Behind the Scenes Dirty Harry Siegel 1971 with Clint Eastwood and Andrew Robinson

This is a .44 Magnum, as you know, the most powerful handgun in the world. Not anymore, but it was then. And it has fired neither five nor six because it's empty. And this is one of the original guns from the movie. And when I did the second movie, I said, I want one of those guns. Can't you get the prop department to steal one of those guns and give it to me? So Clint and Warner Brothers publicity guy arranged to get that. And they put a plaque on it and everything. So it's a very valuable gun now. It's become an icon. I was born in San Francisco and raised in the Bay Area most of my life. So I've always had an affinity for this particular area, especially for locations. However, I must confess that Don Siegel and I were on our way to Seattle to look at that as a place for Dirty Harry because it hadn't been photographed too much at that particular time. And San Francisco had had a lot of films in the 60s and early 70s. But we came through here and took a look around. And it's hard to go past San Francisco. And the idea was that Dirty Harry was supposed to be an outsider, that he was supposed to be a loner that didn't really have any relationships with women other than hookers or something like that. He lived alone. He had lousy food in his icebox, a couple of beers. He had no life except the hunt. And that was enough because he was a hunter. That's why he carried a .44 Magnum because it was a gun that was developed for hunting. And I remember in the first draft of the script, he says, you really want to go hunting? Get your badge. I think that Dirty Harry was a very violent movie. But it was a cool character. And I think the reason why people admired the character so much was because he was not operating within a framework of the law, so to speak. But he was stepping kind of out and taking things a little bit into his own hands. And I think that's what people admire a lot of times. They like to see movies and idolize people that can do that because they themselves, people in general in America and worldwide, feel powerless. So they all of a sudden, they see a guy that all of a sudden takes the blow into his own hands and takes care of the job in a very cool way, not in a traditional way. You know, hold up your arms. You are under arrest. No, he was eating a hamburger. He was eating a hamburger. He just happened to get a glimpse of some crime that is being committed out there. But it was like not like making a call and get the authority and getting another police car and all this. No, he just went out there eating his hamburger and blasting the criminal away. Clint Eastwood was like my inspiration. I remember when I think about it, when I came to this country, there was like, you know, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Kirk Douglas. There was like two, three guys like that that I really admired. And I wanted to have a career like them. And Clint was one of those guys that I always thought, even from the Westerns that he has done before Dirty Harry, you know, that I want to be like him. I want to have this kind of a career, do this kind of movies. So obviously, so he had already impacted me that he was the motivating force for me to come to America and to get into acting in the first place. So obviously, when you then see your idol coming up with a movie like Dirty Harry and creating a whole new standard in action movies, and also to do it with a certain style and the way he played it with a certain, you know, characteristics and lines that were memorable lines, I said to myself, that's what I have to do. I have to go after those kinds of movies. And so for me, there was a motivating force to get into action movies, if it was first the Conan movies and then later on in the Terminator and Commando and Blake Hopps and then Red Heat and all those things. So he was definitely my motivation and was the idol. And that's what I wanted to accomplish. In the 70s, Dirty Harry tapped in on a lot of feelings because at that time, there wasn't much thought of the victims of violent crime. It was mostly, most of the news media and everything was obsessed with the rights of the accused, as they should be. But there was also an underlying thing within society out there in general that felt that maybe there was so much accent put on the rights of the accused that they weren't taking care of the rights of the victim. Well, what's interesting in the Dirty Harry dilemma, that Dirty Harry goes beyond the law to solve, is that we know right from wrong. So we're not talking, I mean, it's like somebody once said that lawyers do not practice justice, they practice law. Whereas Dirty Harry is practicing justice. I suppose I could pseudo-intellectualize and dig up some real deep meaning behind everything we did, but the depth wasn't beyond the man's frustration and there was some frustration with legal decisions that would let a person off and let them back out on the street, even though he was considered extremely dangerous. And there was a wonderful sense in the movie of potency. Because movies had already digressed where a lot of shots were fired. People shot machine guns at each other or automatic pistols. Today, it takes a lot of shots to put a bad guy down. What was nice about the .44 Magnum was it was one shot. And that was all that was necessary. Well, there was a lot of violence in the film, but not violence by the standards they're using today. There was some feeling at that time that there was some great political statement in Dirty Harry. And that just was kind of nonsense. We were just trying to make a good detective story. We didn't care too much about all other stuff. I knew nothing about films or filmmaking. And when they sent me the script for Dirty Harry, I didn't even know