Perplexingly, a widely-shared interview with Clint Eastwood, published in an Austrian newspaper, is “phony” according to the legend himself.
Update, 10pm, 2nd June 2025: Proving that reality is a hall of mirrors and nothing can be trusted, a widely-shared interview, in which Clint Eastwood condemned the advent of sequels and franchises, was entirely fabricated according to the legendary actor-director himself.
In a statement shared with Deadline, Eastwood said he wanted to “set the record straight” on an interview published by the Austrian newspaper Kurier – a piece Film Stories quoted in a news piece yesterday.
“I can confirm I’ve turned 95,” Eastwood said in a statement. “I can also confirm that I never gave an interview to an Austrian publication called Kurier, or any other writer in recent weeks, and that the interview is entirely phony.”
Quite why a small newspaper would entirely make up an interview that could be easily shot down by its subject is currently unclear. All we know for now is that bits of it were shared widely, both by Film Stories and outlets like Reuters, Variety and Vanity Fair. At the time of writing, the original piece (written in German) is still online.
Maybe it was all an elaborate social experiment, designed to show how far something made-up can travel across the internet before anyone can uncover the ruse.
Whatever the truth, we’ve left the original story below for posterity. Just bear in mind that none of it, per Eastwood himself, is true.
Our original story follows…
Original Story from 6:50am, 2nd June 2025: Clint Eastwood may be 95 years old, but he’s still enthused by the filmmaking process, and by the discovery and creation of new stories. Oh, and he also doesn’t have a lot of time for those that are content to turn out reheated ideas in the form of sequels, franchises and remakes.
What’s more, he’s offered a few thoughts on the situation.
Eastwood of course was the director of last year’s Juror #2 – a smart and original crime thriller that was exactly the kind of original and entertaining kind of film that used to be the lifeblood of Hollywood. However, as the film’s woeful marketing and release strategy (it was a Warner Bros production) proved, it seems that Hollywood studios don’t even know what to do with these kinds of films now. Even when they have excellent ones right in front of them simply awaiting discovery by an audience.
In a recent interview Eastwood gave to Austrian newspaper Kurier, per Reuters, he talked about the problems with modern Hollywood: “I long for the good old days when screenwriters wrote movies like Casablanca in small bungalows on the studio lot. When everyone had a new idea … We live in an era of remakes and franchises. I’ve shot sequels three times, but I haven’t been interested in that for a long while. My philosophy is: do something new or stay at home.”
Read more: Juror #2 review | All rise for Clint Eastwood’s superb courtroom thriller
In an era where originality is feared more than it is prized, it’s very difficult to disagree with the man. Especially when Hollywood’s lack of originality is often self-defeating and the industry shrinks in the face of other media, causing it to become even less risk averse and creating a vicious cycle.
Eastwood drove home the point, adding that throughout his half-century-long career, he has been pushed to adapt, which enabled him to pick up new skills: “As an actor, I was still under contract with a studio, was in the old system, and thus forced to learn something new every year, and that’s why I’ll work as long as I can still learn something, or until I’m truly senile.”
Again, it’s a good point. We’re all products of our environment and if storytellers and executives are trained on a diet of developing remakes and franchises, how can we expect them to suddenly burst with originality in the same way that as audiences, we have gradually been conditioned into accepting films with colons or numbers slapped on them as the norm.
As for Eastwood, he’s not interested in numbers next to films – or the ones that describe his supposed age. “There’s no reason why a man can’t get better with age,” he concludes. “And I have much more experience today. Sure, there are directors who lose their touch at a certain age, but I’m not one of them.”
He certainly isn’t.
