Unforgiven (1992)
- During the filming of Unforgiven, the director famously rewrote the ending on the fly after seeing the chemistry between the lead actors.
- Despite a rocky opening weekend, Unforgiven went on to gross over 5x its budget thanks purely to incredible audience word-of-mouth.
Unforgiven is a 1992 American revisionist Western directed by and starring Clint Eastwood as William Munny, a retired, widowed outlaw and pig farmer who takes one last job โ collecting a bounty on two cowboys who slashed a prostitute's face in the frontier town of Big Whiskey, Wyoming โ to provide for his young children. Accompanied by his old partner Ned Logan, played by Morgan Freeman, and a young, boastful gunslinger called the Schofield Kid, Munny rides into a town ruled by the sadistic Sheriff Little Bill Daggett, played by Gene Hackman, who uses brutal violence to maintain his version of law and order. Unforgiven was Clint Eastwood's definitive statement on the Western genre he had helped define, systematically dismantling the myth of noble gunfighter violence by depicting killing as ugly, traumatic, and morally devastating.
Gene Hackman won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his terrifying Little Bill. The film won four Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, and earned $159 million worldwide on a $14 million budget. Eastwood dedicated the film to the directors Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, who had shaped his career.
