Little Bill Daggett: “You’d be William Munny out of Missouri. Killer of women and children.”

Will Munny: “That’s right. I’ve killed women and children. I’ve killed just about everything that walks or crawled at one time or another. And I’m here to kill you, Little Bill, for what you did to Ned.”

So goes the exchange between the sheriff and the gunfighter before Clint Eastwood’s final blazing showdown — in a Western anyway.

At least that’s what Eastwood claims in one of several interviews included in the extras of the 20th anniversary Blu-ray edition of “Unforgiven.” The actor/director says he always intended the 1992 horse opera to be his last, and so far he’s kept his word.

But he certainly left the genre with a bang, literally and figuratively speaking, with his character gunning down five men in one blazing swoop, and his movie raking in big bucks at the box office and four Oscars at the 1993 awards ceremony for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Gene Hackman as Little Bill Daggett), Best Editing and, for Eastwood, Best Director.

It is only the third Western after “Cimarron” (1931) and “Dances with Wolves” (1990) ever to win a Best Picture statuette.

So how could a story about an outlaw who’s killed women and children garner so much adulation?

Perhaps it was how Eastwood, directing from David Webb Peoples’ superb screenplay, portrayed the grim consequences of violence, and how he dealt with themes of aging, human limits and mortality in an a starkly honest and sometimes moving way.

Eastwood sat on this script for years, waiting until he was old enough to play Munny, a reformed outlaw and killer, struggling to raise two children on a failing farm, until a bounty offered by vengeful prostitutes lures him out of retirement. The excellent Morgan Freeman plays Munny’s old partner, and Hackman is convincingly mean-spirited as the brutal sheriff of Big Whiskey, Wyo., where the action centers.

Photographed in artful noir tones by Jack Green, Eastwood’s last roundup is now packaged inside a 54-page hardback book full of behind-the-scenes photos and insight, complete with four documentaries and an episode of the ’50s TV series “Maverick,” guest-starring a very young Eastwood as — what else — a gunfighter.

— Gene Triplett

If you didn’t catch up with “Drive” on the theater circuit, don’t miss this exhilarating ride on its home video run.

Nicolas Winding Refn (“Bronson”) directs sure-handedly from a brilliantly stripped-down script by Hossein Amini (“The Four Feathers”) based on the novel by James Sallis about a Los Angeles loner (Ryan Gosling) who works as a garage mechanic and part-time Hollywood stunt driver by day and moonlights as a wheel man for small-time heisters.

This may sound like potentially mindless action movie fare, this all-too-familiar plot, with an overabundance of car chases, explosions and brutal violence, and it does contain all of the above. And Gosling’s character at first seems typical of the genre, like Eastwood’s Man-With-No-Name (we know him only as “The Driver”), a man of few words or outward emotions, who remains cool and ultra-capable when the going gets rough.

But sweet, sad, vulnerable neighbor Iris (an irresistible Carrie Mulligan) and her little boy (Kaden Leos) jump-start deep feelings within The Driver and the film begins to reveal itself as a high-octane, 21st-century “Shane” in a souped-up Chevy, with not only action and suspense but all the heart, soul and heroism of that classic Western.

When Iris’ ex-convict husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac), comes under threat for a debt he owes to mobsters — which in turn puts the mother and boy in jeopardy — The Driver offers his services in a pawnshop robbery Standard is forced to commit. When the job goes disastrously wrong, The Driver goes on the offensive to protect Iris from the retaliation of some very ruthless criminals, including ex-B-movie producer Bernie Rose, played with startlingly convincing bad-guy gusto by Albert Brooks in one of the most Oscar-worthy supporting turns of 2011.

Unfortunately, “Drive” itself is a robbery victim, garnering only a sound-editing nomination when it should have been a top contender for best picture. There’s a surprisingly tender love story in the midst of the bloody battle between good and evil, and drama as powerful as the supercharged engines beneath the gleaming hoods of all those muscle cars.

Bonus features include the featurettes “I Drive: The Driver,” “Driver and Irene: The Relationship,” “Under the Hood: Story” and “Cut to the Chase: Stunts.”

