Clint Eastwood speaks in a gentle, soothing voice but you cannot miss his convictions. When a journalist recently asked him if his latest film, Mystic River, is an atonement for acting in Dirty Harry, he resolutely said, "No." A huge hit directed by Don Siegel, Dirty Harry starred Eastwood as a vigilante cop determined to nab a serial killer. The film was denounced by some critics for being a fascistic.

"Then is then, now is now. Times change, people change," Eastwood added. Mystic River, which opened the New York Film Festival, released in NY and Los Angeles a week ago to extraordinary reviews. The Warner Bros film is now playing nationwide.

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Eastwood has diluted many of his Republican values and backed Democrats for high offices in California. He has also made films denouncing the death sentence and racial inequities in the US. In True Crime, a 1999 film which he directed and produced, Eastwood played an over-the-hill journalist who has to uncover the evidence that can prove a death row inmate's innocence just hours before his execution. He recently said while he saw Dirty Harry as an expose of an overzealous cop, he did not want to do a sequel.

In Mystic River, which Eastwood directed from a novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane, two powerful men in Boston are shown robbing the innocence of a child. The men drive into a working class neighborhood and scare some boys, taking one of them in their car. If Dirty Harry saw him as a vengeance-prone cop, Mystic River hails him as the victim's rights advocate.

There is a cop character (Kevin Bacon) in Mystic River but unlike Dirty Harry, he is not a seemingly all-knowing, trigger happy officer. He is a very troubled man, gnawed by self-doubt. But there seems to be some hope for him at the film's end.

Eastwood explained his change of view, saying "it is all about aging."

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"Now I identify more with the victims of the crime," said the 73-year-old filmmaker. "Dirty Harry was -- what? -- 32 years ago. Naturally, I had different feelings then. I always feel like I learn something new on every picture. If you don't do that -- don't grow and expand -- you stagnate."

Referring to the kidnapping and sexual assault of an 11-year-old boy in the story, Eastwood said: "There's something about child molestation that deeply bothers me. There's just something about stealing innocence, stealing somebody's life away, that is such a capital offence."

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