Clint Eastwood Talks Gran Torino

8 months ago 23rd Feb 10:26

Clint Eastwood is now just as recognised as a filmmaker as a director and over the last few years he has produced some memorable cinema with Million Dollar Baby, Flags or Our Fathers and, most recently, Changeling.

But Gran Torino sees the actor go back in front of the camera, as well as directing the film, and it's rumoured that this will be the last time we will see him in an acting role.

Were you actively looking for a part, four years after your last appearance in front of the camera?
 
No. I wasn’t looking for it specifically. There are not that many good roles for guys my age. After Million Dollar Baby, I thought, that’s enough now and I didn’t want to act again. But it’s a role that was my age. My producer, Rob Lorenz, read the script first and thought it was interesting and asked if I wanted to look at it.

I did, and yeah, it was! And the timing was right for me. I was in the final stage of Changeling, doing the scoring. And I did not want to wait.

Why did you want to play Walt Kowalski?

I liked the fact he was kind of crazy and an equal opportunity insulter, a unique character I thought I knew well. Growing up, I knew a lot of people like that. It seems in that era nobody was scared to say what they thought.

This is a guy who is a Korean War veteran, whose wife just passed away at the beginning of the story. He’s estranged from his two adult sons who he thinks have counted him out. His family doesn’t care too much about him. They are grown up and don’t want to hang out with an old guy.

The grandkids don’t want to hang out either, except if they might inherit something from him. Most of his friends have died. He has worked at the Ford Motor Company for 50 years and his neighborhood, which used to be all automobile people, has been taken over by immigrants. And he doesn’t like the changes that he sees.

The film also spoke a little bit about obsolescence. And it seems to resonate in what happens in the news with the American auto industry like it is today. It sort of tied in with kind of the landscape right now the end of an era. Walt is an obsolete person.

He’s a little bit like Frankie Dunn from Million Dollar Baby and Sergeant Highway from Heartbreak Ridge, those kind of guys who are out of synch with society and the modern world. He doesn’t know how to relate to anybody. Nothing is the same and he’s kind of cynical about it too. But he ends up learning tolerance with someone belonging to a country he’s never even heard of.

How did you approach playing such a racist character?

The trap would have been to go soft with it. If you don’t play it all the way, then it becomes a Hollywood bailout.

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.