— Gene Triplett

This week, the oddest DVD to appear on release lists is:

“Sledge Hammer!: The Complete Series”

Leslie Nielsen’s bumbling Det. Frank Drebin of the “Police Squad!” TV series (and later the “Naked Gun!” movies) had a worthy successor in comic crime busting in actor David Rasche, star of “Sledge Hammer!: The Complete Series,” due out on DVD Tuesday.

Running for two seasons from 1986-88, the half-hour TV series offered up an over-the-top spoof on Clint Eastwood’s hair-trigger, rule-breaking “Dirty Harry” film character. Sledge’s unorthodox, off-the-books crime fighting methods included blasting a sniper away with a building-collapsing bazooka shot, taming jaywalkers with warning shots from his trusty .44 Magnum, and dragging suspects around on his car bumper to extract confessions.

Armed only with his Magnum, and a cache of grenades, a few Uzi machine guns and a handy bazooka, Sledge was a one-man crime fighting machine who ruffled a few feathers during his short, flamboyantly violent TV run but has earned a strong cult following in the series aftermath. Highlights from his crime blotter include a tangle with an infamous Elvis impersonator serial killer, a powerful Mafioso Don and a violently loony revolutionary.

Creator of the show, Alan Spencer, knew he was pushing boundaries with the series’ comic violence and, not expecting the show to run more than one season, ended the first year’s episode with Sledge accidently destroying Los Angeles, and himself, in a spectacular bomb scenario. When the show was surprisingly picked up for a second season, the crafty writers solved the problem by setting the events five years in the past, before the devastating explosion took place.

“Sledge Hammer!: The Complete Series” is not rated and runs about 17 hours on five discs. It’s being released by Image Entertainment.

- Dennis King

Before there was Joe Kidd or Josey Wales, even before there was a Man with No Name, there was Rowdy Yates.

The young trail herd ramrod on the CBS Western series “Rawhide” was the character through which Clint Eastwood made his first big impression on a national audience. The lanky, sandy-haired, easygoing Yates was aimed at drawing female viewers, while the tough, no-nonsense, baritone-voiced trail boss Gil Favor (played with effectively commanding presence by Eric Fleming) was there for the guys to cheer on.

When “Rawhide” debuted on Jan. 9, 1959, with Frankie Laine singing the Ned Washington/Dmitri Tiomkin-penned theme song over the opening credits, it quickly became apparent that the creators were shooting for the kind of gritty realism that — with the exception of “Gunsmoke” — was absent from other horse operas that glutted the prime time schedule of the ’50s and early ’60s. While other Westerns featured stylized heroes who were superhumanly quick on the trigger, the “Rawhide” bunch was drawn as authentic working cowboys, pushing 3,000 head of cattle up from Texas to the railhead at Sedalia, Mo. Along the way they encountered all kinds of characters, good and bad (played by prestigious guest stars such as Barbara Stanwyck, Burgess Meredith, Ralph Bellamy and Richard Basehart), and all sorts of perilous situations, much like NBC’s “Wagon Train” from the same period.

The regular weekly crew included Paul Brinegar as Wishbone the cantankerous cook and Erick, OK, native Sheb Wooley as seasoned scout Pete Nolan, among several others. The first 15 hourlong episodes of the ’61-’62 season are contained in the latest four-disc DVD package, showcasing the series at its peak with well-written stories and solid acting, and Eastwood’s star potential in plain view, even though he was still only the second banana, and two years away from making “A Fistful of Dollars.” Installments focusing on Rowdy include “Rio Salado,” “The Black Sheep,” “Twenty-Five Santa Clauses” and “The Long Count.”

— Gene Triplett

BY GENE TRIPLETT

Why spend half of your Valentine’s evening waiting for a table and then standing in a boxoffice line when you can pitch a couple of  TV trays in the living room and have your dinner-and-a-movie date in the comfort and privacy of your own love shack?  Simply grab some takeout, fire up some candles, draw the shades and pop open your favorite beverage.

