‘The 15:17 to Paris’: The terrible casting idea nobody stopped Clint Eastwood from doing
Clint Eastwood has proven that his instincts as a filmmaker are solid. His quick, unglamorous style of directing has meant that he’s been able to churn out an assembly line of moneymakers for decades. Now in his mid-1990s, he’s done more for Warner Bros’ bottom line than any other filmmaker, pulling in $9 billion at the box office off a combined budget of about $2.7bn and earning two ‘Best Picture’ Oscars.
Eastwood tends to make movies about real-life loners who achieve extraordinary things, whether it’s an unexpected feat of life-saving heroism in Scully or climbing to the highest of positions in US national intelligence and leaving a complicated legacy in J Edgar. His no-frills directing style is aided in no small part by extraordinary performances from A-list actors. To play the role of the fast-acting airline pilot in Scully, he chose two-time Oscar winner and renowned nice guy Tom Hanks. To play the deeply complex role of FBI head J Edgar Hoover, he chose Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio. Both these films rest on the performances and personas of their lead actors, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else in those roles.
When Eastwood started preparing to make another film about real-life heroism in 2017, it was safe to assume that he’d net another cast of top-tier thespians. Like Wes Anderson and Martin Scorsese, he’s the kind of director who every star wants to work with, so there would surely have been a long line of famous hopefuls calling his office. But Eastwood decided to go a completely different route.
The 15:17 to Paris chronicles the 2015 terrorist attack on a passenger train travelling from Amsterdam to Paris. The armed assailant was subdued by French, American, and British passengers, ensuring that no one was killed. They were later awarded the French Legion of Honour. Instead of casting movie stars or even relatively unknown actors in the roles of the passengers who subdued the attacker, Eastwood cast three of the real-life heroes – Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler, and Alek Skarlatos.
“There might’ve been a little discussion as to whether they thought it was a good idea, but nobody expressed it to me,” the director told film critic Emanuel Levy in 2018. “I guess they felt I’d been doing this for 60-something-odd years, and I could maybe make a decision.”
Eastwood said he got the idea while discussing the film with Stone, Sadler, and Skarlatos. He wanted to make sure everything was accurate and talked the event through with them over and over. Eventually, something clicked.
“I think there are some wonderful actors around that could’ve played this,” he said, “But there’s something about this particular project and the heroism that was involved and the way they handled the thing that is just kind of unique, so I thought I’d try that here.”
The acting is predictably less electrifying than it could have been with professional performers, but the real letdown of the movie was the fact that Eastwood decided to focus on the characters’ vacation rather than the attack. As a consequence, the movie often feels like a terrible knockoff of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, in which the main characters wander the streets of Europe chatting about nothing. The director’s usual economy of style gives way to a languid experimentation that is remarkably dull considering the ostensible subject matter. The film would have benefitted from a little more input from someone other than Eastwood, even outside the choice of actors.
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