Tuesday, October 19, 2010
By Carrie Rickey
Philadelphia Inquirer
NEW YORK
“Hereafter,” Clint Eastwood’s 31st feature film as a director in 40 years, drew enthusiastic applause at Lincoln Center, where it closed the New York Film Festival last week.
The next morning found the actor/director, the planet’s most unassuming movie star, lounging on a banquette outside the Warner Brothers screening room as members of the National Board of Review, an awards group, previewed his new film inside.
The movie stars Matt Damon as a moody psychic and Cecile De France as a broadcaster shaken by a near-death experience. Despite its title and subject, it is not a meditation on what happens after death but, like so many Eastwood movies in the last decade, a life-affirming movie about love.
Clad in a steel-gray jacket and azure polo shirt that match his hair and eyes, the lean figure unfolds extension-ladder legs. He stands to greet you, relaxed and robust. This is what 80 looks like. At least, Eastwood at 80 — the lion not yet in winter.
At a time when many of his generation are resigned to the easy chair, Eastwood continues to command the director’s chair. “I never consider retirement,” says the hero to both the Modern Maturity and Maxim generations. “I’m always learning.”
There is no other Hollywood career like his. He is America’s favorite actor, according to the 2010 Harris Poll (even though he insists “Gran Torino” was his last performance). And he is one of the nation’s best-loved directors, too. “He’s the gold standard,” says industry analyst Paul Dergarabedian. Eastwood’s “Space Cowboys,” “Million Dollar Baby” and “Gran Torino” all hit the box-office bull’s-eye of $100 million-plus. (“Mystic River” made $90 million.)
“Clint stands alone. He produces, directs, composes and acts,” says Jeanine Basinger, film historian and National Board of Review member. “He’s on top of cutting-edge special effects and old-fashioned storytelling. He’s had an amazing career — and it’s not over yet.”
Eastwood has one rule about choosing a script.
“I always ask myself, ‘Would I like to see this?’”
When Steven Spielberg called and said, “I’ve got this interesting screenplay,” Eastwood, who hears this about as often as “hello,” agreed to take a look. A few pages into Peter Morgan’s script about the reluctant psychic and the survivor of a tsunami, Eastwood found himself “rooting for these characters.”
Given his film’s subject matter, you have to ask: Does he believe in life after death?
“I don’t know,” he says in a whisper less gravelly in life than on screen. “I guess I’m agnostic on the subject.
“But even if I don’t believe in a hereafter, I believed during the course of making the film,” he muses. The undogmatic Protestant who played angels of death in “Pale Rider” and “Unforgiven” says, “I don’t see God as a sadist who wants to punish us for doing wrong,” he says. “If I have any strong spiritual feelings, it’s that you are meant to do your best with your life while you’re here.”
Although “Hereafter” is of a piece with Eastwood’s recent intimations-of-mortality films “Million Dollar Baby” and “Gran Torino,” don’t go thinking that he chose to make it because of his age. “Yes, I’ve lived a fairly long life,” he says matter-of-factly. “But I would have made this picture when I was 40. I would have appreciated its story value.”
And no, he’s never personally had a paranormal experience, save for the occasional premonition: “You know, when you go to the telephone to call someone and they’re on the line already.”
The supremely pragmatic Eastwood didn’t want to become a director because he resented the authority of the filmmakers he worked with or because he wanted to make message movies. He contemplated becoming a director in his late 30s as a way of supporting his family when the public got tired of him, which hasn’t happened yet.
For his first 20 years behind the camera, he made modestly-budgeted art movies without artistic pretensions. He alternated between small personal films he made for himself and popular films for the mainstream audience. Over time, he’s been able to bring the mainstream over to his shadow-ridden studies of violence and vengeance such as “Unforgiven” (1992) and quiet meditations on morality and mortality such as “Million Dollar Baby” (2004).
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