See? You’re free to play slap and tickle all you want, talk back to the screen, whatever. And there’s that handy “pause” button if you’re suddenly inspired to indulge in some other activity.

So here, in no particular order, are a few suggestions for your Valentine’s viewing, designed to enhance your romance:

“You’ve Got Mail” (1998), Nora Ephron’s computer-age version of “The Shop Around the Corner,” stars Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan as e-mail pen pals who become infatuated with one another through their correspondence, not realizing they already know and dislike each other as competing book shop owners. A real charmer, and the new Blu-ray edition includes a bonus — the original 1940 classic starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan.

Oklahoma’s own Blake Edwards created one of the greatest midlife crisis movies of them all with “10” (1979), showcasing the comedic talents of Dudley Moore and at the same time elevating him to leading-man status in the role of a successful songwriter who jeopardizes his long-standing relationship with a beautiful singing star (Julie Andrews, aka Mrs. Edwards) when he becomes obsessed with a sexy young blond newlywed (Bo Derek) who blithely encourages his advances.

The “bells and the banjos ring” between Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen in “Love With the Proper Stranger” (1963), but only after a really rocky start. The two meet at a wild New York City party, tumble into a drunken one-night stand, then face the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy in the cold light of day. Great supporting cast includes Edie Adams, Herschel Bernardi and Tom Bosley. Directed by Robert Mulligan (“To Kill a Mockingbird”), this one is pretty mature, sharp and bold for its day.

Ever seen that smoldering scene between Bette Davis and Paul Henreid, in which they stand there with all their clothes on in misty black and white shadow, and he places two cigarettes betweem his lips, lights them both and hands one to her as they gaze desirously at one another? That’s from “Now, Voyager” (1942), about a seemingly hopeless spinster (Davis) who’s brought around by her shrink (Claude Rains) and blossoms when she meets the suave (but married) Henreid. Directed by Irving Rapper (“Rhapsody in Blue”), this forbidden-love melodrama made movie smoking sexy, a trend later perfected by Bogie and Bacall.

In “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison” (1957), tough Marine lifer Robert Mitchum and wise but delicate nun Deborah Kerr find themselves in a potential Adam-and-Eve situation on a Pacific island taken over by Japanese troops during World War II. They have to hide and survive together in a small, primitive world teeming with deadly enemies. One of the great bittersweet war love stories, an uplifting heartbreaker directed with great care by John Huston.

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961), another Blake Edwards-directed comedy-drama, based on a Truman Capote story with a wonderful score by Henry Mancini that includes the classic “Moon River,” stars Audrey Hepburn as a Manhattan party girl and George Peppard as a sardonic young writer who meet, fall in love and find a chance to save each other from their self-demeaning lifestyles. Hepburn and Peppard boil up the perfect chemistry, with a supporting cast that includes Buddy Ebsen (TV’s Jed Clampett) in a heart-melting turn as Hepburn’s deserted country-bumpkin husband.

In “The Bridges of Madison County” (1995), flinty-eyed Clint Eastwood shows his sentimental side as director and star, turning a second-rate romance novel by Robert James Waller into a film of quiet yet powerful beauty about two people — a worldly photographer and a neglected farmer’s wife (Meryl Streep) — who meet in the visually mesmerizing Iowa countryside, fall deeply in love, then face the harsh realities of their situation after four days of illicit romantic bliss. No blood spilled here, just plenty of tears.

The silly but sweet “There’s Something About Mary” (1998) is an uproariously funny tale of a hopeless nerd (Ben Stiller) who almost makes it to the prom with the queen of everyone’s dreams (Cameron Diaz), only to lose his chance in a disastrous bathroom mishap. He finds a second chance years later, although there are several sleazy adversaries (Matt Dillon, Chris Elliott) working against him. Lots of lowbrow jokes and deliberate politically incorrect humor, but there’s a warm heart at its center. It was co-written and directed by Bobby and Peter Farrelly (“Dumb & Dumber,” “Me, Myself & Irene”).

