Clint Eastwood’s Most Famous Unforgiven Line Needed A Small-But-Crucial Rewrite

In an interview with Yahoo! Entertainment in honor of the film’s 30th anniversary, “Unforgiven” screenwriter David Peoples talked about a line from his original script that Eastwood changed from the film. After the climactic shootout at the end of the movie, Little Bill contemplates his death at the hands of Will Munny in a powerhouse performance from Gene Hackman. The character is bitter to the end, believing that he didn’t deserve to go out the way he did, bleeding out on the floor of a saloon. Munny’s response? “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

According to Peoples, he initially thought his original line in the script, “Deserve don’t mean s***,” better suited the film. However, upon actually seeing how people resonated with the line, he understood Eastwood’s capability as a storyteller, and his initial adverse reaction as a writer comes with the territory of collaborating with another filmmaker:

“He changed it because he said it sounded too modern, and I respect that. I originally thought ‘Deserve’s got nothing to do with it’ sounded a little awkward, whereas ‘Don’t mean s***’ had a better rhythm. So I felt a little bad about it for a while until I heard people quoting it! When that happened, I realized, ‘Clint knew what he was doing.’ [Laughs] That’s normal for writers: we can react very negatively to any line that changes, sometimes because it’s changed for the worse and other times because it’s just different than what we heard in our heads.”