The director Morgan Freeman is totally in love with: “He’s got this really strange mindset”
Being a legend of the silver screen means fewer auditions and more offers being sent straight to the front door to be accepted or rejected, which has placed Morgan Freeman in the trajectory of some phenomenal filmmakers.
Ever since he broke through on the cusp of turning 50 years old with his first Academy Award-nominated performance in Street Smart, Freeman has never had to worry about where the next paycheque was coming from. People want to work with him now, and they have for a long time, but only one of them caused him to fall in love.
It’s not Clint Eastwood, even if they’ve proven to be very good luck charms for each other. Their first and second features together both won Oscars for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ when Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby took top honours, with Freeman snagging his own statue for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ in the latter.
Eastwood might be his favourite out of all the directors he’s worked with, but it’s fair to assume the actor and director’s iconic thousand-yard stare wouldn’t take too kindly to being the source of Freeman’s infatuation. It isn’t Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, Rob Reiner, or David Fincher, either, even if they all rank among the cream of the crop talent-wise.
Instead, Freeman fell head over heels for an auteur he’s only ever worked with once and never again, so maybe the dynamic was a lot more one-sided than he wanted it to be. 2000’s crime caper Nurse Betty teamed the wizened sage up with Chris Rock as a father/son pair of hitmen who killed Renée Zellweger’s husband and have her in their sights next.
The offbeat black comedy with heavy lashings of whimsical fantasy – on the part of Zellweger’s daydreaming title character, anyway – barely broke even at the box office and didn’t make much of a splash beyond that, but the way Freeman describes its director, the cartoon-style hearts floating above his head are almost palpable.
“Have you ever met Neil LaBute?” he asked Roger Ebert. “I’m like everybody else who works with him; I’m totally in love. He’s got this really strange mindset that is so much fun. I mean, he has a total sense of humour. It may not always be apparent, but even in In the Company of Men, it was there; it had to do with a man’s take on what other men do.”
Across his 13 features, LaBute has refused to be constrained by genre, with his output covering everything from the aforementioned adaptation of his own play to Nicolas Cage’s widely-mocked remake of The Wicker Man. Freeman clearly had a blast, but seeing as that was the solitary picture on which they put their heads together, he’s remained something of a jilted lover ever since.
