Clint Eastwood, promoting the DVD release of Dirty Harry (a "fascist" slice of filmmaking, as per Pauline Kael), talks to Jeff Dawson in The [London] Guardian:
"[Spike] Lee [who complained about the absence of black soldiers in Flags of Our Fathers] shouldn't be demanding African-Americans in Eastwood's next picture, either. Changeling is set in Los Angeles during the Depression, before the city's make-up was changed by the large black influx. 'What are you going to do, you gonna tell a fuckin' story about that?' he growls. 'Make it look like a commercial for an equal opportunity player? I'm not in that game. I'm playing it the way I read it historically, and that's the way it is. When I do a picture and it's 90% black, like Bird, I use 90% black people.'
…
"There are actually echoes of Dirty Harry in Changeling, Eastwood says, and he's not making any concessions to liberals: 'I get a kick out of it because the judge convicts the killer to two years in solitary confinement, and then to be hanged. In 1928 they said: "You can spend two years thinking about it and then we're going to kill you." Nowadays they're sitting there worrying about how putting a needle in is a cruel and unusual punishment, the same needle you would have if you had a blood test.'"
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There are other curious tidbits in Dawson's piece. For instance, I had no idea that Sergio Leone once said he liked Eastwood "because he had only two expressions: 'one with the hat, one without it.'" (Dawson says Eastwood has only one expression nowadays.) Or that there had been "a scurrilous — and erroneous — piece of showbiz gossip" claiming that Eastwood was "Stan Laurel's love child." Laurel should have sued.
By the way, considering that the U.S. Constitution says something or other against the application of "cruel and unusual punishment" some people were concerned that "the same needle you would have if you had a blood test" — but filled with a poison that would give death-row inmates a slow and excruciatingly painful heart attack — might be an unconstitutional way of handling criminals.