how to read a film script. I read it and I didn't like it. And I didn't like it because I just didn't get it. I didn't get how the story was being told. It was very different from reading a play. And I didn't get the character. And the character, of course, was described very differently. He was like this balding guy in a T-shirt with a paunch who hangs around in bus stations. I have no idea why they hired me. I once asked Siegel, why did you hire me for this role? And he said, because I wanted somebody who had the face of a choir boy. So when I got to San Francisco, I said to Don, I said, you know, I can only do what I can do because I'm not that guy on the page. And Don said, I didn't hire the guy on the page, I hired you. So I walked into Dirty Harry playing this basically deranged Vietnam veteran. And the violence of the film and the character I'm playing being the perpetrator of the violence of the film, it was tough for me, but I'm also an actor. And basically what happened was a collaboration began. And it opened my eyes to what filmmaking was about. And it was probably the most important and the most complete collaboration I've ever had as an actor in film. There's a moment in the film where he holds the gun on the Scorpio killer and he says, I know what you're thinking. Did I fire five or six? The famous line, the famous line. If I had a buck for every guy, and it's always a guy, by the way, all over the world who's come up to me and quoted that line in its entirety to me, I gotta tell you, I'd be a rich man now. Did he fire six shots or only five? Was really unique because to come up and have sort of a playful interaction with somebody you've just shot and he sort of torments him was something that hadn't been done too much in film. And reprising it at the end, he'd become more bitter, but it was like his running routine. He still knew all the words to it, but his attitude was totally different because he was, at that time, very disenchanted with the way things had gone. On Dirty Harry, the first one, and he got hit very hard for Dirty Harry being a vigilante. And the second one, he tried to soften that image a lot by this time going after the people who were doing very dangerous things. Well, Clint would give very specific instructions and he would say, you've got too many words here. I don't say words real good. I stare real well. I mean, Clint's great. Clint, there's no nonsense, there's no pretension. The characters, as you portray them, you try to portray them as honestly as you can. And because in a film, in any drama, whether it's a film or a play or what have you, even liars think they're right. So everybody, the antagonist thinks he's right. The villain in a piece thinks he's right. Oh, well, society didn't treat me right, so that's why I'm doing this. That's the way it is in real life. It's just people do that. It's much akin to, we see it happening all the time now because we live in this era of blaming everybody for everything and that kind of goes along with that. It's like if a bartender's working for you and he steals from the employer, it's, oh, well, I bring a lot of people in here. I'm important to the business. So he's dishonest, but he's rationalizing in his mind that he's done a great deed for his dishonesty. And that kind of goes about with any story. You approach a story much like real life. You try to tell it whether you're playing, whoever you're playing in it, you try to make him as honest a character, as real life a character as possible. When I got Magnum Force, what we did do a little bit was to try to make him a little more human that he gets involved with another side, another aspect of his life, which is the feminine side, knowing that getting to meet somebody who could in some ways suggest that he wasn't all cop, that there was another human side to him. There was just no time for that. Usually there was a case going on and so there wasn't time for romance. I didn't intend to do a series of sequels. When I did Every Which Way But Loose years later, I never intended to do a sequel to that. And when I did Fistful of Dollars, I never intended to do sequels to that, but they just kind of came about. But at the stage I am now and the type of things I've been doing in the last decade or so, other than doing a genre repeat such as Unforgiven where you revisit a genre that you've had some success with, I don't necessarily like to go back to the same characters anymore. I think if you'll look at things like Die Hard and the success that Die Hard was and a lot of the way that Bruce Willis approached his character, I think even to some extent, a lot of the things that Schwarzenegger did later on, you can see clearly that they were all generational prototypes of Dirty Harry. I think it had a tremendous impact on cop films that came after that. When I saw Dirty Harry, I remember I went to see it not only once, but I saw it five times in a row because it had such a tremendous impact on me. And it was like, not only on me, but also on a lot of other people, obviously, because it became like the action movie, a new standard of action movies. I think that we've heard all this Make My Day and Do You Feel Lucky Punk and all of those kind of things. We have seen now millions of times over not only in America, but worldwide. So I think that the Clint Eastwood there created something that was unlike anything else. Yeah, I think it influenced a lot of people at that time. A lot of people tried other detective stories, lone wolf kind of cop things, but some of them worked, some of them didn't. The character of Harry Callahan, I think has spawned a lot of wannabes, a lot of imitations. Well, I think that Clint showed us clearly that when you want to do an action movie and really portray a guy in an interesting way, you should make him multidimensional. You