Clint Eastwood Talks Gran Torino - page 2

23-02-2009 10:26

And if you’re going to play this kind of guy, you’ve got to go all the way. You cannot be Mr. Nice Guy.  It is very non-politically correct and that’s good. There’s just no pussyfooting around it.

He’s definitely a racist but he learns a certain amount of tolerance along the way through his forced relationships with the Hmong family who lives next door and whom he despises at the beginning.

It changes when he turns around and stars helping them out, trying to save the young kid, Thao, from the gang life, and teaching him ambition, ethics, morals.

At one point in the film, someone tells Walt, 'You are not at peace. Then, at the end, after he finally confesses, he says to the young priest that he is at peace.'

He has kind of willed his ethic of hard work and being honest on to Thao, and so he left that behind him. Now, he feels that he let go.

How easy was it for you to act again after four years?

It was okay. I have been doing it for 55 years. It’s like anything: you get the character in mind and then you’re there doing it. And I was happy to get back in front of the camera. It was fun to play such a bizarre character.

Gran Torino is the first American movie to showcase the Hmong community in such a preponderant manner. What did you know about them?

Not much. I had to read and learn. They come from Laos, and during the Vietnam War, they fought along the Americans against the Communists, which, after the war, started to kill them. So, the U.S. government brought a lot of them here. L

arge communities of them are found today in Fresno, California, as well as Minneapolis-St. Paul and in Michigan, where we shot the film. And to be totally authentic, I wanted to cast only Hmong people in the film, which was a little tricky.

And mainly you chose non-professional actors. How did you guide them to achieve the performances you wanted from them?

I got young people, seventeen, eighteen, who had never acted before, but they were really good and brought a certain realistic feel to it. It comes off real. Bee Vang, who plays Thao, is very smart and somewhat unselfconscious, which helped because his character is that way too. 

I tried to give them a lot of freedom. I told them they don’t have to stick to the words literally. And when they spoke in Hmong, I didn’t know what they said anyway.  I just tried to get them in the mood, to make them think of what their motivation is, what stimulates them in saying whatever they say. But also, not to think too much, to let it come up from instinct.

Gran Torino has been a huge success at the U.S. box office. Did you expect it?

I never expect anything. I am always amazed at why anybody goes to any movie or why anybody doesn’t go to any movie. Any movie you make, you make it because you’re hoping somebody wants to see it, but you never know.

When it came out, it got nice reviews, but that doesn’t always necessarily mean a thing.  But then, when the public started liking it, I said, ‘Fine. I’ll take the success.’

I thought older people might see it and see a similarity to their own family relations. But young kids liked Walt because he is so obstinate. I think everybody would like to be him for ten minutes. 

It becomes an interesting character that way; it is definitely a character that triggers something in people. I think there are a lot of good little messages in the film about relationships with the church, and with friends and cultures people are prejudiced against.

That success, is it also rewarding?

Sure. Yeah. To be 78 years old and to be in a successful picture, that’s nice. It made more business than Million Dollar Baby. But I don’t know the whys or whats, and that’s what makes it provocative to still work in movies. You never know and you learn something new every day.

Most of your recent films deal with dark subject matter.  How do you explain that attraction?