“Somewhere in Time” (1980) is an old-fashioned romantic fantasy in the tradition of “Laura” and “Portrait of Jennie” about a disillusioned modern-day playwright (Christopher Reeve) who falls in love with a painting of a 19th-century actress (Jane Seymour) and finds a way to overcome the barrier of time to meet and court her. Richard Matheson, best known for penning some of the classic ’60s “Twilight Zone” episodes as well as the more recent feature “What Dreams May Come,” sends a major candygram to the heart. Shot against the beautiful green backdrop of Mackinac Island by director Jeannot Szwarc (“Enigma,” “Jaws 2”), it features a memorable love theme by John Barry, played by Roger Williams.

Then there’s the king of the torch-carriers, Humphrey Bogart’s cynical Rick, who gets one last shot at holding the woman he thought he’d lost (Ingrid Bergman at her most radiant), only to make the ultimate lover’s sacrifice for conscience and the wartime cause in “Casablanca” (1942). Play it again, Sam.

Finally, there’s “Annie Hall” (1977), Woody Allen’s hilarious examination of why fools like all of us fall in and out of love. It’s one of the smartest and most touching romantic comedies ever made, mainly because it’s a painfully honest semi-autobiographical account of his affair with co-star Diane Keaton. He sums it all up in the end when he tells an old joke about a guy who tells a psychiatrist, “Doc, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.” And the doc says, “Well, why don’t you turn him in?” And the guy says, “I would, but I need the eggs.”

“Well, I guess that’s pretty much how I feel about relationships,” Woody concludes. “You know, they’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd, but I guess we keep goin’ through it because, uh, most of us need the eggs.”
Happy egg hunting, lovers.

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – As an actor, Clint Eastwood has dispatched more than his share of fictional adversaries into the great beyond. But as a director, when it comes to the mysterious passage from life to death, he admits he doesn’t have any answers. Only questions.

Clint Eastwood

And those are posed with admirable art, rigorous curiosity and glancing uncertainty in his new film “Hereafter,” a moody, yearning examination of life’s most nagging question: What happens to us after we die?

At a press conference hosted by Warner Bros. before the film’s closing-night premiere at the New York Film Festival, director Eastwood and his cast engaged in a rambling exchange with film journalists that sometimes smacked of an airy New Age seminar on the afterlife.

“Most religions seem to ponder the afterlife, but I thought this was interesting because it wasn’t really a religious project,” Eastwood said. “It had a spirituality about it, but it was not necessarily tied in with any particular organized thought.

“And I think everybody, whether you believe in the afterlife or the chance of this near-death experience and coming back, whether that has really happened or not, I don’t know, certainly everyone has thought about it at some point in time,” he said. “And it’s a fantasy that if there is anything out there like that it would be terrific. But that remains to be seen.”

“Hereafter,” which stars Matt Damon as a self-questioning San Francisco psychic, interweaves the stories of three unrelated people in far-flung locales struggling with the overwhelming tragedy of sudden death and seeking to find answers about eternal life.

Matt Damon

“It was a terrific script,” Damon said of Peter Morgan’s speculative screenplay. “It was really tight. It read like a play in a sense where sometimes when you do a play you just explore the material and every answer you need is there. I’m somebody who does a lot of research normally on my own, but in this case I really didn’t want to go down the rabbit hole. It was really all on the page.”

“The film is really a story of inquiry and curiosity and a feeling of incompleteness and a feeling of living with mystery,” said Morgan, whose resume includes celebrated scripts for “Frost/Nixon” and “The Queen.” “And that’s something that unites every one of us. Other than the act of being born, none of us know where we’re going. None of us has any idea, and we’re going to do all of it alone. I thought it would be quite interesting just to provoke those questions without offering any answers. You know, it’s very private.”

Eastwood emphasized that the film poses mysteries with no concrete solutions.

“The questions are there,” he said. “You pose the questions and then it’s up to the audience to meet you half way and think about it in terms their own lives and what their thoughts are or what experiences they might have had.”
For his part, Eastwood said he has had a couple of brushes with death that left him vaguely wondering about eternity.

