As sprightly as ever... Clint Eastwood. Photograph: Francois Guillot/AFP/Getty Images
I last met Clint Eastwood in the early 1990s after his great western Unforgiven had brought him Oscars for best picture and best director. When I talked to him last week at the Ritz in Paris, the day before he was to receive the Légion d'honneur from President Jacques Chirac, he was on his way back from introducing his latest picture, Letters From Iwo Jima, at the Berlin film festival.
Just three months away from his 77th birthday, he looks as fit and sprightly as ever. His hair is white now and thinner, his skin tanned and leathery, but he's lean, upright, and cheerful, forthcoming, articulate and modest, with a splendid open smile and a wonderfully throaty laugh.
Before recording our conversation, we chatted about Ira Hayes, the Native American who as a private in the US Marines was one of the soldiers raising the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi. The famous photograph of this historic event is at the centre of Flags of Our Fathers, companion piece to Letters From Iwo Jima. Suddenly while talking of Peter LaFarge's protest number, The Ballad of Ira Hayes, a big hit for Johnny Cash in 1964, we suddenly burst into song together as we discovered we could both of us remember the lyrics from way back.
Sadly the tape recorder wasn't running so there's no record of this duet. A pity. Well I think so. Anyway, our conversation went on for 75 minutes, and although the principal subject was his two companion pieces about the battle of Iwo Jima in 1945, the last year of the second world war, we ranged widely, taking in his collaborations with Sergio Leone in Italy and Don Siegel in Hollywood, as well as his first masterpiece as actor-director-producer, The Outlaw Josey Wales.
Hope you enjoy it.
~ Listen to the conversation on your computer (72mins 42s)
~ Read the full interview in this Sunday's Observer.
