Clint Eastwood couldn’t stand a 1980 masterpiece: “I didn’t like that”
People like what they like, but in the modern era, it seems to be getting harder and harder for people to admit that a director they admire is capable of making a bad movie. Mercifully, as someone who doesn’t give a fuck about the consensus, Clint Eastwood was happy to shoot straight from the hip.
Hagiography is a very real thing among cinephiles, and even those who wouldn’t necessarily brand themselves as such, looking at the feverish devotion Zack Snyder inspires, despite never having made anything that could reasonably be called a great, classic, or timeless work of cinema.
It happens to the best auteurs in the business, too, one of the more recent and until recently unthinkable developments in the discourse the nit-picking vultures soaring above Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and he was generally viewed as someone who wouldn’t know how to put a foot wrong if he tried.
Is Akira Kurosawa one of the greatest directors of all time? Of course. Is he one of the most influential? Yes, and he might be the most influential of them all. Has he made more masterpieces than the average director? Again, yes, and anywhere up to eight, if your name is Francis Ford Coppola, who’s made at least four of his own, so he knows what he’s talking about.
Has Eastwood been a huge fan of Kurosawa since the 1950s? Absolutely, and not only because Yojimbo inspired, or was ripped off by, to be more accurate, A Fistful of Dollars. As a four-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker, the ‘Man with No Name’ knows a maestro when he sees one, which doesn’t mean he’ll bend over backwards to claim that the Japanese icon walked on filmic water.
He wasn’t a fan of Dersu Uzala, calling it a “terrible” movie that “had a nice wind sequence in it,” and it’s definitely not one of his best. However, Eastwood didn’t have anything nice to say about Kurosawa’s follow-up, either, even though 1980’s Kagemusha was a Palme d’Or-winning return to form that can stand shoulder-to-shoulder alongside his greatest work without feeling out of place.
“I didn’t like that,” the Dirty Harry frontman intoned. “But some of his earlier things were just really fabulous. Rashomon was really good. I haven’t liked any of his last works.” That’s his opinion, but it’s almost as if Kurosawa knew that the knives were being sharpened and he was facing increasing accusations of being yesterday’s man.
He’d only made two films in the previous 15 years, with Dodes’ka-den failing so badly that he attempted suicide. Dersu Uzala was another flop, so how did he respond? By directing Kagemusha and Ran, which is exactly the reason Steven Spielberg called him the only director capable of making masterpieces that late into his career, whether Eastwood agreed with him or not.
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