When Clint Eastwood started his career as a western star – becoming known for iconic performances in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy – it didn’t take him long to discover his love of directing. He made his directorial debut with 1971’s Play Misty For Me, and since then, he’s become one of Hollywood’s most prolific directors.
Eastwood has earned two ‘Best Director’ Oscars, with both of these films – Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby – also earning ‘Best Picture’ wins. As a filmmaker, Eastwood is able to retain more control of his career, often starring in the movies he directs. In fact, the actor rarely takes roles in films he’s not in charge of helming, preferring to immerse himself in stories he has ultimate command over.
Is Eastwood a control freak? This question has spurred differing answers from people who have met the filmmaker. The book Clint: The Life and Legend by Patrick McGilligan paints him in a rather questionable light, calling him a “paranoid control freak”. However, when asked by CBS News if he considers himself a controlling director, he said, “No, because I like the participation of everyone”.
Certainly, various actors have shared great experiences of working with Eastwood, like Morgan Freeman, who called the filmmaker “an actor’s director”. He told RTE, “He doesn’t direct actors. He directs movies. He hires actors, and it’s your job. And I love that about him that you establish your own character; you play it and do what the scene calls for. [He’ll] have the scene set up.”
It seems as though Eastwood does like having a hold on the project he’s working on to a certain degree, which is perhaps why he has only starred in one movie in the past 30 years that he didn’t direct himself. It was 2012’s Trouble with the Curve, directed by Robert Lorenz, that saw Eastwood make a rare acting appearance in a movie he didn’t write or direct, although he did produce it.
Thus, it’s hardly surprising to hear that Eastwood turned down the chance to star in a western movie back in 2007, even though it was written and directed by Paul Haggis, whom he worked with as a writer on Million Dollar Baby. The movie, In the Valley of Elah, starred Charlize Theron as Detective Emily Sanders, who helps a man, Hank, to investigate the disappearance of his son, Mike, a soldier who has recently returned from serving in Iraq. Hank was played by Tommy Lee Jones, but Haggis asked Eastwood first, hoping he’d be interested in the film’s exploration of the effects of war.
Yet, when he posed the opportunity to Eastwood, he was shot down by the actor, who “told me he was never going to act in anything else,” Haggis revealed to Entertainment Weekly. At this point in time, he hadn’t appeared in anything that he hadn’t directed since his cameo in 1995’s Casper, so it’s not shocking that he decided to turn the movie down. In fact, he’d claimed that his 2008 movie Gran Torino would be his last acting gig before he retired for good.
Yet, Eastwood is not one to sit still, so he has since acted in several other movies, like The Mule, Cry Macho, and of course, Trouble with the Curve.