“I remember when I was very young, my dad was taking me into the surf on his shoulders and I fell off,” the director said. “And I can still remember today, even though I was probably 4 or 5 years old, I can still remember the color of the water and everything as I was being washed around in the surf before I popped to the surface again. But at that age you don’t think too much about (death).

“And then years later, when I was 21 years old, I was in a plane and we had to ditch off the coast of Northern California in the wintertime,” he recalled. “And I must say that as I was going in to shore I was thinking that I should be thinking about my demise, but all I was thinking about, as I saw some lights in the far distance, I said, ‘somebody is in there having a beer and sitting next to a fireplace, and I just want to be in there. So I’m going to make it.’

“And that was the determination,” he continued. “but there was no sense of fate out there. I don’t think you get a chance to think that much. When you get that much time to think you’re usually going to be OK.”

Eastwood, 80, whose burgeoning resume has put him in the director’s chair for both personal, human-scale dramas and epic, action-packed sagas, said he had to perform a delicate balancing act in “Hereafter.” The film opens with a stunningly realistic, large-scale depiction of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people before segueing into the more intimate, intermingling stories of his characters’ tortured questing.

“I thought an unusual aspect of the script was taking actual events and placing them into a fictional story,” Eastwood said. “And so the tsunami of 2004 out in the Pacific was one and then the London bombings of 2005, of course. I thought that was a unique thing to do.

“But the tsunami sequence was very difficult to do,” he said. “I thought that would be prohibitive and where would we do that. In the old days I suppose you would have done that on the set and you’d have done little set pieces and turned a lot of water lose.

“But with the element now of computer-generated effects you could go ahead and do it. Even though water is probably the most difficult thing to do in a CGI basis,” he said. “I have a guy named Michael Owens who worked with me on ‘Letters From Iwo Jima,’ ‘Flags of Our Fathers’ and back as far as ‘Space Cowboys,’ and he kept very much hip on the technology as it had been improving over the years. And we went through it and figured out what shots we would need to do live, and then we did it. But it took us a lot of different places.”

Eastwood said they shot some live sequences in a giant water tank in London and then went to Maui and shot in the ocean and on the streets of Lahaina.

“From then on it was piecing all the elements together with the connective shots,” he said. “If you don’t pre-plan, CGI is the most expensive thing in the world. So you have to plan every single shot, and that’s normally not the way I shoot. But this time it worked out rather well.”

Eastwood admitted the tonal difference between the tsunami sequence depicted in the film’s preview trailers and the smaller-scale story that follows might be confusing to some film goers.

“With trailers you’re most of the time fighting the studio because they want to tell the whole story in a matter of 30 seconds,” the director said.

“Any marketing department is always going to want to show the scope,” said Damon. “And (the tsunami) is an incredible sequence. I understand you want people to be totally surprised by it, but at the end of the day they’re in that situation where they want people to come see the movie. With ‘The Informant’ I kind of jokingly went on David Letterman and intercut scenes from ‘Transformers’ into the trailer to try to get people to go, just to say, ‘yeah, it’s about a whistleblower but a lot of (stuff) blows up, too.’”

“Yeah,” Eastwood agreed. “I would have preferred not showing the tsunami (in the trailer) and just having it sprung on everybody, but that’s just not the practicalities of life. You do want people to come in and see it and hopefully they’ll enjoy it.”

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – The vague eccentricities of movie moguls are something screenwriters have endured since the earliest days of Selznick, DeMille and Goldwyn.

Peter Morgan

But British screenwriter Peter Morgan said he encountered a particularly odd and endearing one in the process of getting his new film, “Hereafter,” through the first stages of pre-production. “Hereafter,” produced by Steven Spielberg, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Matt Damon, tells three interlinking stories of people dealing with sudden death and pondering ethereal questions of an afterlife.

“I knew because (the screenplay) had three stories and was somewhat unconventional, I wanted some feedback. So I gave my agent the script and said, ‘what do you think?’” Morgan said during a press conference before the movie’s premiere at the New York Film Festival. “And they gave it to (producer Kathleen) Kennedy. And I kept waiting for the notes, and Kathy Kennedy gave it to Steven Spielberg, and it started getting more and more ridiculous.

