“It’s a Hell of a Thing, Killing a Man”: the Birth of Clint Eastwood’s ‘Unforgiven’

In 1976, the TV journalist and aspiring screenwriter David Webb Peoples, under the influence of Martin Scorsese’s and Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver, wrote a dark Western about a band of prostitutes seeking revenge on the men who’ve disfigured one of their number by posting a bounty, attracting, among others, a famously violent outlaw who has given up his murderous ways for the hardscrabble life of a hog farmer. Peoples named the proposed film, with its vicious themes and language and outbursts of sadism and cold-blooded executions, “The Cut-Whore Killings” (you certainly couldn’t accuse him of sugar-coating). It sat on a shelf. In the coming years, Peoples was involved with some very successful films, receiving writing credits on the atomic bomb documentary The Day After Trinity and the classic sci-noir Blade Runner. His bloody Western was optioned by Francis Coppola, and he was hired to do a rewrite on the medieval fantasy Ladyhawke.

As these things happen, Peoples became a rising star whom producers want to work with, Clint Eastwood among them. In late 1983, his colleagues at Malpaso Productions got him a copy of “The Cut-Whore Killings” to read as a sample of Peoples’s work, and Clint was stunned by it. He’d had the first look at just about every Western of quality in the past fifteen years, and this was, he later said, easily the best of the bunch. He was deflated when his team told him that it was under option, but when they called Peoples’s representatives to find out if he was available for them, they learned that Coppola’s rights to the material had expired. Clint snatched it right up.

As was the practice at Malpaso, Sonia Chernus, whom Clint had known since before Rawhide and who was still reading scripts for him at age seventy-four, gave it a once-over and typed up her formal response for him. She was deeply unimpressed:

We would have been far better off not to have accepted trash like this piece of inferior work. It is completely lacking in believable and valid characterizations. . . . I skimmed most of it. . . . I don’t know what the resolution of the plot it [sic], and I don’t care. Neither would you. It is really an insult to this company which has always had high standards even to accept a property like this, which isn’t worth your time. . . . I can’t think of a good thing to say about it. Except maybe, get rid of it FAST.

Clint felt differently. He saw something unique and galvanizing, a tale about the steep cost that killing takes on a man. “I’ve done as much as the next person as far as creating mayhem in Westerns,” he said later on, “but what I like about [this one] is that every killing in it has a repercussion.” Considering the violent swath he had cut through the movies, the idea of a protagonist haunted by his misdeeds and yet forced by circumstances to add to them seemed profound. But the story also had an autumnal, valedictory air to it. At the time, he was preparing Pale Rider, and though he loved “The Cut-Whore Killings,” he wasn’t ready to make it. “I put it in a drawer and kind of forgot about it,” he said. “It was like having a little gem, a little cupcake or something that you’re going to savor before you eat it.”

In 1991, on the heels of a string of poor box office performances that, save for The Dead Pool, dated back to 1986, he decided the time was right. “One day I took it out and re-read it, and I said, ‘This is what I’m going to do,’” he recalled. In 1990, at the Telluride Film Festival, where he received an honorary tribute, he announced that he would be making a new Western. Just as he had returned to the genre with Pale Rider to put the brakes on a run of flops, he would saddle up for what was now known as, after the name of the lead character, The William Munny Killings.

A few things needed sorting out before he got underway. He called Peoples at his home in Berkeley and asked for a few scenes to be changed, including the ending, which Clint envisioned as a little more hopeful and tied with a neater bow. He asked Peoples what he thought about casting Morgan Freeman as the hero’s partner. And, said Peoples, he asked, “What did I think of Unforgiven as a title?”

