Clint Eastwood Film and Career

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With his rugged good looks and icon status, Clint Eastwood was long one of the few actors whose name on a movie marquee could guarantee a hit. Less well-known for a long time (at least until he won the Academy Award as Best Director for Unforgiven), was the fact that Eastwood was also a producer director, with an enviable record of successes.

Born May 31, 1930, in San Francisco, Eastwood worked as a logger and gas-station attendant, among other things, before coming to Hollywood in the mid-’50s. After his arrival, he played small roles in several Universal features (he’s the pilot of the plane that napalms the giant spider at the end of Tarantula [1955]) before achieving some limited star status on the television series Rawhide. Thanks to the success of three Italian-made Sergio Leone Westerns — A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) — Eastwood soon exchanged this limited status for bona fide international stardom.

Upon his return to the U.S., Eastwood set up his own production company, Malpaso, which had a hit right out of the box with the revenge Western Hang ‘Em High (1968). He expanded his relatively limited acting range in a succession of roles — most notably with the hit Dirty Harry (1971) — during the late ’60s and early ’70s, and directed several of his most popular movies, including 1971′s Play Misty for Me (a forerunner to Fatal Attraction), High Plains Drifter (1973), and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). Though Eastwood became known for his violent roles, the gentler side of his persona came through in pictures such as Bronco Billy (1980), a romantic comedy that he directed and starred in.

As a filmmaker, Eastwood learned his lessons from the best of his previous directors, Don Siegel and Sergio Leone, who knew just when to add some stylistic or visual flourish to an otherwise straightforward scene, and also understood the effect of small nuances on the big screen. Their approaches perfectly suited Eastwood’s restrained acting style, and he integrated them into his filmmaking technique with startling results, culminating in 1993 with his Best Director Oscar for Unforgiven (1992). Also in 1993, Eastwood had another hit on his hands with In the Line of Fire. In 1995, he scored yet again with his film adaptation of the best-selling novel The Bridges of Madison County, in which he starred opposite Meryl Streep; in addition to serving as one of the film’s stars, he also acted as its director and producer.

Aside from producing the critical and financial misstep The Stars Fell on Henrietta in 1995, Eastwood has proven to be largely successful in his subsequent efforts. In 1997, he produced and directed the film adaptation of John Berendt’s tale of Southern murder and mayhem, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and he followed that as the director, producer, and star of the same year’s Absolute Power, 1999′s True Crime, and 2000′s Space Cowboys. With Eastwood’s next movie, Blood Work (2002), many fans were pondering whether the longtime actor/director still had what it took to craft a compelling film. Though some saw the mystery thriller as a fair notch in Eastwood’s belt, many complained that the film was simply too routine, and the elegiac film quickly faded at the box office.

If any had voiced doubt as to Eastwood’s abilities as a filmmaker in the wake of Blood Work, they were in for quite a surprise when his adaptation of the popular novel Mystic River hit screens in late 2003. Featuring a stellar cast that included Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and Kevin Bacon, Mystic River was the film that many critics and audiences cited as one of the director’s finest. A downbeat meditation on violence and the nature of revenge, the film benefited not only from Eastwood’s assured eye as a director, but from a screenplay (by Brian Helgeland) that remained fairly faithful to Dennis Lehane’s novel and from severely affecting performances by its three stars – two of whom (Penn and Robbins) took home Oscars for their efforts.

His reputation as a quality director now cemented well in place thanks to Mystic River’s success, Eastwood’s remarkable ability to craft a compelling film was nearly beginning to eclipse his legendary status as an actor in the eyes of many. Indeed, few modern directors could exercise the effeciency and restraint that have highlighted Eastwood’s career behind the camera as so beautifully highlighted in his 2004 follow-up, Million Dollar Baby. It would have been easy to layer the affecting tale of a young female boxer’s rise from obscurity with the kind of pseudo-sentimental slop that seems to define such underdog-themed films, but it was precisely his refusal to do so that ultimately found the film taking home four of the six Oscars for which it was nominated at the 77th Annual Academy Awards — including Best Director and Best Picture.

