“This is not a hard film to do”: the terrible movie Clint Eastwood compared to “a beating”
If there’s one director who can be relied on to make a movie with the minimum amount of fuss, complaining, infighting, backstabbing, or studio politics, it’s Clint Eastwood.
In his 50 years as a filmmaker, the four-time Academy Award winner and all-around Hollywood legend has maintained the mindset that he devised on the very first shot of his feature debut from behind the camera, Play Misty for Me. If he wanted to change, he would have done it a long time ago, but he didn’t want to, so he kept the same outlook for 50 years.
That’s fair enough, especially when he’s never gone a penny over budget or a day behind schedule, and he runs such a tight ship that many of his crew members have been working with him for decades. He’s the model of economy and efficiency, but even someone famed for ensuring every picture he helms has zero fat on its bones can occasionally bite off more than they should be chewing.
What made it worse was that it didn’t even happen on one of his many good, great, excellent, or classic pictures. Instead, it was pulling double duty as the director and star of one of his worst efforts that made Eastwood realise he might be better off if he stopped playing the leading role in his own movies.
“The last film where I did both was Blood Work, and I was in every shot,” he recalled. “I’d thought, ‘Well, this is not a hard film to do, it’s contemporary and takes place in Los Angeles’. But when I got into it, I realised that I was in every single scene.'” That’s a lot of work for anyone, never mind a guy who’d turned 72 years old shortly before it was released.
Adapted from The Lincoln Lawyer and Bosch author Michael Connelly’s novel of the same name, Eastwood’s veteran FBI profiler is waylaid after a heart attack leaves him in need of a transplant. When he discovers the donor was the victim of an unsolved murder, he mounts an unauthorised investigation that reveals the crime was committed by ‘The Code Killer’, the white whale he’s been chasing for years.
Blood Work is nestled comfortably in the bottom tier of Eastwood’s directorial canon, and it tanked in cinemas for good measure. In what may or may not be a coincidence, Connelly, who called the big-screen adaptation “duff,” killed off protagonist Terry McCaleb in his very next book, although it’s speculative to say he did that deliberately to keep any more shoddy movies off his back.
Even though Eastwood took top billing in Unforgiven, “there were a lot of scenes I wasn’t in,” which made it a less arduous shoot than Blood Work. “So there was a lot of relief time, and I didn’t just get a beating all the time.” This being one of the hardest-working fellas in the industry, he didn’t learn his lesson. He exhausted himself for little reward and took a beating on both sides of the camera, and after ceding the spotlight to Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby, he was shouldering the burden all over again when he directed and played the lead in Gran Torino six years later.
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