He shrugs and there's another smile. We're in an office on the Warner Bros studio lot at Burbank. Eastwood has had a base here for almost 30 years, and when he drives down the coast from his home in Carmel, he heads here. This office is actually not his, that's elsewhere on the lot, and perched on a hard-backed chair at a mini-conference table, Eastwood seems too big for the room. He's 6ft 4in and, even at 74, is an imposing, physically impressive man. His body looks in good shape, and his face is weather-beaten, tanned and lined, his hair silver and cropped short. He's wearing chinos, a beige sports shirt and a curious pair of brown lace-up boots - like a pair of boxing boots, in fact. The overall effect makes you think of a retired military man heading for the golf course, which is, incidentally, Eastwood's favourite form of exercise. Hasn't he considered retiring and knocking a ball around all day? "I like playing golf, but I don't want to have to play golf," he says. "I still like work. I'm involved. Things challenge me."
Previous interviews with Eastwood have made much of his demeanour - some have found him rather distant, icy perhaps, closed and, at least sometimes, a little dour. Maybe it was to do with the films he made: first in the Sergio Leone westerns of the Sixties, The Man With No Name didn't say a lot, just shot up the bad guys and chomped on a cigar. And then, with his other great mentor, the director Don Siegel, he became Dirty Harry - Harry Callahan the hard-boiled cop who dispenses justice with the aid of a Magnum .44.
In five very violent films, Eastwood virtually invented his own genre, and while the public lapped it up, an awful lot of them couldn't work out how much of Clint was in Harry. To many, he became a right-wing torchbearer... or was that Harry?
Politically, Eastwood never really fitted into a convenient box, the one that most assumed was marked "Republican". "I was playing a part. I'm an actor playing a role, and if somebody thinks I'm supposed to be that guy, then great. You have to put yourself into the roles, and if you put yourself into them positively enough, strongly enough, people believe you are this person. It's a fantasy. But it's a fantasy the audience wants to believe."
He recently described his politics as a mixture of social liberal and fiscal conservative. The truth is, as a jazz-loving actor and director, he's an awful lot of different things. He even tried his hand at politics, serving as mayor in his home town of Carmel for two years back in the mid-Eighties, but that was enough, and any attempts to lure him into state or federal politics failed.
"I enjoyed it for two years, but not beyond. After about a year and a half I said, 'I'm going back to make some more pictures.'" He was single for that time, he recalls with a smile. "I was so busy doing that stuff that I didn't have time to go out, and I didn't dare take out a date because as a politician you have to go out into a group of people and you can't remember everybody's name. And if you have a date you have to introduce 'em."
More recently, something seems to have changed with Eastwood and that icy demeanour has melted somewhat. He's talked more about his family - he has seven children by five different women; the eldest, Kimber, is 40 and the youngest, Morgan, is just eight - and how much he appreciates them. He's even opened up about his relationship with his own father. "I remember when my father died I went through a terrible guilt period where I wished I'd asked him to play golf more often. I was a young guy trying to make it as an actor and doing pretty well and busy with my life, so I never took enough time. I wished I could have said, 'Let's hang out' or 'I love you' or whatever."
This new, touchy-feely Clint is entirely due to his relationship with Dina Ruiz. He met the former television journalist some ten years ago when she was covering the Carmel patch, and they have now been married for eight years. His previous life - women, drinking beer - was over, and he's glad to have seen the back of it. "I have a hard time thinking back past Dina, because she was really the calming influence in my life. But I'm not sure that's because I was just ready to settle down or whether I just adored her to the point where that was a given, so I don't know. But she has opened me up as a person. Absolutely. And she is the idol of my life.
"She's very honest and outspoken. She's a journalist and a writer herself and she's clever. She loves this one [Million Dollar Baby] and thinks it's the best thing I've done." Does he ever wish that he'd met her before? "Sometimes she will look at some old picture of me and she'll go, 'Wow! What a babe!' And I'll go, 'But you wouldn't have liked me back then.' And probably there is some truth in that. There's a certain time in life for anything to gel and you just don't know when that is. I've been very lucky, especially because she came along at the perfect time in my life."
Eastwood married model Maggie Johnson in 1953, long before he was famous, and they had two children - Kyle, 36, and Alison, 32. The union would last 25 years, even though he fathered his first child, Kimber, when he had an affair with actress Roxanne Tunis, one of his co-stars on Rawhide. He has two children, Scott, 19, and Kathryn Ann, 17, with former flight attendant Jacelyn Reeves, daughter Francesca, 11, with actress Frances Fisher, and Morgan with his second wife, Dina.
Eastwood is happier now than he's ever been, and in regular contact with all of his children and their mothers. "Oh, I enjoy it," he says of his large family. "And I have to give credit to my wife, who is great. She has brought everybody together. She's terrific, she brings all the mothers in, everybody, my mother, she's brilliant."
The one woman missing from this happy gathering is actress Sondra Locke, who shared Eastwood's life for 13 years before a bitter break-up in 1988. The end was extremely messy and very public - she took him to court twice, claiming he had been possessive, manipulative and occasionally violent, all of which he denied. They eventually settled out of court.
It's interesting, though, that at this time, when Eastwood is more content, more settled than he has ever been, he is making movies dealing with father-daughter relationships torn asunder by tragic events - Sean Penn loses his daughter in Mystic River, Frankie Dunn is desperately trying to establish contact with his daughter in Million Dollar Baby. "I think at any age you can imagine yourself in those situations, and I think as you mature you can imagine them a little stronger because you have seen a lot of relationships come and go. You have a lot of things to draw upon within your soul."
He's already decided on his next film, The Flags of Our Fathers, a Second World War movie that he will direct but not appear in.
In the meantime, he's heading back to Carmel to be with his family, play a little golf and deal with some other business. What might that be? "Oh, I've got to look at some slots..." He's not joking. He recently approved the use of his image for a series of gaming machines to be installed in Las Vegas. "They wanted to make one called A Fistful of Dollars, which is a great title for a slot machine. And then there's A Few Dollars More. You get the picture. And they turned out to be a really nice company to work with."
This, I suggest as he walks out of the door, is further proof of his iconic status. "Well, they already got a Marilyn and a Bogart." He pauses at the doorway before adding: "Maybe I'm the only one still alive, though."
Million Dollar Baby opened yesterday
