On paper, his status as a living legend would lead anyone to believe that Clint Eastwood would have few issues securing funding and distribution for whatever project he wanted to pursue.
After all, he’s one of the most iconic actors in Hollywood history and one of its most respected and accomplished filmmakers, with his reputation alone surely enough to convince any studio that if he believed in it, then the decision-makers should, too.
That wasn’t the case with Million Dollar Baby, though, a story that faced plenty of obstacles on its way to the big screen. In the end, everybody ended up a winner, with the notable exception of Sandra Bullock. She’d fought for years trying to make the movie, only to be rejected by every major outfit in town, so she would have been well within her rights to be fuming when Eastwood got it into production.
As dispiriting as it sounds, one of the biggest hurdles was the industry’s inherently casual sexism. Because Million Dollar Baby was a boxing film with a female lead, potential backers were hardly falling over themselves to acquire the screenplay and get it in front of the cameras.
Even though writer and director Karyn Kusama’s Girlfight had recently shown that female-led sports flicks centred around a protagonist who lets their fists do the talking were capable of winning critical acclaim, Million Dollar Baby was going to be 30 times more expensive than the million-dollar independent drama.
Eastwood may have been an icon and a two-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker boasting a mutually beneficial association with Warner Bros that dated back decades, but even at that, his erstwhile home studio wasn’t convinced that Million Dollar Baby was a risk worth taking.
“I read it, and I thought, ‘Well, I just don’t see it,’” then-chief Alan Horn revealed to The Hollywood Reporter. “I thought, ‘I don’t know if women want to see a woman fight.’” Disappointed, Eastwood took the script around Tinseltown, only to discover that nobody was prepared to bite.
A compromise was eventually reached, which saw production company Lakeshore Entertainment contribute half of the $30 million budget, with Warner Bros footing the rest of the bill. Even then, Horn suggested that some major changes be made to the script, but Eastwood was having none of it.
“The movie killed me,” he admitted. “I said, ‘Does she have to die in the end?’ Clint said, ‘I’m afraid so’. I said, ‘Does she have to bite her tongue off?’ He said, ‘That’s the way we have to go’. I said, ‘Does she have to lose the fight?’ But it shows that William Goldman was right; no one knows anything.”
An A-list star had already tried and failed to get Million Dollar Baby off the ground, and even when Bullock was out and Eastwood was in, one of cinema’s greatest-ever stars struggled to convince the people he’d worked with for years that it was an investment worth making. Obviously, history always remembers the victor and the filmmaker’s perseverance was rewarded, justified, and vindicated.
Million Dollar Baby won Oscars for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Actress’, and ‘Best Supporting Actor’, recouping its budget almost seven times over from theatres. Eastwood could have walked away at any point, held his hands up and admitted defeat, but his dedication to the project in the face of industry-wide apathy puts it right up there among his greatest achievements.