Clint Eastwood is about to tackle another movie, and has taken aim at remakes and franchises. More here.
Clint Eastwood may be 95 years old, but he’s still enthused by the filmmaking process, and by the discovery and creation of new stories. Oh, and he also doesn’t have a lot of time for those that are content to turn out reheated ideas in the form of sequels, franchises and remakes.
What’s more, he’s offered a few thoughts on the situation.
Eastwood of course was the director of last year’s
Juror #2
– a smart and original crime thriller that was the exactly the kind of original and entertaining kind of film that used to be the lifeblood of Hollywood. However, as the
film’s woeful marketing and release strategy
(it was a Warner Bros release) proved, it seems that Hollywood studios don’t even know what to do with these kinds of films now. Even when they have excellent ones right in front of them simply awaiting discovery by an audience.
In a recent interview Eastwood gave to Austrian newspaper
Kurier
,
per
Reuters
, he talked about the problems with modern Hollywood: “I long for the good old days when screenwriters wrote movies like
Casablanca
in small bungalows on the studio lot. When everyone had a new idea … We live in an era of remakes and franchises. I’ve shot sequels three times, but I haven’t been interested in that for a long while. My philosophy is: do something new or stay at home.”
In an era where originality is feared more than it is prized, it’s very difficult to disagree with the man. Especially when Hollywood’s lack of originality is often self-defeating and the industry shrinks in the face of other media, causing it to become even less risk averse and creating a vicious cycle.
Eastwood would drive home the point, adding that throughout his half-century-long career, he has been pushed to adapt, which enabled him to pick up new skills: “As an actor, I was still under contract with a studio, was in the old system, and thus forced to learn something new every year, and that’s why I’ll work as long as I can still learn something, or until I’m truly senile.”
Again, it’s a good point. We’re all products of our environment and if storytellers and executives are trained on a diet of developing remakes and franchises, how can we expect them to suddenly burst with originality in the same way that as audiences, we have gradually been conditioned into accepting films with colons or numbers slapped on them as the norm.
As for Eastwood, he’s not interested in numbers next to films – or the ones that describe his supposed age. “There’s no reason why a man can’t get better with age,” he concludes. “And I have much more experience today. Sure, there are directors who lose their touch at a certain age, but I’m not one of them.”
He certainly isn’t.
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Clint Eastwood I “Do something new or stay at home.”
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