The lines to see Clint Eastwood give his Master Class at Cannes began on the second floor of the Palais, and extended all the way to the fourth.
It was one of the wildest adrenalin-packed lines I had ever been in. Journalists were pressing against the ropes, shoving their badges towards guards, while the guards swept them back. I stood among them and watched. Occasionally I chatted with the guards. “Go away! Finished! Closed!” shouted one guard, definitively. But then —miracle!—the rope dropped, and I found myself in a rampage moving up to the next rank.
There the line turned to an exercise of crossing the frontier. One young journalist—with the fiercest look I had ever seen (off-screen)—charged at the next line of guards, and then---in a dastardly move—shoved me against the railing, where my body met with another journalist, bullying her way through.
I found myself tilting over.
To fall to my death off the balcony of the third floor of the Palais! What an ignoble end!
In fact, looking at the ferocious faces of my fellow journalists, I made a decision.
If in any way my own face had the same expression that I saw in the others, I wanted no part of it.
So I simply stepped out.
Even though I was the next one to be called.
I sat down crosslegged in the calm open space of the corridor, and pulled out “Variety magazine” and read. Why push so much for anything in life? How free and light I felt.
What will be will be.
This Buddhist decision bode me well. Ten minutes later, after I had totally forgotten the line—and did not even hear the shouts anymore---a gentle hand tapped me on the shoulder.
“Madame,” a kind man’s voice said in a whisper. “What kind of badge do you have?”
I showed him—and the guard waved me to follow him, far from the maddened crowd, to another entrance.
“Let her through,” he said to his colleagues.
So I did get to see Clint Eastwood.
There he was, calm and sure of himself, sitting comfortably in a chair on stage, speaking about his love for Westerns as a kid in 1930s Depression Era USA—when “every kid wanted to pack a gun and ride a horse”---and why the genre is still so popular today.
“Westerns are pure escapism. An escape to a different time and history when law and order was built around the individual and how well he took care of himself. It is a fantasy one cannot have anymore in organized society.”
His calm was very soothing. Everything in his career—it seemed—had happened just as calmly, step by step, with no gun-slinging fight.
“How did I begin? I auditioned for a play in junior high school. And the lead in the play was a young boy who was retarded, mentally, well not really, he was just dumb. My teacher thought I was perfect. We were all petrified of getting up on stage, in front of the whole class, and it was so bad, it was funny. It was even funnier than it was supposed to be.
Then in the early 50s, I was in LA City College, and I started going to some acting classes in the evening because a friend of mine said there were pretty girls in the class. I kind of got used to it, and started doing improv.
A cinematographer named Glassberg contacted me and said, come down, we are finishing the last days of a picture and he had some film left on camera. I photographed all right, so they said we would like you to come work for us. So I got a contract with Universal. I stumbled through the 50s doing bit parts. In 1968, I got a test for the CBS show “Rawhide”, and I was employed and actually making a living as an actor for about six years. I had an agent. I had had a hard time getting an agent.
The agent asked me if I would like to go to Italy to make a Western.
I read the script, and it was Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo”, and I had never been to Italy or Spain, so I went, and it was a very small picture, and it was good. Then I made two other films, fantasy Westerns, very stylized films, and Sergio was great. Working for a European director was good for me. They re-named the film “Fistful of Dollars.”
Then I saw on the marquee that they wrote “Starring Clint Eastwood.”
It was that movie that started everything”.
He spoke about all the films he acted in and directed in the same evenhanded manner.
Indeed, I was disappointed that aside from one slightly revealing comment about why he liked “Dirty Harry” (“It was far out. Everything is politically correct now. We have lost our sense of humor”) Eastwood said very little about the meaning of his oeuvre or why he chose to direct the films he did. He directed “Mystic River” because he read a positive review about the book, bought the book at Cosco, loved it, and the next week it was in production. As for “Bridges Over Madison County”: he chose to adapt the book from the woman’s perspective, asked Meryl Streep, who disliked the book, to “take a look at the script”, and she called the next day and she said she would do it.
In fact, what I most took from this encounter with Clint Eastwood---hard-earned—was the stoic approach: to persevere, landing by landing, with calm.
“If it doesn’t go at all,” Eastwood said about directing. “You just have to go back to the drawing board.”