I don’t know if I played on it consciously. I know that for many years before I became known for the way I act now, I played characters that were not terribly talkative. Economical characters. Some books—even Stanislavsky’s people—discuss the fact that sometimes less can be best. Sometimes you can tell more with economy than you can with excess gyration.
The Rawhide series was a great training ground. All of a sudden, everything you ever studied about being an actor you could put into play every day. It’s one thing to work for a week in a Francis the Talking Mule picture—which was how it had been going for me—and another thing to be doing it all day for eight years.
It’s like the story of the great classical trumpet player they found one day playing in a baseball orchestra at Wrigley Field. Somebody recognized him and said, “My God, Maestro, what is the greatest classical trumpet player in the world doing playing in a baseball band?” He said, “You must play every day.”
In Rawhide, I got to play every day. It taught me how to pick up and run, how to make things up, wing things in there.
The ‘New York Review of Books’ recently ran an article about you that said, “What is most distinctive about Eastwood . . . is how effectively he struggles against absorption into mere genre, mere style, even while appearing, with his long-boned casualness and hypnotic presence, to be nothing but style.” Do you want to comment on that?
Well, yeah, style. Take guys like Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster. They’re terrific actors, but their style is more aggressive. Both of them did some marvelous things and some films that weren’t big hits but were great all the same: Douglas in Lonely Are the Brave and Paths of Glory; Lancaster in Trapeze. But their style was a little different than, say, Gary Cooper’s or Henry Fonda’s, because those guys were more laid-back, more introverted, and you were always leaning forward, wondering what they were thinking. With the Lancaster-Douglas school, there was never any doubt. Fonda or Cooper: you were never quite sure with them. They had a mysterioso quality.
Which is something you strive for: that little taste of ambiguity.
Exactly.
Let’s go over a few of your films. ‘Dirty Harry.’
There was something there I felt some people missed. One critic said Dirty Harry shot the guy at the end with such glee that he enjoyed it. There was no glee about it at all, there was a sadness about it. Watch the film again and you’ll see that.
‘Every Which Way but Loose.’
All of a sudden Norman Mailer comes out and says he likes this film, and because he’s such a well-thought-of writer, people think, “Wait a second, maybe that wasn’t such a bad movie after all.” I thought it was kind of a hip script myself when I read it. Here’s a guy pouring his heart out to an ape, and losing the girl. I like the correlation with some of my westerns, too. The guy purposely loses the big fight at the end because he doesn’t want to go around being the fastest gun in the West.
‘Bronco Billy.’
It’s about the American Dream, and Billy’s dream that he fought so hard for. And it’s all in the context of this outdated Wild West show that has absolutely no chance of being a hit. But it’s sweet. It’s pure.
In the pivotal scene, Billy allows himself to be humiliated by the sheriff rather than allow his friend to be arrested. That played so against your established image, it must have been fun to do.
Really fun. It was suggested that Billy come back at the end and punch this guy out. That would have ruined the picture, the whole theme of loyalty. Billy doesn’t approve of this kid being a deserter, and he doesn’t know enough to intellectualize what his friend’s feelings were about the war in Vietnam. He just knows he doesn’t approve but he’s going to stick by his friend. Now if Billy had come back and kicked the crap out of the sheriff at the end, it would have wrecked all that.
There’s no real excuse for being successful enough as an actor to do what you want and then selling out. You do it pure. You don’t try to adapt it, make it commercial. It’s not Dirty Bronco Billy.
‘Honkytonk Man.’
Red Stovall is based a bit on some self-destructive people I’ve known. He’s wild and funny, but he’s been a coward in his time. He won’t face up to his ambitions. He’s not that great a singer, but he writes some interesting things. When he gets his moments, he’s already destroyed himself.
And the studio suggested that it might be a good idea if Red didn’t die in the end?
I resisted that.
Your new one, ‘Pale Rider.’
It’s a western. One of the earliest films in America was a western: The Great Train Robbery. If you consider film an art form, as some people do, then the western would be a truly American art form, much as jazz is. In the Sixties, American westerns were stale, probably because the great directors—Anthony Mann, Raoul Walsh, John Ford—were no longer working a lot. Then the Italian western came along, and we did very well with those; they died of natural causes. Now I think it’s time to analyze the classic western. You can still talk about sweat and hard work, about the spirit, about the love for the land and ecology. And I think you can say all these things in the western, in the classic mythological form.
You’re not generally credited with having any sense of humor, yet certain of your films get big laughs in all the right places. The first half of ‘Honkytonk Man,’ for instance, was very funny.
That’s the way it was designed: a humorous story that becomes a tragedy. A lot of the humor is not in what you say but in how you react. Comedians are expert at that. Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners: Alice zaps him, and his reaction—just look at his face—cracks you up. Jack Benny could do that. Comedy isn’t necessarily all dialogue. Think of Buster Keaton: the poker face and all this chaos going on all around him. Sometimes it’s a question of timing, of the proper rhythm.
