A few years before he died, you can maybe find it on YouTube Tom Laughlin was interviewed about the Oscar awards from 2013 and Eastwood came up in discussion and he was talking about that movie and how he noticed Eastwood was like a sponge even then learning about directing from William Wellman. Actually the actress who played Eastwood's wife in The Outlaw Josey Wales who gets killed is Cissy Wellman who is William Wellman's daughter...From what I've read William Wellman originally wanted Paul Newman and Eastwood as the leads, but that got rebuffed by the studio heads and instead it went to Tab Hunter and David Janssen.