Clint Eastwood's wife often asks him about his past. Dina Ruiz, who at 40 is some 34 years younger than her husband, likes to play a game in which she lists famous people to see if he knew them. Of course, almost always he did - presidents, pop stars, jazz musicians and actors, the movers and shakers, the rich and powerful, Eastwood has met or worked alongside many of them, shared a beer with some and stayed close to a few. "Once in a while, when she gets in the mood, she'll say, 'Did you know Elvis?' and I'll say, 'Yep, sure.' 'And James Dean?' 'Yep.' And then it will be, 'How about Bobby Darin?' And I'll go, 'Oh yeah'," he explains. "We were all hanging around at the same time in the Fifties, you know, we were all in town struggling in various ways - well, not Elvis - but I was doing Rawhide and those guys would be on various stages around the studio. There was a kind of camaraderie among the younger group of people."
Half a century later, and that struggling young actor trying to break out of television and into movies is largely forgotten. Today, Eastwood is movies. Look into his craggy face - a face that breaks into a smile far more often than you expect - and there's the lone, monosyllabic gunslinger of spaghetti westerns such as A Few Dollars More or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; gaze into the pale-blue eyes and you see the violent, vengeful cop of Dirty Harry or Magnum Force; listen to his whispery voice and you can hear the director who makes films which defy easy categorisation.
Indeed, Eastwood the film-maker seems to delight in playing with an image that took Clint the actor so long to create. In his western, Unforgiven, Eastwood deconstructed his own "Man With No Name" screen persona by casting himself as a cranky old gunslinger reluctantly facing up to one last shoot-out. He won a Best Picture Oscar in the process, effectively closing the book on that period of his screen life.
But he's also made films about a jazz musician (Charlie Parker in Bird) and a film director (John Huston in White Hunter Black Heart). He's made middle-aged love stories (Bridges of Madison County), a movie about washed-up, drink-sodden hacks (True Crime), and his latest, Million Dollar Baby, is about a young female boxer and the man who becomes her surrogate father.
One of the compensations of ageing is, he says, the freedom that comes with it. "A friend of mine, who is about the same age as me, said, 'Do you know what the great thing is about being in your seventies? What can they do to you?' And there's something to be said for that. You know, what have you got to lose? Freedom is just another word for having nothing left to lose."
Most people, including Eastwood himself, assumed that we'd seen the last of him on screen. After all, Mystic River, which won Oscars for Sean Penn and his co-star Tim Robbins, was the work of an assured and masterful director, completely in control of his
medium. So why bother to step back in front of the camera? Why not leave the audience with those images of a younger, vibrant actor and not risk the embarrassment of a lessening performance?
"I'm at the age in life where I'm not trying to do things that I did years ago. I've tried to shoot my persona down so many times. I'm looking for different stories, stories that go with the maturing of the years. I probably would have retired years ago if I hadn't found interesting things to do. In Mystic River, I didn't act in the picture and I thought, 'Yeah, I'm happy back here behind the camera', and then all of a sudden someone gave me the Million Dollar Baby script, and I said to myself, 'I think I can play this guy, I think I know this guy.'"
In Million Dollar Baby, Eastwood plays a cantankerous, gnarled old boxing trainer, Frankie Dunn, who runs a ramshackle gym in downtown LA where the hopeless and the hopeful gather to dream of glory, and riches, in the ring. The dream rarely becomes a reality, and even when it does there's often a price to pay, as Dunn knows only too well. With Morgan Freeman as Eddie "Scrap Iron" Dupris, a former boxer now helping Dunn run the gym, and an excellent Hilary Swank as Maggie Fitzgerald, who believes that the only hope she has of escaping her working-class destiny is by taking a shot in the increasingly popular, and lucrative, sport of women's boxing, Million Dollar Baby is one of Eastwood the director's very best films. And Eastwood the actor is pretty good in it, too.
The film is based on two short stories by the late F. X. Toole - who had a lifetime's experience of the ring - and if the plot sounds like a sort of Rocky for girls, don't be fooled. Million Dollar Baby is tough and darkly funny, and ultimately, after the film takes a completely unexpected turn, emotionally challenging and incredibly moving. Swank is excellent - the best she's been since winning an Oscar for Boys Don't Cry - and Freeman and Eastwood rediscover the chemistry they had in Unforgiven.
The morning we meet, Eastwood is understandably in a very good mood. Earlier that week Million Dollar Baby picked up five Golden Globe nominations, including Best Picture and even one for Best Score - and the music was written by none other than Mr C. Eastwood himself. The reviews from the influential LA Times and New York Times had just been dropped on his desk, and they couldn't have been more positive. Eastwood is trying to be even-handed about it all, but it's clear he's delighted.
"It's very nice," he admits. "But I've had them work me over before." And what of the awards? "I just do what I feel like I should be doing and whether you are nominated for something has never been the motivating force for me. It's in the eye of the beholder, and once you finish a film, in a way, it doesn't belong to you any more, it belongs to the audience to interpret it in the way they feel like interpreting it, and that goes for whoever is nominating whatever. You can't make movies thinking about that."
