The directors Clint Eastwood will always regret never working with: “I would have loved to”
The best actors always want to work with the best directors, and since entering his prime as a filmmaker, Clint Eastwood has been that guy whom the industry’s highest-profile stars dream of getting a call from.
Judi Dench is one of stage and screen’s all-time greats, and she was beside herself with glee when she was offered a role in J Edgar. Every name, no matter how big they are, can always be relied on to say they’ve dreamed of working with Eastwood at least once after they’ve been cast in one of his pictures.
Back in his younger days, the shoe was on the other foot, but Eastwood didn’t tick every name he wanted from his bucket list. His favourite directors that he worked with were Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, who became the two biggest influences on his own style and approach once he stepped behind the camera. Once he’d tasted creative control, he became less interested in handing it over to someone else.
Unlike many of the industry’s foremost acting giants, the four-time Academy Award winner hasn’t worked with a huge array of acclaimed auteurs, and the reason is simple; once he started directing his own films, Eastwood’s most frequent and famous collaborator was himself, and taking control of his own destiny left him with little time to play in anybody else’s sandbox.
Play Misty for Me was his 23rd movie, though, so he had the time to ingratiate himself with the filmic elite on either side of his debut. He didn’t, and as he explained to The Guardian, there were three people he always dreamed of working with but never got the chance to, plus another legend he wasn’t all that bothered about.
“I knew Billy Wilder socially, and I would have loved to work with him,” he said. “I would have liked to work with Mr Hawks and Mr Walsh. I once talked to Alfred Hitchcock about working with him. He had a screenplay in mind but he was just in retirement. I asked, ‘When does he want to do this?’ They said, ‘Well, he’s probably not going to do the picture, he’s just at that stage where he’s not physically up to it.'”
Eastwood was happy that he managed to work under William Wellman on 1958’s Lafayette Escadrille, but lamented that Wilder, Howard Hawks, and Raoul Walsh slipped through his fingers. Technically, he could have, with those three releasing their final films in 1981, 1970, and 1964, respectively, since they were all active at the same time, but it just never came to pass.
There aren’t many things Eastwood regrets from his career, which is fair enough when he’s probably the greatest actor-turned-director of all time, and he’s definitely the only one to achieve iconic status in both arenas, but it says a lot about the esteem he holds Wilder, Hawks, and Walsh in that they were the only three who came to mind when he took a trip down memory lane to reflect on which directors he would have loved to work with but didn’t.
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