Eastwood: we’re too humourless and PC to allow Dirty Harry today
THE modern world has lost its sense of humour, claims movie legend Clint Eastwood, who also warned that socalled political correctness is at risk of killing great films.
Eastwood, the 86-year-old actor and Oscar-winning director, revealed his frustration that modern audiences were on constant high alert worrying about political correctness.
His own 1971 film Dirty Harry, he said, was one of the first to be condemned as politically incorrect, thanks to its plotline of a maverick cop who believed it was better to kill a criminal than allow a sharp-tongued lawyer to get him off.
Speaking on stage during a masterclass about his career at the Cannes Film Festival, Eastwood said: “A lot of people thought [Dirty Harry] was politically incorrect. It was at the beginning of the era that we’re in now, where everybody thinks it was politically incorrect – and we’re killing ourselves by doing that.
“We’ve lost our sense of humour and everything.
“But anyway, I made it and thought it was interesting – and it was daring at the time. And that was the only reason.” During an hour-long on-stage interview, Eastwood also harked back to a bygone era which has left audiences nostalgic for a certain kind of film.
Having cut his teeth in such films as The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, he argued that part of the modern appeal of such films was their depiction of a lost world.
“It’s pure escapism,” he said. “You escape to a different time and the days when law and order was all built around the individual. That’s a fantasy that we all have and we can’t have any more in an organised society.”
He also shared his thoughts on how to make a good film, warning that attempts to make them “intellectual” more often than not ended in boredom.
“Your gut is really strong and your instincts are much better sometimes than your intellect,” he told would-be film-makers and members of the press in Cannes.
“If you have good luck with your instincts, you might as well stick with them. Because intellectualising, or pseudo-intellectualising, you can get yourself in a real box.
“You can be putting out a dull thing. It’s an emotional art form; it’s not an intellectual art form.”
He also spoke about his modest family background, which he conceded left him finding it “tough to understand that you don’t have to worry about it [money] so much” even as a movie star.
Asked whether he missed acting, Eastwood said he would only return to the screen for projects he was particularly taken with.
Comparing it to his favourite hobby, he said: “I like playing golf, but I don’t want to have to play golf.”
Finishing up by confirming that he is still happy to be working in the film industry, the star joked that his motto could be: “I’d rather be lucky than good.”
Eastwood then introduced a screening of his film Unforgiven, a revisionist Western first released in 1992, in the Cannes Classic series for 2017.