Francis Ford Coppola was in the midst of a career decline when he optioned “Unforgiven.” His 1982 musical romance, “One from the Heart,” was such a box-office disaster it came to be regarded as the final flop demarcating the end of the New Hollywood era. Peoples told The L.A. Times, however, he had full confidence in Coppola, though he acknowledged perhaps no one could have made “Unforgiven” like Clint Eastwood did. It helped that Eastwood was already a big international star, trading on the image he cultivated in Westerns like Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy. Peoples explained: 

“Francis would have done it brilliantly as he does everything else, but it’s hard to imagine anyone making it as straightforwardly and uncompromisingly as Clint. No studio would have made it that way — dark, moody. With a lot of voices, things generally end up becoming blander and more accessible. ‘Unforgiven’ was Clint Eastwood saying ‘This is what I’m going to do … get out of my way.'”

As a director, Eastwood has a reputation for shooting very few takes. He brought the same sensibility to “Unforgiven,” which remained largely unchanged from page to screen. Peoples concluded:

“I didn’t meet Clint in person until he invited me to see the movie at Warner Bros. But he and I were enough in sync that he didn’t feel it necessary to ask for rewrites. One of the stars [of ‘Unforgiven,’ Eastwood’s then-partner], Frances Fisher, told me that this was the first time she saw a shooting script that was entirely in white. Most of them are multicolored, full of blue and red pages or whatever representing various changes in the screenplay.”

Hollywood is filled with stories of projects that had a revolving door of screenwriters, but Peoples received sole credit for “Unforgiven,” and he would also pick up an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. It’s nice to know there are at least some movies where studio interference was kept to a minimum and the director was respectful of the writer’s vision enough not to mess with success.