Clint Eastwood has released a statement to claim a recent interview with him is a fabrication.
Quotes from an alleged interview with the Oscar-winning actor and director had gone viral over the weekend and were picked up by a number of sites. Yet Eastwood has now said that he never spoke to anyone from the German-language Austrian newspaper Kurier.
“A couple of items about me have recently shown up in the news,” Eastwood said in a statement released to Deadline. “I thought I would set the record straight. I can confirm I’ve turned 95. I can also confirm that I never gave an interview to an Austrian publication called Kurier, or any other writer in recent weeks, and that the interview is entirely phony.”
Eastwood, who turned 95 over the weekend, had been originally quoted as saying he was in pre-production on his new movie and had railed against “an era of remakes and franchises”.
Kurier is based in Vienna and has a circulation of approximately 100,000 copies.
There is no official statement from Kurier or any details on how the interview was assembled. Underneath the interview, a note claims that the paper is “currently investigating the matter”.
Eastwood’s most recent film Juror #2, which starred Nicholas Hoult, was released at the end of last year with no confirmed word on what his next film will be. In an interview to support the film with the Metrograph magazine, he addressed his legacy as a film-maker.
“That would be up to them, to the audiences, to answer,” he said. “Up to the people on the outside. I just kind of go along. I consider this, again, emotional. It comes upon you. You have a story, you make a movie of it. You have to just go for it. If you think too much about how it happened you might ruin it. I go back and look at films I’ve made, and I could easily ask, ‘Why the heck did I make this?’ I don’t remember! It might have been a long time ago.”
Eastwood had recently paid tribute to co-star Gene Hackman after Hackman’s death in February. “There was no finer actor than Gene,” he said. “Intense and instinctive. Never a false note.” He added: “He was also a dear friend whom I will miss very much.”
