“I don't want to need you because I can't have you,” said Robert Kincaid, Clint Eastwood, in the extraordinary The Bridges of Madison.
On the screen Clint and Meryl Streep, Eastwood without a gun, without a poncho and without one-liners before shooting any poor unfortunate man to death. Clint Eastwood has always been linked in the collective imagination to that rude and ill-tempered man, always seen through his role as an actor, in which he has stood out with simplicity, but many forget his work, critical and daring, in direction. I meet with Pau Gómez to chat about Clint Eastwood's book.
The myth behind the mask, to comment on how he has done justice to the good Eastwood, one of the last greats of cinema, “the director Eastwood catches my attention – says Pau – because there is a lot written about him, and above all, about his facet as an actor, and it strikes me that we are facing one of the masters, or the last masters of American cinema, and there was not a single book that focused on his career as a director. Which does not ignore his career as an actor because in my opinion his best performances have always been in films directed by himself.
Which was also a way to explore his interpretive side. Eastwood is a director with a rich and very personal filmography, there are fundamental themes in his films, from revenge to the redeemed antihero, it was worth exploring as a filmmaker, he is really going to go down in history as a filmmaker, because as an actor he has been a star, but he has not been an excellent actor, as a director, yes.”
Pau Gómez is a film lover, he also directs the Antonio Ferrandis Festival in Paterna, as he immerses himself in the filmographies of directors of the stature of Zemeckis (Back to the Future, 1985) and Nolan (Origin, 2010).
Furthermore, for his books he always collects impressions from people who can add something more to the text. On this occasion he chose John Carlin for the prologue, author of The Human Factor, a book that inspired the film Invictus (2009). “John Carlin was the obvious choice – recalls Gómez –, at that time he was working in Spain, and he is a very cordial and approachable guy, and speaks perfect Spanish.
I knew him because on Channel 9 we did a couple of interviews with him about a biography of Rafa Nadal (Rafa, my story) that he wrote and about the death of Nelson Mandela. I kept his number and his email, and it was an absolutely fleeting thing, it was my first option, I wrote to him in the morning and he replied in the afternoon, delighted, saying that it was an honor. The only thing I asked him in the prologue was to tell a story about the Clint Eastwood that no one knew during the filming of Invictus (2009), and the next morning I had the prologue in my email. It is a privilege that he accepted it without reading it, because at that time the book was in a very embryonic first phase.”
Approaching the director Eastwood is interesting because of his self-taught training, his evolution as an author and his distancing from the image he had created, “Eastwood is a guy who has had many influences – comments the writer –, and he is a hodgepodge of great masters, and In the end he has turned it into a very personal, and very identifiable, speech, but I don't see that it has left a great influence on cinema.
He is an atypical case, because the first thing he directs is a feature film, he must be the only director in the history of cinema who has not shot a measly short, nor an experimental work for the faculty, nor an advertisement before getting behind the camera. . The first thing the guy directs is Chill in the night (1971), and he does it quite reliably, he hasn't studied film, he has no idea, and the night before filming he has a panic attack.
He has had very important teachers from Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964) to Don Siegel (Dirty Harry, 1971), who are the two great references of him, his cinema at first draws a lot from Leone's cinema and Siegel. He has never hidden the influences from him, and then he has made them his own. He is a guy who shoots in a very natural, very intuitive way, few takes, he is clear that an actor's first take is the best because it is the most natural. In today's cinema, where the blockbuster predominates, where blockbuster films gross more than the previous year, the essence of a cinema, as pure as Eastwood's, is being lost. There is no heir to Eastwood, it is very sad that we cannot see the influence of him.”
