Why Clint Eastwood rejected one of the greatest movies ever made: “I don’t want to”
Hollywood’s biggest stars tend to decline more offers than those further down the totem pole because every studio boss and filmmaker in town covets the A-lister most of all. As one of his generation’s marquee names, Clint Eastwood grew accustomed to saying no.
With the Dollars trilogy, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Dirty Harry, Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, and countless more under his belt, Eastwood was never left to rue the pictures that got away. However, if he’d accepted just one of the notable gigs he turned down, his career could have spun off in several new directions.
The four-time Academy Award winner was asked to play James Bond and Superman, and that’s without mentioning Die Hard protagonist John McClane, Tommy Lee Jones’ grizzled Agent K in Men in Black, a reunion with Sergio Leone in Once Upon a Time in the West, and the Oscar-winning comedy Dick Tracy.
All of those movies and franchises are memorable in their own way, but Eastwood also turned down a stone-cold masterpiece that’s celebrated as one of cinema’s finest-ever features. He still doesn’t regret it, though, which makes sense when it turned out to be one of the industry’s most nightmarish productions.
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was beset by issues from all sides, whether it was inclement weather, a hell-raising ensemble, financial issues, or any of the other problems that seemed to arise daily on a shoot that was as troubled as it was lengthy. Martin Sheen only played Willard because Harvey Keitel dropped out, but it could have been Eastwood.
“Coppola asked me if I wanted to play that, and I said, ‘Gee, I don’t know,'” he revealed, per UPI. “I don’t understand this show too much. I said, ‘No, I don’t think I can go off for that long a time. I’d just gotten through building a house and everything, and I thought, ‘No, I don’t want to go away that long.'”
That was before a single frame had even been shot, which proved to be somewhat prophetic. After all, the first day of principal photography on Apocalypse Now was in March 1976, and it was supposed to be over and done within 16 weeks. Thanks to the aforementioned run of bad luck, it would be another 14 months before Coppola finally wrapped his war epic, so Eastwood made the right call.
Instead, Eastwood decided to stay at home cooped up in the brand new house he’d just built at the expense of flying to the other side of the world to spend an inordinate amount of time working on a film that stumbled from one catastrophe to the next, even if it emerged on the other side smelling like some of the finest filmic roses that ever bloomed.
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