Morgan Freeman, as Clint had indicated, was an old Western fan who’d grown up riding horses in Mississippi, and he would often joke to Clint when he bumped into him, “If you need somebody to ride along with you, give a yell.” For the role of a sly, sadistic sheriff trying to keep killers out of his town, Clint had his eye on Gene Hackman, who wasn’t, Clint recalled, interested at first. “He said, ‘Well, I don’t want to do anything with any violence in it.’ . . . I said, ‘Gene, I know exactly where you’re coming from. . . . But I would love to have you look at this because I think there’s a spin on this that’s different. I don’t think this is a tribute to violence.’” Hackman gave it a read and agreed.

For the role of a foppish British gunman who comes to town to collect the bounty, Clint placed a call to Richard Harris, the voluble and bibulous Irish actor. “He was in the Bahamas somewhere,” Clint recalled, “and he says, ‘Who is this calling, anyway?’ And I says, ‘Richard, it’s Eastwood, it’s me.’ And he says, ‘Is this Al?’ He says, ‘Is this Joe?’ He says, ‘You guys are pulling a damn . . .’ And the reason he said that is because he was downstairs in the basement watching High Plains Drifter! And I said . . . ‘I’ll send a script out to you.’ He said, ‘Oh, you don’t need a script. . . . I’ll be there!’”

And in the role of the senior of the group of prostitutes whose search for vengeance leads to the reward that kicks off the story, he cast Frances Fisher, who had just played Lucille Ball in a TV movie and was firmly established in his life as his new partner. He and Fisher were practically living together in his various homes, where she kept duplicates of essentials, including her running shoes. She still maintained a place near Los Angeles that she shared with her younger brother, but she was Clint’s full-time partner (he gave her a set of golf clubs for Christmas: “Isn’t that romantic?” she cooed). Sondra Locke had been permanently replaced.

Clint and production designer Henry Bumstead found a location some forty miles or so south of Calgary, Alberta, where they would build the fictional town of Big Whiskey, and Clint flew Fisher to the location in his helicopter, a pleasant three-day journey, stopping to enjoy the scenery along the way. (Throughout the shoot, he took cast members for rides. As Richard Harris recalled, “During a lunch break, he took me for a spin in it. And he took me all over the countryside and up the valleys, up the mountains. And all of a sudden, I looked at my watch. I said, ‘Christ! Look, we’ve got to land this plane quick. I’m going to be late for shooting. We’re ten minutes late.’ And he said, ‘How late can you be? The director is here beside you.’”)

The fifty-two-day shoot went off smoothly even by Clint’s standards, even for a picture being made in late summer and early fall in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. He pushed cinematographer Jack Green into new extremes, insisting on lighting interior scenes, of which there were many, only with the natural light of lamps. “I want it to look like it’s coal-oil lit. . . . I want it the way the light would pool,” he explained. “If you go back and look at some Westerns that were made by some of the most beloved directors of the 1930s and ’40s . . . you wonder, ‘Where did they get all that electricity back in 1850?’” He pushed this pursuit to an arresting degree, as witnessed one day by a visiting journalist, when Green declared that he wanted a second take of a particularly dark shot:

Clint: Am I in the frame?

Green: Yeah.

Clint: Can you hear my voice?

Green: Yeah.

Clint: They know who I am. Let’s print it and move on.

One reason Clint was able to deliver films ahead of schedule was what his crew was fond of calling “Malpaso weather”—the elements always seemed to conspire in their boss’ favor. But near the end of this shoot, they were told an early winter storm was coming in, which would have covered the location in snow and made shooting impossible for an untold number of days. Reprising the mad scramble he’d put Michael Cimino through on Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Clint had the crew work all night, a twenty-one-hour shift approved by the on-site union representatives. They finished not long before dawn broke and watched the next day as Henry Bumstead’s custom-built town was slowly buried under snow.

In April 1992, as he was finishing work on Unforgiven, he was granted relief in a matter that had been dogging him for about a month. The FBI had arrested a thirty-year-old Baltimore man named Brian Keith Neun and charged him with making more than forty obscene and threatening phone calls to Clint’s Malpaso offices, demanding that he be paid $5 million for three films and saying that he would kill Clint and his children Kyle and Alison if his demands weren’t met by April 11. “You kept trying to keep the lights out of my life,” one of the taped calls said. “I will kill you.” Helpfully, he’d left his return phone number and street address on a couple of the calls, so it didn’t call for any crack work of detection to find and arrest him. Charged with extortion and other crimes, Neun was held for psychological evaluation.

