PD: You've done your share of sequels and Westerns. It must be much easier to get a green light for something familiar than a project that's against type for you.
CE: Yeah, but with Mystic River, [Warner Brothers] said that they would do it for a certain price and no more, but you could shop it around if you feel like, so we shopped around, and we couldn't find anybody to do it. They just thought the material was too tough. Million Dollar Baby had been submitted here, and they had passed on it. When I brought it, they said, "Well, a boxing movie..." and I said, "It's not a boxing movie. It's a character study, it's a love story, it's a lot of things, but it's not a boxing movie. It's in and around boxing, and sure, boxing plays a part of it, but it's the father-daughter love story," so it kind of came about that way.

PD: How many projects like that fall by the wayside, where you're ready to make something and then you just can't find the backing?
CE: Not many. In my younger days, I wasn't working so much. I guess there were a couple genres -- Westerns being one, detective stories another -- that you could do that nobody ever questioned too much. But if you want to do something that's a character study that's different and a little bolder, this is a tough era to be doing it in.

PD: Everyone wants a safe project and sequels are safe. If you're making a carbon copy of the original, you're more or less guaranteed the same response.
CE: Hopefully you get somebody who's on the cover of Us or People, [so the studio will say,] "OK, great. They're in the demographic," and all the kids'll go. But they don't always go. I'm trying to make films for an audience that wants to see adult film and character studies for people who are a little more cinema oriented from an old-fashioned point of view. In a way, Million Dollar Baby could be a movie about a '40s guy or a '50s guy from some other time, some other era.

PD: The fact that you decided to make the Warner logo at the beginning black and white was an early hint at that. Just the quality of the dialogue, the way the whole movie plays out and the hard-boiled nature of the characters contain echoes of classic Hollywood movies.
CE: I'm not sure how they feel about [their logo appearing in black and white], because I don't think the front office has seen it yet. There was no logo on it when they saw it as a rough assembly, but it just seemed nice to start out that way because that early boxing sequence looks almost black and white. The movie's almost black and white. I guess I've been doing that for years, with Bronco Billy and Honkytonk Man, too, [telling stories of] people out of kilter with what we see in society every day. These guys, they're almost on the periphery of anything we know, and yet there are people like that. You go down to these old gyms in Los Angeles (and I've looked at all of them), they're all young guys, all trying to get somewhere, [chasing the] dream of something that the odds are it'll never happen. And this young girl sort of represents that in the story, somebody who has limited education and is struggling to get on being a waitress and what have you.

PD: Returning to what you said about making movies for adults, that's something we don't see very often these days. Everything seems to be aimed at the 13-year-old demographic. Here, while you have something that wouldn't be considered inappropriate for younger audiences...
CE: No, I showed it to my 8-year-old daughter actually.

PD: ...it clearly never talks down to the viewer. You're expecting your audience to rise up to that level of discourse and the importance of the subject matter.
CE: Absolutely, I expect the audience to participate all the way along. You know Frankie's estranged from his real daughter and he has an ex-wife somewhere. Obviously, there's some painful things that've gone on there. Maybe he has grandchildren now, who knows? At the end, we don't know where Frankie ends up. We see the cabin where he had the lemon pie, and is that him in there? Do we see him through the window, or do we not see him? We see a waitress kind of there, but maybe it means nothing. Maybe he's not there. Maybe he sailed to China. Who knows? The audience has to think about all of that, and if the audience isn't able to think about it, then that's the wrong audience for that picture.

PD: You're leaving things open to interpretation.
CE: Everybody's always asked in Mystic River, "What does that [gesture Kevin Bacon gives Sean Penn's character] mean at the end?" Does that mean, "I'm gonna get you," or does that mean, "I know, and you know, and this is going to be a secret that's going to go to our graves?" What does all that mean? My answer is, whatever you think it means. A guy says, "Well, I think it means it's something they're sharing that they're both going to know for the rest of their lives," and I say, "That's fine. Good."

PD: Million Dollar Baby marks a significant departure for you. In many of your films -- from the early Westerns to the Dirty Harry series and right up through Mystic River -- vengeance is a key theme, whereas a very different movie emerges here when it could return to that element.
CE: That's just the nature of this film. It's just this film has nothing to do with other films because they were just driven differently. This is just driven that way. Fate took it in a tough direction.... Here's this young girl, and life should be great as the dream world goes, but it doesn't come out that way. He's the father that died that she loved very much, she's the daughter that he's estranged from, and he has the greatest moral dilemma that you can imagine on a person.... When I think about it, if somebody told me [what happens] now, I'd say, "You'd have to be pretty brave to try to pull that off, because what else could be worse in life?"