You have a reputation for shooting your films quickly and bringing them in under budget. Do you think that this has anything to do with having grown up in the Depression?
I would like to say it’s just good business, but it may be that. It may be a background of not wanting to see waste.
There’s a rumor that people work quickly on your sets because you don’t provide chairs.
That rumor derived from some comment I made. Someone asked why I like shooting on location as opposed to in the studio. I said, “In the studio, everyone’s looking around for a chair. On location, everyone’s working.” But there are chairs on the set and on location.
You also have a reputation for bringing in bright or underappreciated talent. ‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot,’ for instance, was Michael Cimino’s first film. Some people might say that you do that because you get these folks cheap.
Nothing’s cheap, and I don’t think I’d cut off my nose to spite my face. I don’t think I’d get somebody cheap just because I thought he was cheap. I think I’d want the film to be the best possible. Otherwise you’re selling yourself short. An awful lot of directors are expensive, but you don’t know how they got to be that way. Sometimes it’s just a matter of salesmanship and agenting.
I haven’t worked with a lot of big-name directors, but I came up during an era when they were all beginning to retire. I never worked with Hitchcock or Wyler or Stevens or Capra or Hawks or Walsh. I missed all that.
I suppose the most expensive director I’ve worked with is Don Siegel. I think I learned more about directing from him than from anybody else. He taught me to put myself on the line. He shoots lean, and he shoots what he wants. He knew when he had it, and he doesn’t need to cover his ass with a dozen different angles.
I learned that 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 that moment even more clearly. And once you’ve got it, once you feel it, you can’t second-guess yourself. If I would go around and ask everyone on the set how it looked, eventually someone would say, “Well, gee, I don’t know, there was a fly 600 feet back.” Somebody’s always going to find a
flaw, and pretty soon that flaw gets magnified and you’re all back to another take. Meanwhile, everyone’s forgotten that there’s certain focus on things, and no one’s going to see that fly, because you’re using a 100-mm lens. But that’s what you can do. You can talk yourself in or out of anything. 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 pseudointellectual dipshit, it’s my responsibility to be true to myself. If it works for me, it’s right. When I start choosing wrong, I’ll step back and let someone else do it for me.
ERIC CLAPTON
by Robert Palmer
June 20, 1985
Since we’re starting at the beginning, why don’t you tell me a bit about the town of Ripley, where you grew up.
It’s only about thirty miles outside of London, but it’s very country—Ripley is not even a town, it’s a village with farms all around it. And very few people ever leave there. They usually stay, get jobs, get married.
What kind of music did you hear when you were growing up?
Pop music, first. Mostly songs that were still hanging over from wartime; “We’ll Meet Again,” that sort of thing, melodic pop music.
There was a funny Saturday-morning radio program for children, with this strange person, Uncle Mac. He was a very old man with one leg and a strange little penchant for children. He’d play things like “Mule Train,” and then every week he’d slip in something like a Buddy Holly record or a Chuck Berry record. And the first blues I ever heard was on that program; it was a song by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, with Sonny Terry howling and playing the harmonica. It blew me away. I was ten or eleven.
When was the first time you actually saw a guitar?
Hmmm . . . I remember the first rock & roll I ever saw on TV was Jerry Lee Lewis doing “Great Balls of Fire.” And that threw me; it was like seeing someone from outer space. And I realized suddenly that here I was in this village that was never going to change, yet there on TV was something out of the future. And I wanted to go there! Actually, he didn’t have a guitarist, but he had a bass player, playing a Fender Precision bass, and I said, “That’s a guitar.” I didn’t know it was a bass guitar, I just knew it was a guitar, and again I thought, “That’s the future. And that’s what I want.” After that I started to build one, tried to carve a Stratocaster out of a block of wood, but I didn’t know what to do when I got to the neck and frets and things.
I was living with my grandparents, who raised me, and since I was the only child in the family, they used to spoil me something terrible. So I badgered them until they bought me a plastic Elvis Presley guitar. Of course, it could never stay in tune, but I could put on a Gene Vincent record, look in the mirror and mime.
When I was fourteen or fifteen, they gave me a real guitar, an acoustic, but it was so hard to play, I actually didn’t even try for a while. And pretty soon the neck began to warp. But I did invent chords. I invented E, and I invented A. I thought I had discovered something incredible. And then I put it down again, in my later teens, because I started to become interested in being an artist. The bohemian existence beckoned; actually, the good-life part of it beckoned more than the work. And at that point, when I was about sixteen, I started making weekend trips to London.
