LOS ANGELES (AP) ¿ Alison Eastwood has been a model, an actress, a Playboy Playmate and a producer. Now, the 35-year-old daughter of Clint Eastwood has turned her talents toward directing.

Her first effort, "Rails & Ties'', features Marcia Gay Harden and Kevin Bacon as a couple forever changed by a deadly train crash. It's heavy material for the first-time filmmaker, who started with the project as a producer.

But Eastwood says it was kismet. She was immediately drawn to the story, and in the process of making the movie, she discovered that she's a director.

How did you find this story?

I got the script through a friend of a friend ... I read it and I liked it and originally I attached myself as a producer. Then after having it for a couple of years and working on it with the writer, I just started having a vision for it. I started having a really strong desire to tell this story and had a real passion for it.

The leap from actor to producer to director is substantial. Was it an organic shift?

I always kind of do things a little backward in my life. It was never like I aspired to direct. I always wanted to be involved in films whether it was producing or acting, but directing? Maybe it was subconscious just because of the association, like, OK, I'm already kind of living in the shadow of this iconic person and being in his business that maybe I just didn't want to go there. ... So after finding this material, it kind of became obsessive, almost like where I couldn't refuse. It's like you have to do this, you have to do this.

What made you launch a clothing line?

I've always grown up with horses and I've always had this love for the West and that kind of ranch life and vintage-inspired clothes. I had the idea to really start a lifestyle brand ... and celebrate the American West and all the different decades of fashion, particularly kind of the turn of the century and the wild West.

Which is harder, movies or fashion?

Once you get the financing usually for a film, you can somehow move forward, whereas one wrench gets thrown into the machine of (clothing) manufacturing and it just throws a terrible domino effect of disaster ¿ not shipping on time and things being wrong and then it just goes downhill from there. My experience as a director and even as an actor has never been as difficult as trying to make clothes. It's by far the worst.

What inspired you to pose for Playboy in 2003?

I'd just turned 30 and the opportunity kind of arose. I think I had some other ulterior motives which I don't necessarily need to talk about, but I think it was more that I thought, you know, I'm probably not going to look like this for too much longer and I've always been extremely comfortable in myself and in my body ... I was able to kind of pick and choose the photos I wanted and who I wanted to shoot it. And of course they compensated me well.

I was in the midst of my clothing line, which was eating up my bank account. So we had a lot of factors in that. I don't know, maybe it was turning 30. I'm 35 now. I don't think I'd ever do it again.