,” then I’ll get offered jobs from serious directors. As it is now, I’m in the phone book under K for Komedy.
CLINT EASTWOOD
by Tim Cahill
July 4, 1985
You are, by some accounts, the world’s most popular movie star. Do you sometimes wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and say, “Can that possibly be me?” I mean, does it surprise you?
If I thought about it enough, it might. Yeah, I guess so. I guess you’d look back and say, “How did a kid from Oakland get this far?” I’m sure other people do that to some degree. It’s like waking up with a hooker—how the hell did I get here?
Let’s start with ‘A Fistful of Dollars.’ How did that come about?
Well, at that time I’d done Rawhide 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.” I was pretty westerned out on the series. They said, “Why don’t you give the script a quick look?” Well, I was curious, so I read it, and I recognized it right away as Yojimbo, a Kurosawa film I had liked a lot. When I’d seen it years before, I thought, “Hey, this film is really a western.” Nobody in the States had the nerve to make it, though, and when I saw that someone somewhere did have the nerve, I thought, “Great.”
Sergio [Leone] had only directed one other picture, but they told me he had a good sense of humor, and I liked the way he interpreted the Yojimbo script. And I had nothing to lose, because I had the series to go back to as soon as the hiatus was over. So I felt, “Why not?” I’d never been to Europe. That was reason enough to go.
You’ve said that in the original script, the Man with No Name shot off his mouth more than his gun.
The script was very expository, yea. It was an outrageous story, and I thought there should be much more mystery to the person. I kept telling Sergio, “In a real A picture, you let the audience think along with the movie; in a B picture, you explain everything.” Tha
t was my way of selling my point. For instance, there was a scene where he decides to save the woman and the child. She says, “Why are you doing this?” In the script he just goes on forever. He talks about his mother, all kinds of subplots that come out of nowhere, and it goes on and on and on. I thought that was not essential, so I just rewrote the scene the night before we shot it.
Okay, the woman asks, “Why are you doing this?” and he says . . .
“Because I knew someone like you once and there was nobody there to help.”
So you managed to express ten pages of dialogue in a single sentence.
We left it oblique and let the audience wonder: “Now wait a minute, what happened?” You try to let people reach into the story, find things in it, choice little items that they enjoy. It’s like finding something you’ve worked and hunted for, and it’s much more enjoyable than having some explanation slapped into your face like a wet fish.
So you have a lot of faith in your audience.
You have to. You don’t play down to people, you don’t say, “I’d better make this a little simpler, a little more expository.” For instance, in Josey Wales, when he rides off at the end of the picture, the editor and I had wanted to superimpose the girl’s face over him. He said, “We want the audience to know that he’s going back to her.” Well, we all know he’s going back. If he rides off on the other side of town, the audience will say, “Well, he’s gonna turn left.” It’s really looking down on an audience to tell them something they already know. Or tell them something they can draw in because it arises out of the story. I try to make that part of their job.
To . . .
To think about it a little bit.
You did two more of the Italian westerns with Leone: ‘For a Few Dollars More’ and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”
Yeah. The other two, the productions were glossier, more refined. The stories didn’t mean a whole lot. They were just a lot of vignettes all shuffled together. I enjoyed them, they were fun to do. Escapism. And the American western at that point was in a dull period. But when Sergio approached me about being in some of the subsequent westerns, I thought it would be going too far. So I came back to Hollywood and did Hang ’Em High. Sergio was interested in expanding the size and scope of his films, and I was more interested in the people and the story line. I guess, selfishly, because I am an actor, I wanted to do something with more character study.
You’ve described yourself as introverted. Do you think that’s because you moved around so much as a kid?
Maybe, yes. We moved around California a lot. We lived in Redding, Sacramento, Hayward. My parents were married around 1929, right at the beginning of the Depression. It was a tough period for everybody, and especially a young guy like my dad who was just starting out. In those days, people struggled for jobs. Sometimes jobs didn’t pan out, or they couldn’t afford to keep you. We drove around in an old Pontiac, or something like that, towing a one-wheel trailer. We weren’t itinerant. It wasn’t The Grapes of Wrath, but it wasn’t uptown either.
It gives you a sort of conservative background, being raised in an area when everything was scarce. Once, I remember, we moved from Sacramento to Pacific Palisades because my father had gotten a gas-station attendant’s job. It’s still there, the station. It’s at Highway 101 and Sunset Boulevard.
Were you involved in any school activities?
Yeah. I played a little basketball. Some football in junior high. I didn’t really get involved in team sports, because we moved so much. I did some competitive swimming, and one of the schools I went to had a great gymnastics program, so I diddled with that for a while. I wasn’t particularly suited for it, because I was so tall, but I liked it.
I suppose one of the biggest things when I was a kid—I always liked jazz. A wide spectrum of jazz. Back in the Forties and Fifties I listened to Brubeck and Mulligan. And I loved Ellington and Basie. I’d get books on everybody: Bix Beiderbecke, King Oliver, Buddy Bolden. I used to be very knowledgeable.
Then, up through the Forties, I used to go to these Jazz at the Philharmonic things. One time, they had Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker and a whole group of classic players. In fact, nowadays, when I talk to composers that are maybe ten years younger than I am, they’re all jealous about that concert: “You saw those guys live!”
You play some jazz piano yourself.
Yeah, when I was a kid, I played. Fooled around with some other instruments, but I was lazy. I didn’t really go for it. I just started again in the last few years. I’ve been diddling around with composition. Five or six things. I used one as my daughter’s theme in Tightrope, and I also did the theme for the young girl in Pale Rider.
I have some regrets that I didn’t follow up on music, especially when I hear people who play decently. I played on one cut of the album for City Heat. After the session, Pete Jolly and Mike Lang and I were all talking about how we started out playing piano. We all started the exact same way, only those guys went on to really play. We began by playing blues: blues figures at parties. I was such a backward kid at that age, but I could sit down at a party and play the blues. And the gals would come around the piano, and all of a sudden you had a date.
You had a country hit, “Barroom Buddies,” a duet with Merle Haggard. When did you get interested in country music?
Well, I think you can say that Merle Haggard had a hit and sort of dragged me along. I was never terribly knowledgeable about country music. The first real good taste of it I got was when I was eighteen or nineteen, working in a pulp mill in Springfield, Oregon. It was always wet, really depressing. Wintertime. Dank. I really didn’t know anyone, and someone told me to go out to this place where there was a lot of country music. I wasn’t very interested, but this guy told me there were a lot of girls there. So I went. I saw Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. Unlike most country bands, they had brass and reeds and they played country swing. They were good. It surprised me a little bit, how good they were. Also, there were a lot of girls there, which didn’t surprise me at all. So I guess you could say that lust expanded my musical horizons.
Why didn’t you follow up on the music?
I was going to. I tried to enroll in Seattle University, where they had a good music program. I got my draft notice before I got there, though, and ended up at Fort Ord [California]. And I guess I just failed away from music.
I served my two years and went down to L.A. City College, where I enrolled in business administration. In the service I had met some guys who were actors—Martin Milner, David Janssen—and when we got out, a cinematographer got me a screen test. I got an offer to go under contract with Universal, seventy-five bucks a week to start. They threw me out a year and a half later. But it was a pretty good deal for a young guy. We had acting classes every day.
Is that when you realized that being introverted could be an asset for an actor? That you could play on it?
The Rolling Stone interviews Page 23