Scott Eastwood Talks About His Dad, Clint Eastwood

My dad eats a lot of salmon. He's big into salmon. Yeah, but your dad's like 100 years old. He's doing great. 91. Did he just turn yesterday? Yeah. Yeah. How badass is he? He's born on Memorial Day. Bad motherfucker. I know. I know. He almost... Oh my gosh. This is a crazy story. I don't know if you know the story, but he was about two seconds from being deployed to the Korean War, and he was in a plane crash off San Francisco when he was 21 years old. Wow. He was in the army, and he was doing a flight somewhere. He had done some training flight or something. They said, oh, you need to hop on this thing. And he said, okay, cool, last minute, I'll go do it. He was in a plane crash. The crash landed outside of San Francisco Bay. And because he ultimately ended up there, I think one person died, him and the pilot or co-pilot, I can't remember, had to swim to shore at night. Jesus Christ. Over two miles, I want to say something crazy. And there's tons of sharks, tons of shit out there in San Francisco. And this was 1950. So at the time, my grandmother, they had told him that he had gone down in a plane crash. She thought he was dead. And there was no cell phones, there was no social media, there was no anything. It took a week for him, by the time he got back and he got back to the thing, to be able to call her after, I don't know, maybe to go to the hospital, I can't remember, for him to be able to call his mother and say, hey, I'm alive. And that is what kept him from going to the Korean War, because he was supposed to be deployed but because he was in this plane crash, he had to stay and testify and do the whole thing and they had just deployed without him. Isn't that crazy how one moment in time can change the whole course of someone's life? Yeah, and a moment that's completely out of your control. There's these weird sort of pathways that you come to in life, gateways, and you go left and you're okay, you go right and the trip ends. Trip's over. Yeah. My dad was born in 1930. That's crazy. Before World War II. That's crazy. Which is nuts. What is it like talking to him? First of all, what is it like being Clint Eastwood's son and also being a movie star yourself? It's got to be weird. It's well, look, I'm stumbling through it just like anyone else in life. You know, you're just you're trying to you taking the information you have trying to make the best decisions of the time. Speaking to my dad, it's like there's a wealth of knowledge and for knocks and you're trying to just like pull little slivers out when you speak to him because you'll just say things casually like, yeah, and everyone shuts the fuck up like a dinner. Finally you'll know he's about to say something and then he'll say, yeah, well, that was back in the sixties. I was with Frank Sinatra at that place at the time and oh, yeah, we did. We met her in the thing and you go, wait, what? Did you say you were with Frank Sinatra? Wait, hold on. Stop. Stop. Give us more. He'll be on to something else and you can't get it out of him. He's just lived this incredible life. Incredible. Incredible. So, you know, I'm trying to right now, I'm trying to just soak up every piece of knowledge I can from him, listen to him, sit with him as much as possible. So I know he's not going to be around forever and that's terrifying to think about, but it's like, oh man, I got to spend every moment I can. Does he exercise? Yeah. He's super active. Obviously he's 91. How old are you? 35. So, he had you way late in life, but he had three kids after me. Whoa, what's the youngest? The youngest is 20. 20? He has had some younger wives. He has a 20 year old kid? Yeah, 23. Holy shit. Shooting live rounds deep, deep, deep in his 60s. Machine gun rounds. Wow, that's crazy. That was that newscaster lady, right? Was that her? It was, it was. Yeah. Wow. She's great actually. She was great. But yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, he had a few younger ladies around. He's such a throwback. He really is, you know? And what's interesting though is like what people think about him. They think they see this bigger than life character, but he's so much more complex than what you see in the movies he's in. He's, there's a lot of nuance. It's like humans, you know? It's like, I'm sure. All humans. People would think about you just because of whatever and they're like, oh, well, he's just this thing. Like, they don't know about your personal life. They don't know about how you are with your kids, how you are, you know, how you think, you know, esoterically about things. And, you know, when you're speaking to your wife, like, he's like much different than just that. He's got a lot of shades and he's, he's very, I think, middle of the road. A lot of things he looks at issues and says, well, this is that and this that and maybe there's a middle ground and I don't know, you know? Well, there's always this urge to dismiss people, any person. You have this reductionist perspective of who that person is and it's hard to just go, to just be curious. And it's just to say, huh, like abandon all your preconceived notions and go imagine, imagine being that guy. Like imagine being Clint Eastwood. Yeah. Imagine being. Lived a lot of lives. Lived like. A lot of lives. Did you ever talk to him about what it was like to be the mayor of Carmel? He was the mayor when I was, when I was a young kid. I was, you know, a few years old. I think he had his fill of politics. That was it. Because they asked him, they were kind of like, well, you know, you've been the mayor now, why don't you, you know, go for governor, you know? And he's like, nah, this shit ain't for me. I just gave it a shot. Yeah, it was, you know, I think it was good. It was, you did what he did, but you know, you can never please everybody. Everyone's, there's always someone pissed off. There's always some conflicting point of view. Always. So. You ever talk to him about that time that he pretended Obama was sitting next to him? No. He was on the podium and that was bizarre. And it was. It's like impromptu. You know, like he just like was winging it. He's winging it. He's doing a bit. He's doing