“And then Steven Spielberg asked me to fly out (to Los Angeles),” said the London-based screenwriter, whose reality-based movies include “Frost/Nixon,” “The Queen,” and “The Last King of Scotland.” “So, of course, I went – you know, for an English screenwriter this is a rite of passage, you’re on the plane, off to meet Spielberg. And he said, ‘would you mind if I gave this to my friend Clint Eastwood?’

“Prior to that, I think I should say – I hope he doesn’t hate me for this – I was in a boardroom at DreamWorks and the assistant walked in and said, ‘Mr. Spielberg has taken to having his meetings in the dark.’ So all the lights were turned off. And this distended voice said, ‘would you mind if I show this to my friend Clint Eastwood?’

“This was the most surreal meeting I’d ever been in in my life,” Morgan said with a wry chuckle. “I thought maybe he’d had facial surgery or something. But it wasn’t that. And as the light faded and I saw him and we talked, it was a lovely, lovely meeting. I don’t know, I think it was more conducive, I think it’s rather a good idea. Perhaps we should turn out all the lights for this press conference.”

Bryce Dallas Howard, left, and Matt Damon.

“Hereafter” begins placidly enough as it introduces us to Parisian TV news anchor Marie Lelay, vacationing at a balmy Indonesian beach resort with her producer-lover. While on an early morning shopping stroll to buy souvenirs, Marie and others in the busy street market become vaguely aware of a far-off roar and a stiff, rising breeze.

Those are eerie precursors of the massive tsunami that roared across the Indian Ocean in 2004, pummeling the coastline and sweeping some 230,000 people to their deaths. Director Clint Eastwood recreates that disaster in horrifying, hydraulic, chaotic detail with a realistic, workmanlike special-effects sequence (much of it achieved through CGI) that puts the razzle-dazzle trickery of most younger Hollywood blockbuster turks to shame.

But that’s merely the storm before the calm. “Hereafter” quickly shifts into a somber, pensive mood as it ventures to three countries and visits the lives of three desperate people forced to confront death and struggling with nagging questions about what comes after.

The film — contemplative, oblique and deliberately paced — seems at first blush an unlikely New Agey departure for the famously steely, straight-shooting director. But on second thought, in Eastwood’s earthy cinematic realm, sudden death is a prevailing presence, and the hereafter is often the ultimate destination for the good, the bad and the ugly who populate his films.

Death hovers over this story like an elegant, jazz-infused pall as Eastwood works mightily to pull all the film’s disparate elements into a harmonious whole.

The script by Peter Morgan (“The Queen”) interweaves three story strands — revisiting the mournful Marie (Belgian actress Cecile de France) after her near-death experience in the tsunami; looking in on George Lonegan (a solid Matt Damon), a reluctant San Francisco psychic whose gift has become a soul-crushing burden; and introducing us to hardscrabble London twins Marcus and Jacob (nonacting, 12-year-old brothers George and Frankie McLaren) as they fend off social services and cover up for their drug-dependent mother.

Marie, once a confident, rising media star, is haunted by visions of mortality and now questions everything she once held dear. George is determined to put his psychic powers on the shelf, but the pleas of a greedy brother (Jay Mohr) and a stalled romance with a charming cooking-class student (Bryce Dallas Howard) make him doubtful he can ever have a normal life free from intimations of death. And sudden tragedy sends twin Marcus on a quest to find a noncharlatan psychic who can put him in touch with the afterlife.

Eastwood’s great skill as a director has often enabled him to transform soft, fuzzy narratives to a tougher plane. He’s possessed of a dead-on bunkum detector that allows him to tamp down cliches and homilies, inject a healthy jolt of pragmatism and bring out the best in potentially mushy material (see “The Bridges of Madison County”).

