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Every director takes their own approach to making films. Clint Eastwood has largely bucked the accepted clichés of the directing profession. When he first launched his production company in the ’60s, now called Malpaso Productions, and later took to directing films himself, he did so with no illusions. He pulled off the tightrope act, balancing the artistic and financial sides of the art form. While fellow auteurs ran up fat budgets, succumbed to self-indulgence, or fought with their actors, Eastwood quietly directed from the shadows. Fittingly, he’s one of the few big-name directors from the ’70s who grew more acclaimed into the ’90s and ’00s.
It’s all about maintaining momentum. Despite his on-screen persona, he thrives when he can completely avoid confrontation, bringing in films on time and on budget with minimal stress. Many directors micromanage actors’ performances, nitpick every aspect of design/cinematography, demand perfection, and film dozens of takes; Eastwood hates wasting everybody’s time. Malpaso has accounted for countless classics, with the films Play Misty for Me, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Million Dollar Baby to name a few, starring and directed by Eastwood. The jazz-loving cowboy displays a marked skill of knowing what works on screen, how to deal with actors to elicit their best performance, and more critically, how to avoid the most dreaded words in Hollywood … production hell.
Keeping All the Drama in Front of the Camera
CBS
In his decades-long tenure as a director, Eastwood acquired the rep of a kindly taskmaster, shooting only two takes (one for insurance), where certain other bearded directors have driven their actors to tears by demanding dozens and dozens of alternate takes. As far back as the ’70s, he recognized that the director’s job wasn’t all that much fun, especially as an actor, as it tends to consume your life.
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Jeff Daniels noted that Eastwood simply wanted his crew to be prepared, and that he seeks personalities that won’t become toxic, telling The Hollywood Reporter that “ninety percent of it is casting the right actor who’s going to work on it and come in with a plan.” And it’s this “plan” that allows them to inhabit the character how they see fit, and provides them just enough leeway to contribute and shape their scenes to keep them busy and invested in the whole process.
The Necessity of a Good First Impression
Warner Bros.
Unforgiven actor Saul Rubinek pointed out that Eastwood favors consummate professionalism over all other qualities. The performance or mannerisms are pretty much up to each actor. “I have never seen actors directed less than I have on Unforgiven,” Rubinek said years later during an appearance on The Road to Cinema Podcast. He evaluates prospective talent without ever meeting them, a brave choice as a single, unconventional casting decision can spark a firestorm of controversy. As it turns out, Eastwood has an aversion to live casting calls, as he doesn’t like having to reject people to their face.
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Eastwood fixates on casting rather than haggling over tiny details while on set, which applies to extras as much as it does to Gene Hackman or Morgan Freeman. He labors at the beginning of the shoot to save time and headaches in the back-end. In the ’80s and ’90s, that entailed watching hundreds of hours of videotapes to cast perhaps just five or six roles.
Rubinek added that he landed the gig in Eastwood’s Western magnum opus because the excessive thought and production value poured into his videotape, going so far as to consider blocking and lighting when preparing. The J. Edgar director views an audition reel as a kind of resume, and nobody is going to take your CV seriously if it’s written in Comic Sans font. By the time Eastwood made Mystic River, he had amassed a sizable library of VHS tapes to compete with Blockbuster Video.
Cultivating Goodwill One Performance at a Time
Warner Bros.
He rejects a lot of the customary trappings of his occupation, or maybe it’s more accurate to say he has the luxury of ignoring the buzzing swarm of studio execs and PR people. He doesn’t start the cameras until the script is 100% done, rarely if ever alters screenplays, and never reshoots scenes to appeal to focus test groups. The key to a Clint Eastwood picture is trust, this lone philosophy permeating every stage of production. He believes in the material and his crew. The crew has faith in him. Warner Bros., longtime distributor of Eastwood’s movies, doesn’t second-guess Malpaso, until this year, so it seems.
Most importantly, generations of moviegoers have come to rely on the quality standards of the Eastwood brand. “He banked an enormous amount of credit with the male audience in the early part of his career, when they were eager to imagine themselves as whatever character he was playing,” Bridges of Madison County actress Meryl Streep said in an Esquire bio. “And then he sort of brought them into material that they never would have gone to.”
This isn’t to say his job is easy, or that he doesn’t have to assert his dominance. Properly casting a movie is no small feat; neither is selecting the right story nor managing millionaires’ whims. Eastwood’s signature style is predicated on cutting out as many variables from the equation as possible. Eastwood once filmed a scene with an extra rather than wait for Kevin Costner to get dressed, shooting around the A-lister rather than catering to him. A tendency he picked up while working on the television show Rawhide, noticing that conventional filmmaking was grossly inefficient and dragged on way too long.
A production is only as strong as its weakest link. Or, in this case, only as nimble as its slowest crew member, taking cues from Sidney Lumet and John Ford. For Eastwood, the film revolves around the script and characters, not the director’s pretensions or the superstars’ egos.
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