The Walker Art Center, a contemporary art museum in Minneapolis, has just released its collection of interviews with 60 filmmaking icons to the general public. Some of the videos date back to the early 1990s

For the past 30 years, the museum has been inviting independent visionaries and leading film directors, screenwriters, actors, and producers to discuss the cinematic acts. The Walker Dialogues and Film Retrospectives: The First Thirty Years compilation is an attempt at studying their minds and deciphering they ways of thinking and viewing the world. Most of the conversations revolve around inspiration, artistic choices, and the ideas the invited filmmakers have embraced or followed in the course of their careers. 

One of the first filmmakers to visit the Walker Art Center was Clint Eastwood. Aside from the video of the interview, the museum website also has a transcript of the 1990 conversation. Thirty years ago, Eastwood was not only a celebrated actor (whose credits included Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns and the Dirty Harry franchise, to name a few credits), but also a rather prolific director, with a dozen films to his name. But his career really took off only in the 1990s. Films like Unforgiven (1993), Mystic River (2003), and Million Dollar Baby (2005) brought him universal critical acclaim and industry recognition—and won him four Academy Awards and five Golden Globes. 

The Walker Art Center archives feature far more than just the Eastwood interview—there are sixty conversations in total. The roster includes filmmaking icons such as Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, Bong Joon-ho, Jim Jarmusch, Luca Guadagnino, Robert Redford, Steve McQueen, Isabella Rossellini, Terry Gilliam, Peter Greenaway, and Wim Wenders. The interviews will be a real treat for movie fans and an instructive, illuminating experience for students of the cinematic arts. See them at the link below: