Clint Eastwood

"You have to have the picture there in your mind before you make it. And if you don't, you're not a director, you're a guesser."

Clint Eastwood: Interviews was published in 1999. And in the years since, Eastwood’s thirty year career as a filmmaker has become a more than a forty year career, and his twenty-plus feature films as director have become more than thirty. An expansion to update to the ’99 volume to cover his ongoing and thriving career was in order.

Clint Eastwood: Interviews Revised and Updated (University Press of Mississippi) includes 10 interviews conducted between 1998 and 2011 that bring the interview collection up-to-date. It is worth noting that Eastwood is the first subject in the Conversations with Filmmakers Series to be issued in a second edition.

Clint Eastwood (b. 1930) is the only popular American dramatic star to have shaped his own career almost entirely through films of his own producing, frequently under his own direction. Few other actors have directed themselves so often. He is also one of the most prolific filmmakers, directing thirty-three features since 1971.

Yet he remains an outsider, steadfastly refusing to heed cultural and aesthetic trends in film production and style. His films as director have examined a variety of themes, ranging from the artist's life to the nature of heroism, while frequently calling into question the ethos of masculinity, even as they have remained accessible to a worldwide, popular audience. With two Best Director and two Best Picture Oscars to his credit, Eastwood now ranks among the most highly honored living filmmakers.

Nearly a third of the pieces contained in Clint Eastwood: Interviews Revised and Updated are from European sources including several appearing here in English for the first time. The book also includes an Eastwood chronology and filmography.