Clint Eastwood’s apathy towards one of cinema’s most influential movies: “You don’t really care”
Being one of cinema’s most influential and adored figures doesn’t obligate someone to fawn over cinema’s most influential and adored movies, as Clint Eastwood showed on several occasions.
While he won’t be remembered as one of the industry’s most innovative or stylish auteurs, ask any actor-turned-director whose career they want to emulate, and there’s at least a 99% chance the four-time Academy Award winner will be at the very top of the list.
Eastwood occupies one of the rarest positions in Hollywood history, in that he’s an icon on both sides of the camera. There are plenty of legendary actors and just as many legendary directors, but there aren’t many who’ve become all-timers in both arenas, something he managed to make look effortless.
In keeping with his no-frills style as a filmmaker, Eastwood tends to prefer his movies to be relatively straightforward affairs. He’s got little time for tricks, gimmicks, and narrative sleight of hand, which helps explain why he seemed so apathetic towards a masterpiece that changed the business forever.
A watershed moment for the industry, and not only because it showed a toilet flushing onscreen for the first time, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was transformative. Keeping its plot twist under wraps, shocking audiences, and depicting a frenzied murder where the implication is a lot more startling than what’s actually captured on film, the ‘Master of Suspense’ pioneered the slasher and dragged the horror genre kicking and screaming toward modernity.
When Eastwood was gearing up to make his feature-length directorial debut on 1971’s Play Misty for Me, he sought to channel Psycho‘s spirit, up to a certain point. The psychological drama finds his DJ being stalked by an obsessed fan, but he always wanted to have it grounded in reality, which he didn’t think Hitchcock had achieved.
“It was one of the few psychotic thrill-type pictures that I felt was actually plausible,” he told Paul Nelson. “Even Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, you can’t remember the story. You remember a few very important scenes that were exquisitely done, but you don’t remember the plot lines. You don’t really care about the plot line.”
It would be foolish for an established actor and aspiring director like Eastwood to completely turn his nose up at the artistic merits of Psycho because that would be wrong. It was unlike anything viewers had seen and shocked them into submission, but he felt it was sorely lacking in narrative depth.
All he remembers are individual moments, not the film as a whole. That was something he was keen to avoid when he launched his second career, even if it’s doing one of the greatest movies ever made a disservice to say that “you don’t really care about the plot” when unravelling the mystery of the Bates Motel informs everything that unfolds over Psycho‘s 109-minute running time.
Still, it wouldn’t be the last time Eastwood criticised one of the finest filmmakers in history for their forays into horror, with the star famously blasting Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining for billing itself as the most terrifying picture ever made when he didn’t find it scary in the slightest.
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