In his measured, unassuming style, he allows the action here to unfold naturally — letting the story threads come together (perhaps a little too neatly), allowing his actors to invest their melancholy characters with a hard-won sense of hope, if no real semblance of eternal certainty. Even with a slightly forced, feel-good ending, questions linger, answers remain elusive. “Hereafter” starts with a bang but ends, like life, with that final cosmic query lingering in the air.

— Dennis King

MOVIE REVIEW

“Hereafter”

PG-13

2:08

3 stars

Starring: Matt Damon, Cecile de France, Bryce Dallas Howard, Frankie and George McLaren, Jay Mohr.

(Thematic elements including disturbing disaster and accident images, brief strong language)

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – At 80 years old, Clint Eastwood says he is not ready to hang up his spurs as a filmmaker.

The actor turned four-time Oscar winning producer-director (for producing and directing “Unforgiven,” producing “Million Dollar Baby,” and for lifetime achievement with the Irving Thalberg Award) is currently releasing his 34th title as a director – “Hereafter,” an ambitious, autumnal drama that contemplates death and the afterlife.

Clint Eastwood and Cecile de France

But at a Warner Bros. press conference accompanying the film’s release, Eastwood brushed aside any notion that he was contemplating his own mortality or even thinking of retirement.

“There’s a Portuguese director still making films at a hundred years old,” Eastwood said, “and I plan on doing the same thing.” (Manoel de Oliveira is actually 101 years old and recently released a new film, “O Estranho Caso de Angelica,” set in the 1950s, and telling the story of a photographer who is asked by hotel owners to take portraits of their recently deceased daughter.)

Still, Eastwood said he did wonder at the phenomenon of many great, iconic Hollywood directors whose work trailed off as they aged or who left the director’s chair while they still seemingly had stories to tell.

“Hereafter” star Matt Damon, appearing in his second film with the director, said he’s been amazed at Eastwood’s speed, ease and fearlessness as a filmmaker.

“I actually asked Clint on ‘Invictus’ about directors as they got older,” said Damon. “Why was it that they historically seemed to fall off? I remember asking him, ‘why is that?’ Because Clint’s obviously completely avoided that. And he thought about it for a good 10 seconds and then just said, ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense to me.’

“It doesn’t to me either because presumably the older we get, the wiser we get, the more knowledge you have about filmmaking, the more different types of films you’ve made,” Damon said. “And so it is kind of mystifying to me that many of the great directors, not all of them, but many of them kind of fell off as they got older.”

“I was always sort of shocked about that, too,” Eastwood agreed. “I knew Frank Capra a little bit, and I spent some time with him in the summers and he was always so bright I wondered, ‘why isn’t this guy still working?’ And I also knew Billy Wilder somewhat, and he had actually stopped working in his 60s. And I thought, that’s amazing, here’s a guy that lived well into his 90s and didn’t work. I never could figure that.

“I figure your best work should be at a point where you’ve absorbed all this knowledge,” Eastwood continued. “Now, maybe they just didn’t keep up with the times or they picked story material that didn’t work and they have a few pictures that don’t do so well and then all of a sudden, you know people are very fickle, the Hollywood thing is very fickle and they kind of move on.”

Quick to dispel any doubts about Eastwood’s enthusiasm and vitality, Belgian actress Cecile de France, 35, who plays a Parisian TV journalist swept up in the tsunami in “Hereafter’s” massive, special-effects heavy action sequence, said working with Eastwood was an exhilarating experience.

“I was very pride to do my own stunts, no?” De France said in halting English “And of course I remember a very good memory when we were shooting in Hawaii. Clint jump with us in the big waves in the ocean. The little crew were in the water, and Clint just take his shirt off and came in with us. It’s an amazing memory for me.”

Eastwood said his longevity is largely a matter of good luck, but he is aware of some adjustments and limitations he’s observed as he’s gotten older.

“Everything for me is spontaneous. ‘Unforgiven’ is an example of a script that I liked right away, but thought I’d like to do this when I’m older,” he said. “So I stuck it in a drawer for 10 years. Other projects just come to me. ‘A Perfect World’ or whatever. And I have no rhyme or reason. I wish I could give you some pseudo-intellectual thing that would be great. And maybe if this was a French cinema class I’d have to fake something. But if I started evaluating myself I’m afraid that I would not be able to fake intelligently about every project and the various makings thereof.”