That same month, Clint showed his new film to Warner Bros. executives, and they were astonished. “If that had been our picture, we would have ruined it,” one said. As David Peoples explained, it was the ultimate payoff for the independence the studio had afforded Malpaso: “It’s hard to imagine anyone making it as straightforwardly and uncompromisingly as Clint. No studio would have made it that way—dark, moody. With a lot of voices, these things generally end up becoming blander and more accessible. Unforgiven was Clint Eastwood saying ‘This is what I’m going to do. . . . Get out of my way.”

Peoples himself was jolted by the finished film. He saw it for the first time at a screening on the Warner Bros. lot that also marked the first time he met Clint in person. “As he ushered me into the theater,” Peoples recalled, “he told me he’d thrown out the two scenes I’d rewritten, said it was better the way I’d written it the first time.” (Frances Fisher told him that “this was the first time she saw a shooting script that was entirely in white. Most of them are multicolored, full of blue and red pages or whatever, representing various changes.”) The only thing that was changed, he said, was the title. And, he had to admit, “The new title was perfect.”

The other person who might have been surprised was a woman named Megan Rose, who had worked at Warner Bros. as a story analyst—a reader of and scout for scripts and other possible movie sources— and who claimed not only to have been Clint’s lover in the early 1980s but to have been the person who brought “The Cut-Whore Killings” to his attention. According to her, their trysts were conducted in the apartment off of Malpaso’s offices and in Clint’s production trailer (yes, the one the Pope had blessed), where she brought him homemade desserts, and she and Clint worked on improving drafts of Peoples’s script, honing it to the version that eventually went into production. She said that Clint had promised her a finder’s fee if the film ever got made, then changed his tune, suggesting that she’d shown him the script not as a possible project but as a sample of Peoples’s work.

She left Warner Bros. in the late 1980s, debilitated by a lingering case of Lyme disease, but resurfaced when Unforgiven was released, demanding the payday that Clint had told her she had coming. Malpaso and Warner Bros. both struck back at her. In an article in the New York Post, a studio executive, admitting that Rose had given Clint the script as part of her ordinary salaried duties, added that “she once told another exec here that she’d had an affair with Eastwood 600 years ago in a previous life.” Clint offered her a $10,000 gig editing the script of another film, but she rejected it and walked away with nothing. In interviews she gave in the late ’90s to The Independent newspaper of London and Clint biographer Patrick McGilligan, she claimed to harbor no ill will about the episode: “I have totally forgiven him. My life is not about money. I still like him and believe in him.”

Uncharacteristically, Clint promoted the film with a blizzard of interviews—there were feature stories in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, Rolling Stone, Premiere, Variety, Vogue (!), Psychology Today (!!), and a story in Parade with his own byline on it—and an appearance on The Tonight Show. There was a gala premiere in Westwood in early August, with an after-party at Chasen’s restaurant in Beverly Hills, to which he was escorted by Fisher and his daughter Alison. The public debut, on just over two thousand screens, was August 7, and the response was rapturous. Unforgiven took the number one spot at the box office with a haul of $14.5 million—a record opening for a Western. It barely dropped the following weekend, still holding the top position, and slipped only slightly in its third week, also at number one—all of which indicated strong word of mouth. The film only dropped out of the top ten in late September, by which time it had grossed more than $70 million.

