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This is FRESH AIR.
I'm David Biancouli.
This week, we're featuring our classic films and movie icons series of interviews from our archives today, westerns.
First up, Clint Eastwood.
He became a tv star as rowdy Yates on Rawhide, but left that series in midstream to go overseas and make movies with italian film director Sergio Leone.
Eastwood's stoic and vengeful character, who appeared in several films, was dubbed the man with no name.
But those italian films made Eastwood not just a star, but an icon.
Terry Gross spoke with Clint Eastwood in 1997.
At the time, he was the subject of a biography by film critic Richard Schickel.
Well, in some of your action roles, in some of your westerns and like Dirty Harry films, you not only don't say a lot, but what you do say, you're saying often through clenched teeth, you know, in that really guttural voice.
How did you develop that style of speech speaking?
I don't know what you're talking about.
Well, I think that the character just drives you in.
That is a character who is maybe frustrated with the things that the common person on the street is frustrated with the bureaucracy that we live in, the nightmare that we as a civilization have placed on ourselves.
And I think this is a person who is frustrated with that, especially if you're trying to solve a case in a limited amount of time.
So make my dayline or the do you feel lucky punk kind of lines.
We're lines that people gravitated towards.
Did you have a sense of that, reading this graph that, you know, presidents would be making, but improvising on those lines and that they'd be people just, they would just enter the general vocabulary.
Could you read a script and say, these lines are going to last beyond the film?