Eastwood has also contributed songs and scores to several of his films, including The Bridges of Madison County and Mystic River. In 2005, Eastwood found critical and commercial success when he directed, produced, scored, and starred in the boxing drama Million Dollar Baby. Eastwood played a cantankerous trainer who forms a bond with the female boxer (Hilary Swank) he reluctantly trains after being persuaded by his lifelong friend (Morgan Freeman). The film won four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Swank), and Best Supporting Actor (Freeman).

Eastwood, also received a nomination for Best Actor, and the trio was nominated for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. Eastwood also received a Grammy nomination for the score he composed for the film. Million Dollar Baby was in theaters from late January to early June 2005, grossed more than $216 million at the box office and was his highest-grossing film at the time.

In 2006, Eastwood directed two films about the battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. The first one, Flags of Our Fathers, focused on the men who raised the American flag on top of Mount Suribachi. The second one, Letters from Iwo Jima, dealt with the tactics of the Japanese soldiers on the island and the letters they wrote to family members. Letters from Iwo Jima was the first American film to show a war issue completely from the view of an American enemy.

Both films were highly praised by critics and garnered several Oscar nominations, including Best Director and Best Picture for Letters from Iwo Jima. In 2008 Eastwood directed Changeling, based on a true story starring Angelina Jolie. After releasing in several film festivals in 2008, the film grossed over $110 million, the majority of which came from foreign markets.

After four years away from acting, Eastwood ended his “self-imposed acting hiatus” with Gran Torino. It grossed close to $30 million during its wide-release opening weekend in January 2009, making Eastwood, at age 78, the oldest leading man to reach number one at the box office. Eastwood directed, starred, held a producer role, and co-wrote the theme song for the film. Biographer Marc Eliot called Eastwood’s role “an amalgam of the Man with No Name, Dirty Harry, and William Munny, here aged and cynical but willing and able to fight on whenever the need arose.” Gran Torino grossed over $268 million worldwide in theaters and is the highest-grossing film of Eastwood’s career so far without adjustment for inflation.

Andrew Sarris of the New York Observer stated that Eastwood “… caps his career as both a director and an actor with his portrayal of a heroically redeemed bigot of such humanity and luminosity as to exhaust my supply of superlatives.” Eastwood has said that the role will most likely be the last time he acts in a film.

In 2009, Eastwood directed Invictus, with Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela and Matt Damon as rugby team captain François Pienaar. Carlin sold the film rights to Morgan Freeman.

Hereafter was the forthcoming thriller film directed by Eastwood from a screenplay by Peter Morgan. It stars Matt Damon as “a reluctant psychic”, and co-stars Cécile de France, and Lyndsey Marshal. Filming commenced in France on October 19, 2009, and in the first week of November, production moved to London, England for three weeks of filming in locations including Bermondsey and in Walworth, including the Heygate Estate. Filming resumed on January 12, 2010; Eastwood filmed scenes with de France for three days on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Production next moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. On January 19, scenes featuring Damon were shot at the California and Hawaiian Sugar Company refinery in Crockett, California, which represents a flour mill on screen. Production returned to London on January 29 to shoot the final scenes with Damon.

Variety has described the script as a thriller “in the vein of The Sixth Sense.” Peter Morgan told The Hollywood Reporter, “It’s quite spiritual material, and quite romantic, too. It’s the sort of piece that’s not easy to describe and in the hands of different filmmakers could end up as wildly different films. Quite unlike some of my other material, which I think there were only certain ways that you could shoot it.”

In an interview published in the Los Angeles Times in September to promote the release of Hereafter, Eastwood revealed that he had been offered the role of James Bond following the departure of Sean Connery, and had also been approached by Warner Brothers to star in Superman when the film was in the early stages of development.