PD: Is there a specific actor whom you feel you've learned a lot from?
CE: I've just learned a lot. Every time you see an actor do a good performance, it's a thrill, and so that's what keeps me doing it. I think that's what keeps me here at this stage in life rather than playing golf or something, because I love to see performers perform, and I love to set the atmosphere for them to perform. Once in a while, you get somebody who isn't quite confident, and then you have to work with them. That's a challenge, but it's fun. I'm lucky. In recent movies, certainly in these last two, I've worked with people who were just ready to jump right in there. I prefer that way. With the fellas and the gals in Mystic River, they were all right ready to go.

PD: For Million Dollar Baby, was it a similar setup?
CE: Very similar setup. Every actor's different. Some actors need a tremendous amount of rehearsal, and others are just great when they just let themselves free and kind of go with it. [On Million Dollar Baby,] everybody's usually ready. The crew is ready too because they're used to me working that way. A lot of times, a crew will be used to a person who does maybe 10 or 15 or 20 [takes], so they set it up and they know we're going to be here grinding for a while, but I prefer not to. There are certain scenes in this particular picture that are very difficult for me that I just wanted to shoot. I didn't want to talk about 'em, I didn't want to rehearse 'em, I didn't want to hear lines. I just wanted to say them for the first time. [For example,] the scene in the church with the priest... took one take. We do one [more] take on the other side, and then we're off and running. Because they're highly emotional moments, you want to capture them while they're still highly emotional in your mind. There's nothing technical in 'em. So the ultimate reaction you want from your audience is that every scene sounds like it's said for the first time, and if a person can do that 10 times in a row and make it sound like it's the first time, that's terrific (and good actors should be able to do it), but why not try it, why not see where it goes? Why not see what organic material can come out of it?

PD: There must be a great deal of very technical preparation and research that goes into playing boxers and trainers. How do you expect your fellow actors to prepare for their roles?
CE: I had people there to help train 'em. In the gym, when we weren't shooting or setting up things, I'd have people training. [Hilary Swank] practiced incessantly. She is an athletic girl with good moves and everything, but she is very slender, so I had to kind of bulk her up and put her on a heavy weight program, and then she'd box two hours every night, and she'd do weights two hours every morning every day for four months. Lucia Rijker, who plays "the Blue Bear," she is a real champion. She's carved out of steel. I always tell people, "Imagine some poor sap trying to carjack some lady on Sunset Boulevard, and it's Lucia Rijker, and he tries to pull her out of the car. It's like trying to pull a windmill out of the car." She can hit like an animal, but she was a good influence on Hilary, too. She helped train her.

PD: After you've given your cast time to prepare, you seem ready to embrace the happy accidents that occur on set, taking unexpected moments and incorporating them into the film. There are a couple examples in Mystic River, such as Laura Linney spilling the coffee or the match blowing up in Tim Robbins' hands. Were there any elements like that in Million Dollar Baby?
CE: Yeah, there are. Just to use one as an example that was kind of funny, a guy I know is playing the referee. It's the first time we see the Blue Bear, and we see how tough she is. They're in the ring, we have them boxing out there, and the referee's trying to get in the middle of it, and the Blue Bear just goes wham, and knocks the referee, who's a big guy, and the girl right down. That was a total accident. Of course, that was great. They said, "You don't have to use that if you don't want to," but I put it in there, not only because I love seeing the guy fall on his ass, but because it's real. It shows the power of this woman, and so that was an actual moment. That guy wasn't acting. His ego would not let him hit that deck if there was anything said about it, but that's just the way things go.

PD: That's a quality that makes your movies breathe in a way many contemporary directors don't understand. We all know where we're going in the long run, but along the way, it's not as if everything must serve some immediate purpose.
CE: Yeah, if something happens, I don't want the actors to quit the scene. If something falls, pick it up, keep going. [If they ask,] 'Well, what about the camera?' [then I say,] 'Don't worry about it. You're not thinking about the camera. The camera will worry about that if it's bad.' You have to react just like you're in a play or just like you're in real life. If you drop something, you pick it up, put it in your pocket. All those kinds of little moments in a project will make up the sort of lifelike experiences, rather than the theatrical experiences.

PD: It's been 10 years now since you've acted in a movie by another director. Occasionally, you'll make a film like Mystic River where you're not even appearing in it. Do you identify more as one or the other?
CE: Back when I first started directing in 1970, I was thinking that eventually someday, I'd look on the screen, and I'd be tired of looking at that guy, so I took to directing. That way, if I got tired of looking, I could just work behind the camera. And that's happened periodically, but there's no real earth-shattering reason for it all, other than that I probably will in the coming years do more directing, not acting. I thought it might happen sooner, but it hasn't. There's just enough roles for older guys that I could slide in a few, like this last one. This was a wonderful role, but there's not going to be a lot of roles for guys my age other than cameos or small roles that are repetitive of things I've done before, and I don't want to repeat myself at this stage in life. Maybe when I was younger. You mentioned earlier that I did my share of sequels and stuff like that, but not anymore. You have to change with the times, change with your life. If you're not constantly developing, then you just stop and slide off the scale.