From hanging around in coffee bars and so on, I met a certain crowd of people, some of whom played guitar. One was Long John Baldry, who was then playing a twelve-string, doing folk and blues. Every Friday night, there would be a meeting at someone’s house, and people would turn up with the latest imported records from the States. And shortly, someone showed up with that Chess album, The Best of Muddy Waters, and something by Howlin’ Wolf. And that was it for me. Then I sort of took a step back, discovered Robert Johnson and made the connection to Muddy. For me, it was very serious, what I heard. And I began to realize that I could only listen to this music with people who were equally serious about it.
Did getting involved with this music send you back to the guitar?
Yeah, Baldry and these other people would just sit in a corner, playing folk and blues while everyone else was drinking and getting stoned. And I saw that it was possible to actually, if you like, get on with it—to just sit in the corner playing and not have everyone looking at you. I saw that it wasn’t something to be frightened of or shy in doing. So I started doing it myself.
Playing what, folk blues?
Yeah, things by Big Bill Broonzy and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, “Railroad Bill,” “Cocaine.” But then I was drawn more and more toward electric blues, along with a few friends, a select few people. And, of course, then we had to be purists and seriously dislike other things.
When I was about seventeen, I got booted out of art school, and I did manual labor for about a year for pocket money. And during that time, I met up with a guy, Tom McGuinness, who was going to get involved with a band, and I knew just about enough to be able to play and keep up that end of it. So I got involved in that band, the Roosters, and that was a good feeling.
What kind of music did the Roosters play?
We did “Boom Boom” and a couple of other John Lee Hooker things, “Hoochie Coochie Man” and some others by Muddy, I think. We did whatever we could get on records, really, on up to rock & roll things like “Slow Down” by Larry Williams, because you had to have the odd rock & roll number in there.
Then Tom McGuinness brought in “Hideaway” by Freddie King, and the B side was “I Love the Woman,” which is still one of the greatest. And that’s the first time I heard that electric-lead-guitar style, with the bent notes—T-Bone Walker, B.B. and Freddie King, that style of playing. Hearing that Freddie King single was what started me on my path.
According to rock historian Pete Frame’s family tree of your various bands, the Roosters only lasted from January to August 1963.
Yeah, some of the people had day jobs that were more important to them than the band. Practical considerations brought the band down. But by that time, I had no other interests at all. I practiced a lot.
After the Roosters, I got a job with Tom McGuinness in another band, Casey Jones and the Engineers. That folded pretty soon, too, and then I heard the Yardbirds had started up.
The Stones had been playing at the Crawdaddy Club, and when they moved on, the next band in was the Yardbirds. I had met two guys from the Yardbirds at some bohemian parties, and at that time they were playing music by Django Reinhardt, “Nuages” and so on. We became friends. I went down to hear them at the Crawdaddy and was fairly critical of them, especially the guitarist they had. And I don’t really remember how it came about, but I replaced him. I was watching one week and playing the next.
Were you really listening to nothing but the blues?
No, I listened to some modern jazz. I would put on a John Coltrane album after a John Lee Hooker album. I don’t think I understood Coltrane, but I listened to him a lot. I loved his tone, the feel of it.
Were the Yardbirds’ gigs with Sonny Boy Williamson the first chance you had to play with an American bluesman?
Yes, and I think that’s when I first realized that we weren’t really being true to the music—when Sonny Boy came over and we didn’t know how to back him up. It was frightening, really, because this man was real and we weren’t. He wasn’t very tolerant, either. He did take a shine to us after a while, but before that he put us through some bloody hard paces. In the first place, he expected us to know his tunes. He’d say, “We’re going to do ‘Don’t Start Me to Talkin’ ’ or ‘Fattening Frogs for Snakes,’ ” and then he’d kick it off, and of course, some of the members of this particular band had never heard these songs.
There was a certain attitude in the band, a kind of pride in being English and white and being able to whip up a crowd on our own, and there was a sort of resistance toward what we were being asked to do—why should we have to study this man’s records? Even I felt a little bit like that, because we were coming face-to-face with the reality
of this thing, and it was a lot different from buying a record that you could take off when you felt like it. So we were all terrified of him, me most of all I think, because I was really making an attempt. Years later, Robbie Robertson of the Band told me that Sonny Boy had gone back to the South and hung out with them and had said he’d just been over playing with these white guys who didn’t know how to play anything at all.
Yeah, Robertson once told me that Sonny Boy had said, “Those Englishmen want to play the blues so bad—and they play it so bad!”
Right. At the time, I thought we’d done pretty well. But by that time, the momentum of the band was toward becoming a pop group, and this man arrived and took it all back down to the basic blues. And I had to almost relearn how to play. It taught me a lot; it taught me the value of that music, which I still feel.
What caused you to leave the Yardbirds just when they were on the brink of success? You’re supposed to have been grossed out by that first pop hit, “For Your Love.”
The Rolling Stone interviews Page 24