Word: unforgiven
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...anymore, even though the inventory of McQueen autographs is not going to increase. This is Eastwood's Year of Being Taken Seriously. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences showered Eastwood and his latest film, ^ Unforgiven, with nine Oscar nominations, and the Directors Guild of America improved his odds for taking home a statue when it made him its choice for his work on Unforgiven. Whatever the results on Monday night, Eastwood had crossed the divide that separates a constellation from a star and a serious filmmaker from someone who merely makes movies...
...each experience taught him more about his craft and prepared him for Unforgiven, a lean and provocative antiwestern in which the good guys are not so swell and the bad guys are not entirely deserving of their fate. For Eastwood it was something new, garbed in familiar cowboy clothing. Only after the final gunfight does the director allow his alter ego, the actor, to indulge in a brief valedictory to the satiric excess that characterized the Eastwood of an earlier era. "Any son of a bitch who takes a shot at me," gunman William Munny bellows into the night...
...come he isn't Doug McClure, one of those TV-series hunks of the '60s who faded into anonymity? Or merely a Sylvester Stallone, one of those action heroes who have achieved nothing like the longevity Eastwood has? Neither could have, or would have, made a movie like Unforgiven. With the intelligent shyness that empowers many great actors, Eastwood embraced the entire craft of filmmaking, wandering the sets and picking up insights even as he was churning out B movies in his early days. Even now, he keeps a VCR on location to study movies new and old. "My involvement...
...takes the work seriously, but not himself. During the Unforgiven shoot, he regaled the crew with his wicked John Wayne impersonation. When Gene Hackman kicked the hell out of him in their first saloon encounter, the script called for Hackman to stride over to the bar and pour a drink. From his position on the floor, where he was miming grievous hurt, Eastwood didn't call cut. Instead he groaned, "Pour one of those...
...officer in combat. "Making a film takes on a life of its own," he says. "You guide that life along like a platoon leader, getting everybody kind of enthused to charge the hill." To a relative newcomer like actress Frances Fisher, who plays the prostitute Strawberry Alice in Unforgiven and is Eastwood's current companion, it all seems seamless. "He is the most confident director I have ever seen. He kind of glides through it all." Distractions are kept to a minimum and posturing discouraged. "He says very little to you," says Hackman, whom Eastwood lured to play the sheriff...