The movie Clint Eastwood only made as a favour for a friend: “Well, it’s gotten horrible”
Even though everything everybody knows about him would suggest that he’d much prefer it if people made their own luck to make it in Hollywood, Clint Eastwood isn’t above doing the odd favour.
Admittedly, most of the time, it’s due to nepotism. He rarely attaches his name to movies that he’s not involved in as an actor or filmmaker, and on the rare occasions that he did, it wasn’t a coincidence that all of those films bar one were either directed by or starred either his current partners, one of his children, or a combination of the two.
However, there was an exception to the rule, but again, it was basically professional nepotism in action. One of the key reasons why Eastwood has become known as the industry’s most economical A-lister is that he surrounds himself with people who understand his process, and that familiarity ensures everything runs as smoothly as possible, with some of his inner circle having been around for decades.
That doesn’t mean he can’t turn on them, though, with Fritz Manes never working in cinema again after the four-time Academy Award winner severed all ties with one of his closest friends. Fortunately, that didn’t happen to first-time feature director Robert Lorenz, even if it was almost a decade before he helmed his second movie, and all he’s done since 2012 are a pair of workmanlike Liam Neeson thrillers.
He was welcomed into the filmic family in the 1990s, and he’d go on to serve as either an assistant director or second unit director on nine Eastwood-driven pictures, and as either an executive producer or producer on 16 of them. The Dirty Harry and Dollars trilogy icon admitted that he considered making 2012’s Trouble with the Curve himself, but he couldn’t be arsed.
When asked how being directed by Lorenz, in what was the first time he’d acted in a movie that he wasn’t directing for the first time since 1993, he kept his tongue in cheek. “Well, it’s gotten horrible,” he joked to Collider. “I had to listen to everything he said. Actually, he did a terrific job, I thought.”
Eastwood admitted that the baseball drama “was one that I wanted to do,” but after pulling double duty on Gran Torino, he didn’t have the energy. “I thought, ‘This is stupid, to be doing both jobs’. I’ve only been doing it for 40-some years. Maybe I should just do one or the other one and allow myself a little bit of a comfort zone.”
His company already owned the rights, and once it was handed over to Lorenz, Malpaso remained on board. He was involved as a producer from the beginning, but when his protege asked him if he wanted to play the role of Gus Lobel, the ageing baseball scout trying to prove that he was still relevant in the modern game, he accepted. Eastwood is the best thing about it by far, even if his favour didn’t go as planned when Trouble with the Curve bombed at the box office and got sued for plagiarism.
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