The reviews were goggled-eyed. “A classic Western for the ages,” said Todd McCarthy in Variety, “a tense, hard-edged, superbly dramatic yarn.” “A most entertaining Western that pays homage to the great tradition,” said Vincent Canby in the New York Times, “while surreptitiously expressing a certain amount of skepticism.” In the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan called it “simultaneously heroic and nihilistic, reeking of myth but as modern as they come . . . a neat piece of revisionism, a violent film that is determined to demythologize killing.” (For the record, the very few naysayers in the critical community included Gene Siskel, who didn’t review it in print but gave it a thumbs-down on TV; Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic, who hardly ever liked Clint’s work; and Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly, who told readers, “Don’t expect the new, soul-searching Eastwood to be any more dramatically convincing than the old.”)

Well, this is one of those times when the group-think is spot-on. There is no way to say this except plainly: Unforgiven is a masterpiece. Not only is it in the running as Greatest Western Ever, but it’s one of only a couple of dozen Hollywood studio films that you can’t imagine improving. Watch it again and again and what you might once have thought of as a rum choice—a music cue, a shot of landscape, a moment of acting— blends in more seamlessly each time. Is it a perfect movie? Perhaps not. But its imperfections live in choices, not lapses, and are thus matters of taste, not competence. It is thoroughgoing, potent, real, and true.

Unforgiven is crafted by a company of professionals at the heights of their powers and acted by a troupe that feels born to their roles and completely immersed in them. The cinematography, decor, score, editing, and even the costumes and makeup are superb. It is cast to a tee, and each actor convinces. And, my God: the script. Is there another Western so filled with memorable quotes, or one with such a surfeit of rawness and horror and drollery and outrage and regret and anger? It is a powerfully human story, essaying a gamut of emotions, and yet it feels chiseled out of stone like a fable or allegory. There’s coarseness and cruelty and ugliness and loss in it, and yet it is uplifting and consoling, not only because at its center is a man trying to keep his demons buried but because the art in it is so magnificent as to inspire. People sometimes complain about a movie or novel not having anyone in it for whom they can root, and Unforgiven, in which almost every single character is guilty of something, might be such a film. But it is so expertly made that they are all ennobled. If the devil does get the best lines, this is a film filled with devils, made by angels, depicting Hell with heavenly gifts.

Where even to start? The script, obviously, as frank about sex and grief as it is about violence and wickedness. There’s such an array: the hotheaded volubility of the Kid; the snooty persiflage of English Bob; the prideful hauteur of Little Bill; the spiked wrath of Strawberry Alice; and, especially, the various sides of William Munny: fatherly, faithful, determined, enraged, vicious. Every one of these characters—and others—feels fleshed out and alive, and they are gifted with lines that any sane actor would relish. Some of them are positively immortal.

Even an opening title card shines: “She was a comely young woman and not without prospects. Therefore it was heartbreaking to her mother that she would enter into marriage with William Munny, a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition.” And it goes on from there, just as fine and bejeweled as you like. You can quote almost every scene, and what other Western can you say that about?

And as for other Westerns, in particular Clint’s other Westerns, this is the one in which he is most human and empathetic and real. We know nothing, really, of the men he played in the Leone films, in Hang ’Em High or High Plains Drifter or Pale Rider; and of The Outlaw Josey Wales we know only that he’s lost the family he loved. For William Munny, we have an entire biography: a life of shootings and abusings of man and beast alike, of alcoholism and whoring and wrath. He met a woman, Claudia Feathers, who tamed him of his wildness and evil and bore him two children and died at age twenty-nine leaving him alone on a hog farm in Kansas. He takes the job of killing the cowboys not out of wickedness but because he needs to provide a life for his kids. He turns down booze and sex and cruelty until he doesn’t—and at that moment he reaches the point of vengeance where Clint’s previous Western heroes have started. But where those other men are mysterious, Munny is transparent, rational, even justified. His fury isn’t pretty, and it’s not entirely right, but you can see the sense of it.

