“I wouldn’t make the movie at all”: the shocking 1990 scene Clint Eastwood confessed he “wouldn’t do today”
Hollywood’s greatest-ever actor-turned-filmmaker doesn’t have too many regrets from a legendary career, but there remains one particularly galling scene that Clint Eastwood confessed he would never want to repeat.
Several of his movies have been criticised for their excessive violence, but it was like water off a duck’s back for Eastwood. Dirty Harry was accused of being everything under the sun, but its iconic leading man waved off any and all suggestions, repeatedly pointing out that it was a work of fiction at the end of the day.
Richard Jewell and American Sniper were both accused of bending the truth to suit their respective narratives, but the four-time Academy Award winner offered no apologies for those pictures, either. However, he did at least draw the line at a scene from an otherwise forgettable 1990 action thriller that’s been aging progressively worse with each passing year.
Nobody was really asking to see Eastwood and Charlie Sheen team up for a buddy cop caper, but they got one anyway, and it goes without saying that The Rookie won’t be remembered as one of his finest efforts. As formulaic and uninspired as he’s ever been on either side of the camera, the flick tanked at the box office and was instantly dismissed as yet another by-the-numbers police story.
That said, one scene is shocking through a modern lens. Around the midway point, Eastwood’s Nick Pulovski is handcuffed to a chair by Sônia Braga’s Liesl, who undresses, picks up a razor blade, threatens to literally remove the police officer’s manhood if he can’t meet her carnal desires, and then, for lack of a better term, rapes him, with the whole thing caught on camera.
Within the context of the movie, it’s basically shrugged off by Eastwood’s character. However, with the benefit of a decade’s hindsight, when he was asked if he’d have shot the scene the same way again, he confessed that, “Today, I wouldn’t make the movie at all.”
“There are just some films that I wouldn’t do today,” he elaborated. “I’ve simply gotten older and more mature. And a bit wiser. You see, in the final analysis, you make a lot of serious decisions based on gut instinct. Later, you come to regret them, and you’d be happy if you could reverse them, because in the meantime, you’ve acquired a different attitude about things.”
To that end, the Unforgiven architect also acknowledged that he’s “much more interested today in the effect of violence on the victims than I was earlier.” In 1990, Eastwood didn’t have a problem directing himself as a character who was sexually assaulted and then immediately shrugged it off, but it’s not something he’d ever think of doing twice.
Obviously, there are plenty of movies and/or sequences from Hollywood’s past, whether they’re good or bad, that don’t stand up to modern scrutiny. That scene in The Rookie is definitely one of them, something the star became increasingly aware of as he grew older.
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