Listed on wimgo Movies under Drama

Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of ’Shutter Island’ pays homage to Gothics

BY GENE TRIPLETT

Dennis Lehane has learned how to describe “Shutter Island” to a potential reader or viewer without giving away any of the dark plot twists or clues to the shocking surprise ending of his chilling Gothic thriller.

“I’ve had a lot of practice, so don’t worry about it,” the author said in a recent phone interview. “The first thing you would say is, ‘You’ll never see where it’s going.’ The word you hear most about this book is, ‘It’s a trip.’ I mean, it’s taking you on a pretty wild ride.”

Published in 2003, the Boston-born writer’s eighth novel, set in the year 1954, tells the story of two U.S. marshals investigating the mysterious disappearance of a murderess from a federal hospital for the criminally insane on one of the remotest of the Boston Harbor Islands.

The book became a movie in 2010 under the direction of Martin Scorsese, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo as the investigators and Ben Kingsley as the institution’s inscrutable head psychiatrist. Now it’s out on DVD, and Lehane was doing a round of interviews in the hope of enticing a few more thriller lovers into taking a “trip” behind the walls of Ashecliffe Hospital, where nothing is remotely what it seems.

Rachel Solando, who murdered her children, is loose somewhere on the island, having inexplicably escaped a locked, guarded cell under constant surveillance. A killer hurricane is rolling down on the island as U.S. Marshals Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Ruffalo) search for the missing inmate, and Daniels is beginning to suspect the existence of radical experimentations and surgeries being performed on the patients.

Or is something wholly other going on?

Lehane is the author of two other novels turned into well respected films: “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone,” directed by Clint Eastwood and Ben Affleck, respectively.

Dennis Lehane

Unlike those stories, which took a lot of time to plan out, Lehane said the complete narrative of “Shutter Island” came to him in one night — in his sleep.

“Yeah, one night I had this bizarre, almost waking dream,” he said. “It’s hard to describe. I got up, scribbled everything down on a piece of paper, woke up the next morning, and there it was.”

He wishes every book could come to him so easily.

“Yeah, that would be nice,” he said. “That would be awesome actually.”

Lehane was on the set during the making of the film, and actor Ruffalo got to know him a bit.

“Yeah, I went out and had drinks with him,” Ruffalo recalled in a separate interview conducted Sunday in Beverly Hills. “I really liked him. He’s a great guy. A great writer, really down to earth. But, you know, using that book for the movie was fantastic for me because that did 90 percent of my work.”

And Ruffalo also praised Scorsese for skillfully translating Lehane’s complex and atmospheric novel to the screen.

Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, Leonardo DiCaprio, from left, in "Shutter Island."

“Scorsese, he shows you movies to inspire you,” Ruffalo said. “So we were steeped in ‘Out of the Past’ and ‘Laura’ and all of these films that were from that noir sort of period, which is Gothic. And so, basically I was trying to really do as best an impersonation as I could of Robert Mitchum. And so I think that translates really well. It’s hard to do that, especially with a book with that many turns and twists in it. It’s really hard. And so hats off to Marty again for that.”

Lehane agreed that his vision had been accurately captured on film by the director, who, surprisingly, was working from a screen adaptation written by Laeta Kalogridis.

(Lehane said he never attempts to turn his books into screenplays because “it’s just like operating on your own child if you’re a doctor. I don’t see how anybody can do it.”)

“I loved it,” the writer said. “I mean (Scorsese) got it. He got what I was playing with and what I was trying for. And he did cinematically what I did in the language of the novel. The language of the novel is heightened in such a way that you should be aware very early that you’re reading a novel, that this is an homage to Gothics, that this is basically a book about being a book in a lot of ways.

“And he made a movie about being a movie. The movie is in your face as a movie right from the beginning. You should realize very quickly you’re not in the real world, you’re in Oz.”