Is That Clint Eastwood Interview Real? HFPA Journalist Says She Aggregated Old Quotes After Director Calls Out ‘Phony' Story
In a statement to Variety, Elisabeth Sereda, a journalist and longtime member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, says that she was tapped by Austrian publication Kurier to write a tribute timed to Eastwood's 95th birthday on May 31. Sereda says she pulled quotes from various Eastwood interviews conducted by the HFPA, dating back to 1976.
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'Quotes from Mr. Eastwood cited in the story are culled from several of those 14 press conferences I attended and covered,' Sereda writes.
The Kurier tribute, published in German, was then translated and aggregated by various outlets, including Variety. On Monday, Eastwood released a statement to Deadline in which he 'set the record straight,' and clarified 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.'
Per Reuters, Kurier has since pulled the article, reporting that the publication said 'the article fell short of its standards.'
It's not the first time that a Hollywood Foreign Press member has claimed that they drew from group press conferences for an article. In 2018, former HFPA president Aida Takla O'Reilly said a bizarre interview with Drew Barrymore, published by EgyptAir's in-flight magazine, was 'genuine and far from fake,' though may have been erroneously edited by the publication.
Sereda's statement would indicate that Eastwood did, in fact, give the quotes contained within her article — but they could've been spoken at any time over several decades. One quote, in which Eastwood says he's 'shot sequels three times,' may provide a hint. By 1980, Eastwood had made two 'Dirty Harry' follow-ups — 'Magnum Force' (1973) and 'The Enforcer' (1976) — as well as the primate buddy-comedy sequel 'Any Which Way You Can.' Another 'Dirty Harry' sequel, his self-directed 'Sudden Impact,' released in 1983. (This isn't counting Sergio Leone's The Man With No Name spaghetti westerns, which were packaged and marketed as a trilogy after the production of 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.')
With that math, this full Eastwood quote — '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' — may date back to the early-'80s. That that potentially decades-old statement was widely interpreted as contemporaneous, and still resonates with readers now, is certainly something though.
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