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STARING INTO FLAMES. Clint Eastwood’s Will Munny regrets his past in Unforgiven. (Photo Warner Bros. / Malpaso Productions)

David Webb Peoples Talks about Writing Unforgiven, In His Own Words

In a June 28, 2022, telephone interview with Moresby Press, Peoples looked back on one of his favorite scripts, for Clint Eastwood’s classic 1992 Western. ‘Your expectations fuck with you so much when you’re writing.’

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I WROTE UNFORGIVEN IN 1976 as “The Cut Whore Killings.” The script sat around for a long time and no one was buying it. No one was buying Westerns.

Clint made it in a world in which it normally would not be made. So, God bless him.

I was just very, very lucky. The trick in being a writer is hoping that somebody will understand what you wrote. Clint understood everything about Unforgiven.

I feel very lucky that Clint Eastwood took something I’d written and made it into a great Western. Most screenwriters don’t have that experience.

Clint has always been a brilliant storyteller. He likes telling stories. He is always kind to that screenplay, and I’m very grateful for that, too. It’s absolutely one of my favorites that I’ve written.

What Clint saw was essentially the first draft. Clint had done some work on it but realized it made the script worse instead of better.

Eastwood changed almost nothing. He didn’t make anything worse. He was just brilliant.

I had written “Deserve don’t mean shit, Little Bill,” but that sounded too modern. Clint changed the line to: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

I was thrilled that he made the movie and I was thrilled that it worked. They stuck to what I wrote, and it turned out good. I didn’t think it was a great title, but it grew on me.

Years later, Kevin Costner tried to get the Unforgiven script from Clint Eastwood, so he and Kevin Reynolds could do it. Very flattering, but they couldn’t have done it half as well as Mr. Eastwood.

ON UNFORGIVEN’ S CHARACTERS AND THEIR MOTIVATIONS

I’m writing about all these people shooting each other. Let’s have each one of them killing people for different reasons.

The Kid thought it would be fun and romantic to shoot people. English Bob did it for money. Little Bill did it as a law-enforcement officer. When he felt it was necessary, he would shoot people, but he didn’t seek it out.

William Munny was a crazy killer until he met his wife. He had grown up being a terrible person.

Each of these people had a different point of view, and different motives.

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‘The trick in being a writer is hoping that somebody will understand what you wrote. Clint understood everything about Unforgiven.’

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Little Bill made a showcase of beating the living shit out of English Bob, to warn off any other killers that might come to Big Whiskey. You need police to protect you, but you don’t want them to do bad things.

The scene has to do with who the two men are. Little Bill thinks he’s doing a job that makes sense. I didn’t see Little Bill as a sadistic man. It’s a contest between who’s tough and who’s not tough.

Little Bill was like a cop. What he did to English Bob was crime-prevention. From his point of view, he thought he was doing something that was good for the community.

I like the character of Little Bill a lot. But the scene where he whips Morgan Freeman reminds us of the horrors of slavery and racism. But Ned wasn’t written as a black man.

ON UNFORGIVEN’ S THEMES

I seldom think about any sort of themes when I’m writing, but organically themes come if you have certain conflicts that work their way into it.

I try not to think about themes. If you think about themes when you’re writing, then everything becomes subordinated to those themes.

A good screenwriter lets a theme take care of itself through the characters and the story. What you always hope for is a character that says something that startles you, but is the right thing to say. You hope for a character that’s gonna talk to you, not you talking to him.

Unforgiven was never meant to be anti-violence. I wanted it to be like Scorsese’s pictures. Violence is what people have inside them, and there’s no right or wrong to it.

ON UNFORGIVEN’ S INFLUENCES

The story came from a lot of places. I wrote Unforgiven based on the book The Shootist. The hero was afraid of death.

It was also influenced by Taxi Driver. Travis Bickle, who just wanted to be like other people, inspired the character of William Munny, who was a pig farmer trying to raise two kids, but he had this horrendous past.

Another influence was the Gregory Peck movie The Gunfighter. When I was 10 years old, that movie knocked me dead. But I was never able to see it again until years later, when they sent it to me, after I had written Unforgiven. But I didn’t know it when I was writing Unforgiven. The Shootist and Taxi Driver were conscious influences.

ON ACCEPTING IMPERFECTION

I saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I loved the movie. I thought it was so good. At the time, I felt superior to [the movie’s screenwriter] William Goldman, because I saw how he fucked up in the part where they went to Bolivia.

But then I realized that a script can be imperfect. You either have to turn your back on it or go with what you’ve got. But don’t make it worse than it is.

I have made scripts worse for money [but that didn’t happen with Unforgiven].

ON EXPECTATIONS, WORDS, AND ACTORS

The language was almost completely influenced by the movie True Grit, the way the people talked.

But I have to give enormous credit to the actors for the way they spoke the lines. Actors just do magic.

Your expectations fuck with you so much when you’re writing. The scenes in the jail, I thought were terrible in the script. I had taken out the talking, but then it didn’t work, so I put it back.

But then Gene Hackman made them magical.

Thirty years later, sometimes, mostly, I like Unforgiven a lot. But I don’t watch it.

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