a crazy thing to do. Well, he's TV live. I mean, you do the same thing more or less like. Yeah, but I do it in comedy clubs and everybody knows what I'm doing. But what's the difference, right? It's like you go out, you practice material, you're working material out. Right. It's like, you know, there's, you're getting up in front of people doing something. It's like we call it different because it's like, oh, well, that was that thing. But I guarantee you Obama would not have said the things that he thought Obama would have probably had some pretty nuanced perspectives himself. Sure. Yeah. Like, again, same sort of thing that people wanted to do to him or want to do to other folks like he was kind of doing it to Obama. Look, maybe it didn't work out as material. No, I'm sure he didn't. But it was a bold choice. I was like, wow, how badass is Clint Eastwood? And Richard Pryor do that too. If you go back and listen to Richard Pryor's old cassettes, there's like there's some of them that are available from the Red Fox Comedy Club and you could find them online. But I bought them from a gas station one day in like the 90s, these cassette tapes. And they were all like him at Red Fox's Comedy Club. And it was just him like you could hear drinks clinking. You can hear things in the background and ice and shit. And you hear people talk in and it was just like a small crowd where he was just fucking around. And that's where a lot of like his most brilliant bits came from. Interesting. So it's similar to what your dad was doing, but different. Hey, look, I don't I don't pretend to speak for him. That's, you know, listen, he can do whatever the fuck he wants. He's Clint Eastwood, you know, and you know, one of the things I love your dad did, unforgiven, because like he went back and made like this. I mean, he did obviously he did all those great spaghetti westerns, all those amazing and they call them spaghetti westerns for people who don't know because they did in Italy. Yeah. And so he did all these American Western films, but they were all done in Italy and they were all like people didn't think those are going to be like real successful at the time, right? Yeah, he he was coming off a show called Rawhide. If you remember that show, Rawhide, Roland, Roland, Roland. And and he was actually sick of doing westerns at the time because he was like been doing for seven years and he got an offer to do this spaghetti western. I was like in Italy, I don't know, you know, what should I do? I want to go to Italy. Never been there. OK, pretty good. He goes out there and he works with Sergio Leone and crazy story. He comes back. Actually, I think he might have done all three or he came back and did one and he came back and people started talking about this movie. But it was the movie he had done, he known was an Italian. So it was like poor Uno dollar, poor, you know, poor Dostal. And so he was like, people were saying, you know, this is great movie out, you know, Fistful of Dollars, where it was. And he's like, oh, that's cool. I want to go check it out. No one knew, no, no, no, no. He didn't even know. He didn't know. He didn't know it was his movie that was catching fire in America. And so he's like, oh, I got to check this movie. It's his movie that it caught fire and was overnight sensation. And then, yeah, he just kind of just I don't know, fell into doing those movies, did a few of them. And then he did his own. Then he started directing and doing his own westerns. But bringing it back to Unforgiven, what's really, I think, most interesting about that film is that it is an it's an amalgamation or it's it's the whole history of his westerns, but but really looking back as what would it be like to be an older man and having regret, having things he did wrong, you know, looking back. And so it's kind of using the history that he had created. And talking about what it's like to look back at life and one last ride to do things different for his family. So there's like a lot going into that movie. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, it was a a much more sober and realistic depiction of like a killer in the West. Yeah. You know, being paid, you know, probably not that much money, but like, hey, like we need this person dead. Yeah. And you're the man to go do it. And it's like also there was a much more realistic depiction of the way some people react to the idea that they're about to be killed. Yeah. They're going to have to kill someone. They're going to be in a gunfight where they might they might die. That's a fucking great movie, man. It was almost like he wanted it might. The way I felt to me is like he had all these amazing Westerns that he did. But then there was this one is like, you know, let me do a real one. Like, let me go back and make this fucking thing where he sat on that script for almost 10 years before he made it. Yeah. He was like, this is an amazing. I don't think I'm old enough yet. Oh, wisdom. Wow. Yeah. Wow. You know what else I love? High Plains Drifter. Yeah. I watched that one every couple of years. That's a good one. That's a fucking great one. I like Outlaw Josie Wales. Oh, my God. Yeah. Fucking love that. Love that movie. That's a great one. Yeah. That's a great one. But there's something about High Plains Drifter that's like a ghost movie. You don't realize it. It is. You don't realize it. It's like there's a supernatural element to it. Yeah. What is happening here? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I forgot about that one. Fuck. It's one of my favorites. Yeah. Your dad made some goddamn classics. And then he also made some comedies, you know, Every Which Way But Loose. I mean, what a crazy career. That's one I think they should remake. Haha. With who? How about you? Maybe. Would you do it? That would be weird. Why not? Could you imagine though? Why not bring it on? You know? Yeah. Big old orangutan. I don't want to fuck around with orangutans, bro. You just piss it off for the wrong reason. It rips your hand off. Stuffs it up your ass. They're dangerous. They're so dangerous. Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. 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