Munny is a crucial character in Clint’s lineage in another way. He follows John Wilson as a man who understands that killing is a sin. But where Wilson speaks in theory, Munny speaks from beyond the grave of experience. He may wish he were, as he declares, “just a fella,” but he suffers nightmares of his myriad victims, of even his wife, returned from the dead, and he knows that the evil he has sown will reap his soul. “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man,” he famously says, and then adds, when told his victims “had it comin’”: “We’ve all got it comin’.” And when a man he’s about to blow away curses him with “I’ll see you in Hell,” all he can say is “Yeah.” Where the Man with No Name and Harry Callahan mete out death with a blank stare or a quip, Munny does it with a grimace that tells us he knows that he is raising the price he will have to pay for his choices. There’s not a drop of levity or cool in it. He is a doomed man compounding his fate. And Clint plays him with such haunted gravity, such human frailty, and such unstudied naturalness that we believe everything that he goes through, everything that he says about his past, his reformation, and his ultimate reversion to form. William Munny repeatedly confesses for what he’s done, and in immersing himself in the role so powerfully, so does Clint. It’s easily the best performance he’s given to this point.

No previous Western, with the possible exception of Clint’s beloved antilynching film The Ox-Bow Incident, has ever been so frank about the cost paid for the taking of a life by the person doing the taking. Clint became famous playing characters who not only didn’t look back at the people they killed but often didn’t bother to look at them while doing the deed. Munny is death-haunted and self-excoriating and rueful. And the killings in which he engages are messy, gory, and, in multiple senses of the word, mean: One of the cowboys bleeds out while wailing in pain; another is shot while sitting in an outhouse. The Kid, Munny’s hot-to-kill colleague, breaks down in tears after just the one shooting. And when Munny re-emerges in all his monstrous, blood-shedding nature, he does so in a shot that frames him below an American flag waving limply in a rain-drenched night, as if to tell us, in the vision of a director often mistakenly viewed as blindly patriotic, that Munny isn’t the only one in this country for whom killing is second nature.

The film’s conception of human evil is visible in just about every character, and they are all played exquisitely: Gene Hackman as the jauntily sadistic and verbose Little Bill; Morgan Freeman as Munny’s affable but once deadly partner; Frances Fisher as the righteous and vindictive den mother of the whores; Richard Harris as the insouciant and condescending English Bob; and Saul Rubinek as a bumbling, sycophantic writer of Western lore. You expect them all to be powerful—it’s a stellar roster. At the same time, you couldn’t possibly have the same expectations for Jaimz Woolvett, making his feature film debut as the Kid, opposite Clint and Freeman in every scene, sneering and cocksure, holding his place solidly. That’s surely down to Clint’s direction.

As for his other responsibilities—overseeing the production, choosing shots and angles, selecting the music, choosing the pace and cuts in the editing room: It’s a master class. Much of the film is spent outdoors and in the daytime, where Clint’s eye for wide-screen composition has never been so painterly or powerful. But the deepest impression left by Jack Green’s cinematography is of dark rooms where oil lamps provide the only light, illuminating the merest wisps of faces and giving an impression of doom all around. Henry Bumstead, who’d built the town in High Plains Drifter, creates another frontier settlement that feels like it could blow away in a stiff breeze—if it isn’t razed by a vengeful Munny first. Clint’s longtime reliance on a handful of regulars pays off handsomely here: A $14 million budget and ten-week shooting schedule look like triple that on-screen.

And also on-screen, dearly, is an inscription of sorts—a rarity in Clint’s work. At the end of the credits, the screen reads, “Dedicated to Sergio and Don”—that is, Leone and Siegel, the two directors who liberated him from television and helped make him a star and taught him the value of independence and the nuts-and-bolts of the craft. With both men having recently died, he humbly acknowledges what they meant for his trajectory, his life, his art. Unforgiven distills the visions and praxis of each of those masters. There were other highlights in Clint Eastwood’s career, but this would be the peak of peaks, and it’s very fitting that it should end with acknowledgement of the fellows who first showed him how to climb.

Adapted from the book CLINT: The Man and the Movies by Shawn Levy. Copyright © 2025 by Shawn Levy. From Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.

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