Kyle Eastwood: "I have never wanted to distance myself from my father"

BarcelonaBeing the son of a film star has obvious advantages, needless to say, but also risks, as evidenced by the long list of broken toys found in Hollywood families. Kyle Eastwood, on the other hand, seems comfortable with his surname and his nearly three-decade career as a jazz double bassist. So comfortable that this Tuesday, within the framework of the Barcelona Jazz Festival, he will pay tribute to his father's career with a concert at the Paral·lel 62 venue, where his quintet will perform a selection of tracks from the soundtracks of Clint Eastwood's films, some of which were co-written by Kyle Eastwood himself.

How did the project of gathering all this music created for the cinema and performing it in the context of a jazz concert come about?

— Three years ago I recorded a record of my father's film music with my quintet and an orchestra [Eastwood Symphonic], a kind of symphony with jazz and classical arrangements. I had always wanted to work with an orchestra, and it seemed like a good time to pay tribute to my father and his career, but also to the great composers he worked with. The Barcelona concert will be a version of that project, but only with the quintet.

The repertoire includes themes by masters of film music such as Ennio Morricone, Lalo Schifrin, and even John Williams' music for The Eiger Sanction (The Eiger sanction, 1975), a film by his father that is quite forgotten nowadays.

— Yes, but the music is beautiful. It is a soundtrack that I have always liked, since I was a child, and Williams is one of my favorites. Other choices are more obvious: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Dirty Harry (1971) and Magnum Force (1973)...

There are compositions that you wrote for your father's films, such as Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) and Gran Torino (2008), which will also be played at the concert.

— Yes, the first time I wrote music for him was for The Rookie (1990), and starting with Mystic River (2003) he would sometimes ask me to create pieces for certain scenes. It was a gradual process, until he commissioned me for the soundtrack of films like Letters from Iwo Jima. And for Gran Torino my father had a piano melody that Michael Stevens and I worked on for a few days until we shaped it into a song, and it occurred to me to send it to Jamie Cullum along with the film's script. A week later, he already had the lyrics and the music recorded.

I imagine that at times it must have been difficult to live under the giant shadow of your surname, and that you must have often tried to escape from it. What has changed so that you have now allowed yourself to embrace your father's legacy in this way?

— It is true that my father's figure casts a long shadow, but I have always felt proud of his career, and I have no problem talking about him when people ask me questions. I make my own music, and I hope it is judged on its own merits, but I have also enjoyed working with him, and we have worked together on a handful of films. I grew up watching him make cinema, so I know how he likes to work with people. I have never wanted to distance myself from my father.

When he was 13 years old, he starred with his father in one of his best films, Honkytonk Man (Honky tonk man, 1982). How did he experience it?

— I have good memories of that time. Think that I was used to visiting my father on set since I was little, and he always worked with the same technical team, especially during the 70s and 80s, so I knew them all and we were like a big family, I felt at home.

Yes, but in The Midnight Adventurer you had to carry the weight of a film. And you were not an actor.

— It was a great responsibility, yes. In fact, the book was written from the point of view of my character, so he was the protagonist. But both my father and the rest of the team gave me a lot of support and helped me a lot. The truth is that I had a lot of fun. I spent the whole summer with my father, traveling and working with him, we were practically roommates in the hotels where we slept.

His character in the film has a very special relationship with his uncle, a complicated man and country musician for whom the boy feels devotion, but he sees him very little and often does not quite understand him. Did it reflect his own relationship with his father?

— Probably, a little. My father worked a lot during the 70s and 80s. When I was a child he was very focused on his career, so there were times when we didn't see him much. But between films he would spend a lot of time with us, and I would always go to visit him on set, at least for a few days or a week.

And how is it that after The Midnight Adventurer he did not try to be an actor and opted for music?

— In reality I wanted to be a director, but I was constantly playing music for fun, first the piano and then the guitar. Around the age of 12 or 13 I started with the bass, because I had many friends who made music and they were always missing someone to play the bass. And at 18 I realized that I wanted to dedicate myself professionally to music, rather than cinema. But they continue to be my two great passions because, as you can imagine, I grew up in a house where a lot of music was heard and a lot of movies were watched.

A curiosity: in 2008 you acted in Summer Hours, a magnificent film by Olivier Assayas. How did this collaboration come about?

— I met him many years ago in Paris, and The Midnight Adventurer is one of his films that my father likes the most. We were talking and, a year or two later, he contacted me to work on the film. It was a small role, one day of shooting, and he just needed someone to play Juliette Binoche's American boyfriend. It was fun.

By the way, last summer the news circulated that Clint Eastwood had retired from cinema, and the source was a statement of yours from over a year ago. Is that so? Has your father retired for good?

— They asked me what my father's next project was and I said that I didn't know if there would be another project, that is all. But he has never announced that he has retired, it is just a feeling that I have. Actually, I don't know if he will make more movies, who knows. Maybe he will still make another one. But I think it is likely that he will prefer to relax and spend time with his family. I think he has earned it.