shouldn't make just the guy be a straight cop. That doesn't work. I mean, we have seen that too many times on TV shows and all that. But what works is to play around with the character in such a way like he does, very soft-spoken. He never screamed like you normally see when people play cops, doing all the screaming and all the fuss, acting totally out of control a lot of times. He didn't do that. He was, like I said, very calm. He was eating his sandwich or his hamburger, he was pulling out the gun, and he was doing his job. That's what he was doing. And then every time he talked to anyone, any time he negotiated, any time he dealt with anyone, everything was in a very calm way. And I think because he acted so calm and he said lines that were quite humorous, he became really hysterical for people. You could laugh in his movies, you could sit there and be entertained like in a comedy sometimes, and at the same time, two seconds later, be totally scared and frightened because he got very intense. So he gave you kind of a multidimensional character, which I think worked really well and became the new standard for action movies and for those kind of films. You know, I think the thing I remember most about Clint Eastwood is that a year or so later, I hadn't yet had a lot of success and I was still a struggling actor in Hollywood. And I was going on readings and of course he had his company over at Warner Brothers, Malpaso Company. And I was going to the Warner Brothers lot to audition for some part in something. I can't remember what it was. And I had my script and I had worked on it for days and I was on one side of the street, on the lot, walking to the interview. And on the other side of the street was Clint and Ted Post, who directed a lot of those early movies. And I kind of glanced over there, oh my God, it's Clint, you know? And I was still very impressed by him and intimidated by him a little bit. And I looked over and I don't know if he saw me or not, but he kind of looked over and then crossed, I didn't even think he would remember me. He crossed the street and came up to me and he said, hi Bob, how you doing? How's it going? And I thought, Clint Eastwood is the greatest guy on the planet. He's the greatest guy in the world. And he remembered me from that small role in Magnum Force. And he was off doing other big movies. So that's one of my, maybe the most important memory I had of Clint Eastwood in that time in my life. It was fun for a while. And people still now, once in a while, people say, wait, why don't you do another Dirty Harry? But wait a second now, he's a different guy. And he's, what would I be doing? Would I be out there fly fishing or something like that? And then some case comes along, he's retired from the force, of course, long retired. And yet in some instance, I guess that could be feasible, but I don't see it. And I've never had a writer come up with an idea that was at least that provocative. And sometimes it's best to leave a good thing alone. Well, actors directing himself goes back a long way, goes back into some of the two real Westerns that were made years ago, William S. Hart and various people. I think then, of course, Orson Welles made a big impact with his Citizen Kane. A lot of people up through the years have done it. And some people quite successfully and some not. The actors should convert to directing very well because they've spent all their life on the sets and they know kind of the working and they know what it takes and what the job of most crew members are. And so they should make the transition very well. Sometimes it's a little difficult doing both jobs because you have to be able to switch your mind from the setup and the framing and the whole overlook of the film and then jump into it at the same time. So you're jumping right into the center of it. But with me, I did it as a necessity because when Play Misty, for me, if I was in it, I could get the film made. Before that, it was sitting on the shelf at Universal. And so I asked them if I could direct it and they said, sure. They said, we don't particularly wanna pay you for it though. So, but that was fine. I told my agent, Leonard Hershan, I said, they shouldn't really have to pay me. I'd pay them for the opportunity. However, he negotiated a deal where they gave just a percentage and the percentage turned out to be quite good because the film didn't cost very much. So it managed to break even and go on. But it's a difficult job. I don't recommend it and I've always threatened to not do it. I've always threatened. I said, well, I'll do this one more time and then I'll either direct or act. But the one more time always ended up being another and then another. Or I couldn't get the director I wanted and I thought, I brought in somebody I didn't know. You're sort of stuck with their concept and if their concept doesn't agree with yours, then you're stuck with that. So on some projects, you just do it yourself and other projects that you get a director and let them take the grief. Clint Eastwood was very, very much that way. Very quiet, very, you know, no big deal. Very unpretentious. Everything is straight up, just what it is. I am sure that he had no trouble all of his life in dealing with fans or anything like that because he probably changed very little as time went on. He's basically the same guy now that I knew back then. And he's a very good person. He's a very generous person. He's one of the few actors that if you call him up, he'll always call you back in an hour or two. And I've made movies that other actors who were famous actors, they're best movies. And if I call him up, they'll say, what does he want, I better check. None of that with Clint. Clint's right up there. Everybody admires him because of that. He has those old, almost Midwest values.