Clint Eastwood » Quotes

My father used to say to me, "Show 'em what you can do, and don't worry about what you're gonna get. Say you'll work for free and make yourself invaluable."

I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live.

I love every aspect of the creation of motion pictures and I guess I am committed to it for life.

Right now, the state of the movies in America, there's an awful lot of people hanging on wires and floating across things and comic book characters and what have you. There seems to be a lot of big business in that, a nice return on some of those.

Nowadays you'd have many battles before you blow it up, but eventually you'd take it down. And that's okay, I don't heavily quarrel with that, but for me personally, having made films for years and directed for 33 years, it just seems to me that I long for people who want to see a story and see character development. Maybe we've dug it out and there's not really an audience for that, but that's not for me to really worry about.

And I like to direct the same way that I like to be directed.

Most people like the magic of having it take a long time and be difficult . . . but I like to move along, I like to keep the actors feeling like they're going somewhere, I like the feeling of coming home after every day and feeling like you've done something and you've progressed somewhere. And to go in and do one shot after lunch and another one maybe at six o'clock and then go home is not my idea of something to do.

I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don't have a toy they'll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.

There's really no way to teach you how to act, but there is a way to teach you how to teach yourself to act. That's kind of what it is; once you learn the little tricks that work for you, pretty soon you find yourself doing that.

Again, after you've gone through all the various processes and the film comes out and is very successful, you're almost afraid to revisit it. You want to save it for a rainy day.

...in America, instead of making the audience come to the film, the idea seems to be for you to go to the audience. They come up with the demographics for the film and then the film is made and sold strictly to that audience. Not to say that it's all bad, but it leaves a lot of the rest of us out of it. To me cinema can be a much more friendly world if there's a lot of things to choose from.

You know when you think of a particular director, you think you would have liked to be with them on one particular film and not necessarily on some other one.

At the studios, everybody's into sequels or remakes or adaptations of old TV shows. I don't know if it's because of the corporate environment or they're just out of ideas. Pretty soon, they're going to be wanting to do one of "Rawhide" (1959).

I think I'm on a track of doing pictures nobody wants to do, that they're all afraid of. I guess it's the era we live in, where they're doing remakes of "The Dukes of Hazzard" (1979) and other old television shows. I must say, I'm not a negative person, but sometimes I wonder what kind of movies people are going to be making 10 years from now if they follow this trajectory. When I grew up there was such a variety of movies being made. You could go see Sergeant York (1941) or Sitting Pretty (1948) or Sullivan's Travels (1941), dozens of pictures, not to mention all the great B movies. Now, they're looking for whatever the last hit was. If it's The Incredibles (2004), they want 'The Double Incredibles.' My theory is they ought to corral writers into writers' buildings like they used to and start out with fresh material.

I liked the Million Dollar Baby (2004)' script a lot. Warner Bros. said the project had been submitted to them and they'd passed on it. I said, "But I like it." They said, "Well, it's a boxing movie." And I said, "It's not a boxing movie in my opinion. It's a father-daughter love story, and it's a lot of other things besides a boxing movie." They hemmed and hawed and finally said that if I wanted to take it, maybe they'd pay for the domestic rights only. After that, I'd be on my own. We took it to a couple of other studios, and they turned it down, much like Mystic River (2003) was turned down, the exact same pattern. People who kept calling and saying, "Come on, work with us on stuff." I'd give it to them, and they'd go, "Uh, we were thinking more in terms of Dirty Harry coming out of retirement." And who knows? Maybe when it comes out they'll be proven right.