Play Misty For Me would stamp the template for Eastwood's modus operandi as director: a personal project, a tight budget, creative focus (he took the setting from LA to Carmel: "It made more sense for the disc jockey to be a bigger fish in a small pond"), and his own rules. "I knew it was small, so I went to Lew Wasserman at Universal and said this is the project I want to make. He looked at me and said, 'Okay.'"

There was a catch. Eastwood was on a good deal at the time, so much a picture, and as it was his baby he could only take a percentage, a back end deal. "My agent was pretty disappointed, but I understood. I could screw the whole thing up, he was letting me prove myself." Eastwood has always been a brilliant player of the Hollywood system, wise enough to see limits as challenges: "I don't believe in pessimism," he shrugs.

The film has dated, it seems so mild compared to Fatal Attraction, which it inspired, but he draws a terrifically creepy performance out of Jessica Walters, making no bones about her character's madness. There is an insinuating, clammy quality to the movie like a knot that keeps tightening. "It was always at the back of my mind there was going to come a day when I would direct," says Eastwood. "But it came simply, I did one picture, then I needed to do a Western picture because that's the genre I was brought up in so I did (High Plains Drifter). Then one thing led to another and 28 years later I'm still doing it."

Clint Eastwood On... The Beguiled
(1971, DON SIEGEL) "We did everything we could to make it as true to the book as possible and not sugar coat it," recalls Eastwood of this adaptation of Thomas Cullinan's eerie Civil War set novel. "The script had a little bit more of a up beat ending which was sort of ludicrous considering what comes before."

Eastwood was back with Don Siegel again, indeed he had requested him, but this was opposite the grizzled machismo they usually dealt in. It's closer in mood to Play Misty For Me, a seething interior drama where a wounded Yankee solider is first rescued by the women of a Confederate girls school, and then imprisoned. A situation sending both staff and girls into ever increasing fits of jealousy, ending in an astonishing sweep of grand guignol grizliness. One of his most underrated films, it required Eastwood to be virtually to sole male actor in a cast of full of women: "There's nothing wrong with that," he grins. "They were terrific gals."