Eastwood opens his biopic of jazz great Charlie 'Yardbird' Parker with a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'there are no second acts in American lives.' When Parker died at 34, from the effects of decades of heroin use, the coroner assumed he was a man in his sixties. Folks who had caught too many orang-utan movies were surprised to learn that Eastwood the director had even heard of F. Scott Fitzgerald, let alone Parker. It seemed in 1988 like an astonishing break with his previous career to make a movie, only the second film (after Breezy) he directed without taking a star role, with more saxophone solos than gunshots on the soundtrack. However, Bird was a personal project, and indicated that the life of Clint Eastwood the director was entering a second, if not a third, act.

"I went in regardless of what it was," he says, never perturbed by immediate commercial issues. "I was interested because of my love for the jazz of that era. The '40s saw one of the great harmonic changes in the music, a lot of the audience had to work hard to catch up to it and appreciate it."

A lifelong jazz buff, Eastwood had seen Parker perform in Oakland in 1945 and took great steps to obtain the rights to Joel Oliansky's script. It was originally set up at Columbia as a Richard Pryor vehicle, but when that fell through the studio gave it to Eastwood and Warners in exchange for Revenge, which Eastwood had been set to direct. Bird follows the chubby, charismatic hornman (Forest Whitaker, who won Best Actor at Cannes for the role) through a stormy interracial non-marriage to Chan (Diane Venora), upon whose memoir the script was based.

The film also demonstrates a sensitivity and depth of feeling that had always been present in his work as a director, as well as that streak of individualism that makes him unique. "I didn't know how commercial it'd be, but I knew I could make a decent movie out of this. The studios I work with, all I can promise them is the best movie I can make. What life it has after that depends on fate."

Clint Eastwood On... Mystic River
(2003, CLINT EASTWOOD) "No one was too excited about Mystic River, they thought it was too dark, they couldn't see it." Even for the those committed to the Eastwood cause raised eyebrows when he chose to adapt Dennis Lehane's grim tale of child abuse and murder in a backwater district of Boston. It didn't feel, well, very Clintish, and he wasn't going to be in it - Sean Penn (who one Best Actor for his performance as a local hoodlum), Kevin Bacon and Tim Robbins were the three friends who share a painful past, which echoes into the present.

Eastwood, however, could feel the reach of the material - it spoke as much about America's insular communities as it did about cops and crime and it remains possibly his darkest piece. "You can't second guess yourself," he says of his own determination. "You can find a million reasons why something doesn't work. Without sounding like a pseudointellectual dipshit, it's my responsibility to be true to myself."