The Clint Eastwood movie that shocked Meryl Streep: “I heard Steven Spielberg cried for 40 minutes”
When Meryl Streep turned up for her first day of shooting on a classic mid-1990s Clint Eastwood picture, she hadn’t rehearsed a single line from the screenplay. She had been offered the leading lady role in the film five weeks earlier by Eastwood, who would be directing and starring as the male lead – and then nary a word was spoken until she arrived in Madison County, Iowa. She then shot her part in a whirlwind four weeks – much quicker than she was used to – and marvelled at how cinema’s greatest tough guy successfully made a middle-aged romance that barely left a dry eye in every screening. Even Steven Spielberg cried when he watched it.
In 1992, Robert James Waller’s novel The Bridges of Madison County was released, and it became a phenomenon over the next couple of years. In fact, with 50million copies sold to date, it’s one of the biggest novels of the 20th century. The story of a woman in 1960s Iowa who has a short but passionate romance with a National Geographic photographer while her husband and children are away at a State Fair; the book had been optioned for film by Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment before it was even published.
Spielberg always saw Eastwood as photographer Robert Kincaid, telling Entertainment Weekly, “‘I’ve been friends with Clint since the Play Misty for Me days in the early ’70s. I’ve always felt that Clint in his real life was a much drier version of Kincaid in Waller’s book.”
Eastwood wasn’t entirely sold by the book initially, though, simply saying, “Some things worked well, other things I wasn’t quite sure about.” Still, he felt Kincaid was a role he could breathe some life into, mainly because it hit him close to home. He revealed, “I’ve been that guy a little bit, going off by myself years ago in a pickup truck into Nevada, scouting locations for High Plains Drifter,” before quipping, “But I didn’t stop off with any housewives while doing that.”
To Spielberg’s surprise, Eastwood chose Streep to play the Italian-American Francesca Johnson. Spielberg had been imagining Isabella Rossellini, but Eastwood was adamant that all they needed to do was get the best actress in the world for the part. He said Streep “is a chameleon” who “can make herself become whatever she wants to.” Therefore, to him, “This role seemed ideal for her.”
Like Eastwood, Streep had some doubts about the book and was wary that a weepie like this would be difficult to execute properly. However, when she began shooting with the taciturn star, she began to realise his completely unfussy method worked for the film. Of her performance, she joked, “He didn’t say anything good or bad for three weeks. Then he said, ‘I’m not saying anything because I think it’s good.'”
While Eastwood’s directing style was customarily straightforward and minimalist, his performance in the film was anything but. In fact, his willingness to go out on a limb and make himself look vulnerable surprised Streep. She told The New York Times, “I know a score of actors who would avoid exposing their emotions the way he does in this movie. He was very raw. I was shocked. I think he’s just reached a point in his life where he doesn’t give a damn.”
At one point in the film, Kincaid stands in the rain outside his truck, his hair flattened to his head. He is crying profoundly because he can’t have the woman he loves, while his nose streams and his tears merge with the rainwater. It’s an image that audiences had never associated with Eastwood, whose emotions on film tended to remain reserved and just beneath the surface. Producer Kathleen Kennedy pointed out, “How many actors today would do that? It takes tremendous self-confidence.”
Ultimately, the film proved to be one of Eastwood’s late-period masterpieces, with Streep landing an Oscar nomination for her layered performance. It made $182million at the box office, all while causing audiences worldwide to weep uncontrollably into their popcorn. In fact, one of those weepers was the man who got the ball rolling on the project, with Streep claiming, “I heard Steven Spielberg cried for 40 minutes.”
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