The role so good Clint Eastwood didn’t want to direct the movie: “I decided to cool it”
One of the many luxuries of being Clint Eastwood is that as an icon of two different disciplines, he doesn’t have to direct the movies in which he stars or act in the movies he directs.
It’s a balance he’s struck for half a century, even if pulling double duty has reaped the greatest rewards. Eastwood’s four Academy Awards – two apiece for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ – came when he stepped behind the camera and played the lead role in Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby, respectively.
On the other hand, the highest-grossing entry in his entire filmography by quite some distance is American Sniper, a film where he doesn’t play an on-camera role. It doesn’t matter if he’s got one job or two, though; Eastwood is always going to bring his A-game to the set.
On one occasion, he was presented with a script and floated as a potential directorial candidate. However, not only was he fresh from steering his elegiac farewell to the western genre towards critical, commercial, and awards season glory, but the screenplay was so strong that he wanted to be a part of it either way.
“I read the script for In the Line of Fire and decided it was so good, I might as well do it,” he said. “There was some talk of me directing, but it was right after Unforgiven, and I decided to cool it. I was in quite a few of the scenes, so I said I really would prefer to lay low.”
Even though he wasn’t directing or producing, Eastwood’s star power and status ensured he was instrumental in finding the perfect filmmaker to take the reins on a political thriller packed with plenty of action beats and character-driven drama. To do so, he sought to channel the spirit of the auteur who’d made him an international sensation 30 years previously.
It also helped that Eastwood was a huge fan of Das Boot, which marked Wolfgang Petersen as the number one choice. “Well, I felt that as much as Sergio Leone was right for the spaghetti westerns in the early ’60s, Petersen might be right for some Americana, some Kennedy memories, some contemporary suspense,” he explained to Roger Ebert.
Eastwood’s definition of laying low saw him play a veteran Secret Service agent who failed to prevent the assassination of John F Kennedy, only for history to try and repeat itself when John Malkovich’s deranged Mitch Leary draws him into a game of cat and mouse by threatening to murder the current leader of the United States, presenting Frank Horrigan with the chance to either make amends or suffer the same fate twice over.
With his attentions focused solely on acting, Eastwood gave one of his more unheralded performances as the increasingly frantic Horrigan, ably assisted by Malkovich in delicious Oscar-nominated form. It’s up for debate whether In the Line of Fire would have been better or worse had he directed, but it’s indisputable that it’s a top-notch thriller.
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