The hidden artist: Clint Eastwood on the directors he “always liked the look of”
Although cinema history boasts a number of recognisable and iconic auteurs, directors being celebrated in the marketing and promotion of their latest movie is a relatively recent phenomenon, at least as it relates to how long the moving image has existed.
During the ‘Golden Age’, the people behind the camera very rarely took precedence, with audiences largely convinced to part with their ticket money based on the stars. While that’s still the case, filmmakers have become known entities unto themselves, which means they can regularly be used as the focal point whenever a premise or cast is deemed to be lacking the necessary oomph.
Admittedly, the whole ‘visionary director’ thing has gotten completely out of hand when it’s being tossed around with such reckless abandon that it means less than ever, but Clint Eastwood found himself in the rare position of already being an established star and drawing card before he’d even made his feature-length directorial debut.
There were plenty of actors who’d dabbled in directing and vice versa, but Eastwood was among the first certified superstars to carve out a second career wielding the megaphone. Echoing his eventual transition into filmmaking, the four-time Academy Award winner admitted that he was always more drawn to the directors than the stars in his younger days.
“I remember when I was a kid growing up, before I was ever involved in movies at all, I always liked the look of certain directors,” he said to the Directors Guild of America. “But in those days, it wasn’t fashionable to know who the director was. You knew who was in the picture – Gary Cooper or Ingrid Bergman – and you liked that person, so you went to see that movie. You didn’t go because of the director.”
Eastwood “liked Italian films,” which turned him into to Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Mario Monicelli, and he “always liked” Akira Kurosawa, too. John Ford and William Wellman were among that number of early inspirations, with one film apiece from the latter two standing out in his mind as “directors you appreciate more” with the passage of time.
“You look at a picture like The Grapes of Wrath, and you realize that it’s a small film shot in a relatively short period of time, and yet it has a lot of scope,” he explained of Ford before turning his attention to Wellman. “The Ox-Bow Incident is also an intimate story, shot partly on soundstages, where you can hear the echo when the actors speak – all things you’d now take out using technology – but it doesn’t take away from the movie.”
Picking up tricks of the trade from some of the best to ever do it worked out very well for Eastwood, who ended up becoming just as renowned for his directing exploits as he was for his on-camera performances.
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