Clint Eastwood has denied that he threatened to kill fellow film-maker Michael Moore in 2005, in alleged retaliation for Moore’s doorstepping of Charlton Heston while shooting his Oscar-winning 2002 documentary Bowling for Columbine.
At a lunchtime event at the CinemaCon expo in Las Vegas, Eastwood is reported to have said: “Everyone kept saying I was going to kill Michael Moore but that’s not true.” He then added, to laughter from the crowd: “It isn’t a bad idea.”
“I think once years ago somebody asked me what would I do if a guy like him came to my house with a whole film crew and started filming away like he did with Charlton Heston. Unfortunately, Charlton Heston was ill at the time with Alzheimer’s. But I thought if somebody was on your property, you could shoot him.”
The issue was raised by Moore himself back in January, when the documentary maker wrote a lengthy Facebook post “confirming” events at a National Board of Review event in 2005. After writing that Eastwood announced to the assembled attendees that “he would ‘kill’ me if I ever came to his house with my camera for an interview”, Moore added: “I was a bit stunned to hear Eastwood, out of the blue, make such a violent statement. But I instantly decided he was just trying to be funny.”
Moore added that his principal objection was that Eastwood was echoing similar “jokes” by the likes of Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly and that “this kind of thing wreaked all kinds of havoc in my life because of what this hate speech does to inspire the more deranged among us”.
Moore’s post came shortly after a spat with Eastwood over the latter’s record-breaking war film American Sniper, in which he said snipers were “cowards”. Moore also describes Sniper as “a mess of a film that rewrites history”.
