Clint Eastwood Says Viral Interview Is Fake, and He's Mad About It

Gizmodo

2 days ago

An interview with 95-year-old film legend Clint Eastwood recently blew up online after he sent some shots at Hollywood's sequel and franchise film obsession. The problem, it appears, is that he never actually said what has been attributed to him. In fact, according to a statement he gave to Deadline (I mean…we're pretty sure he actually gave this one, right?), he said that the entire interview that produced his viral shellacking of the film industry is 'phony.'
Let's take a step back real quick. On May 30, an Austrian outlet called Kurier, which The Guardian reports has a circulation of about 100,000 readers, published an interview with Clint Eastwood, supposedly given right before his 95th birthday. In that interview, which frankly comes off as a pretty generic press tour conversation, Eastwood supposedly gave the following take when asked how the business has changed in recent years:
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 made sequels three times, but I haven't been interested in them for a long time. My philosophy is, do something new or stay home.
That quote got picked up online and spread like wildfire, in part because it's a sentiment that lots of film lovers agree with and in part because it's Clint Eastwood taking shots at Hollywood, and that is always going to play in the right-wing internet ecosystem. The quote also got picked up by the aggregator industrial complex, getting play in Variety, IndieWire, and the New York Post among others.
Fast forward to June 2, and word had gotten back to Eastwood that he's getting a lot of attention for this quote, which was probably quite confusing for him since he insists he never said it. When Deadline reached out to him to confirm the quote, Eastwood told the publication: 'A couple of items about me have recently shown up in the news. I thought I would set the record straight. I can confirm I've turned 95. 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.'
Kurier has since affixed a disclaimer to the top of the supposed Eastwood interview stating, 'The KURIER editorial team is currently investigating the matter, which will take some time given the time difference to the US. We will comment on the matter immediately thereafter.'
So what happened? For what it's worth, if you run the supposed Eastwood answers through an AI detector (which are notoriously unreliable tools to begin with that produce lots of false positives), it doesn't think the text is AI-generated. And faking quotes from celebrities is not only unethical but pretty dumb because of exactly what happened here: They have a bigger platform than you and motivation to respond.
As it turns out, the Eastwood quotes are sort of real. They just weren't given as part of a single interview. In a statement, which has since replaced the original interview, Kurier explained that the reporter took a collection of answers that Eastwood gave at a series of roundtable events and put them together in a single story, formatted as if they were given over the course of a single, continuous interview.
'The article was formatted as an interview, not a portrait. This was intended to create the impression that it was a new interview. The fact that this wasn't the case is not in keeping with the quality standards the KURIER maintains,' the publication said. 'Even though no quote is fabricated, the interviews are documented, and the allegation of falsification can be refuted, we will no longer work with the author in the future because transparency and our strict editorial standards are paramount to us.'