Clint Eastwood knows what it's like to push back retirement. He's been thinking about quitting acting for four decades.
"In 1970, when I first started directing, I said, 'If I could pull this off, I could someday move behind the camera and stay there.' And I was never able to pull it off because somebody offered me a role."
Case in point: 2009's Gran Torino which, at the time, was believed to mark Eastwood's final performance. At least until recent news broke that he'll likely star in -- but not direct -- a film entitled Trouble with the Curve, in which he'd portray an aging baseball scout who goes on a road trip with his daughter.
"Now they come up with some grumpy old man thing and they say, 'OK, let's get Eastwood for that.' So we'll see. Regardless of what age you are, I think most of actors would agree it's all based on material. And the material's got to spark with you."
But what the 81-year-old Oscar winner makes clear is that, regardless of whether he acts again or not, he intends to keep working for as long as he can.
Follow QMI Agency's Kevin Williamson on Twitter!
"I think aging so far has been OK. I think it's good. We live in a society that reveres being at the prime of life, but you have certain primes at certain times. And I think now I'm doing better at certain things right now than I have in the past and maybe not so good at others. I do think if one keeps busy it's very good for a person. People are always rushing into retirement. In Europe, people are talking about moving the retirement age to 67 or something. But back when they started retirement funds, the average age was 70 or 60. Now all of a sudden it's 80.
"If you keep yourself mentally in shape, chances are physically it will follow suit."
Eastwood's latest directorial offering, the period drama J. Edgar, opens Friday, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the controversial FBI director who revolutionized law enforcement, created the FBI, fought bank robbers, collected lurid files on the world's most powerful men and may have dressed in women's clothes.
"From an outsider's perspective, it's amazing what he does," DiCaprio says of Eastwood. "If he's not directing a film, he's acting in it, or he's composing the music for the film. His commitment is astounding."
Told in flashbacks, J. Edgar traces Hoover's life from 1919 -- when he was forged by both his relationship with his controlling mother (Judi Dench) and his hatred of left-wing radicals -- to the 1960s when he considered the Kennedys and Martin Luther King to be among his political foes. Was he loathsome and paranoid? Or pitiful and even sympathetic? The film, like most of Eastwood's morally ambiguous work in the later decades of his career, avoids simplistic characterizations.
"Hoover, I'm sure, felt he was right in everything he did. Everybody always feels they're right, even if they're wrong," says Eastwood, who remembers growing up with the idea that Hoover was a "hero ... This was all prior to the information age, so we didn't know about Hoover except for what was usually in the papers.
"It was fun to delve into a character you've heard about all your life but never really knew, and try to sort that out.
"We're all just learning history or putting our stamp on history or our interpretation of it. I'm sure a lot of things probably didn't happen the way they did in this film, but they're pretty close."
Hoover’s assistant ahead of her time
Behind every great man -- and some who are just greatly loathed -- there's a woman.
To wit: Helen Gandy, J. Edgar Hoover's personal assistant for five decades who was as intimately involved with the inner machinations of the FBI as her boss.
"Unlike Hoover's character there was very little information available about her," says Naomi Watts, who portrays Gandy in Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar. "All we knew was that she worked for him for 50 years, she was not married, and that she devoted her life to her job. And the rest had to be filled in."
Watts' own question about Gandy was simple: Why did she devote her life to her career?
"It was not common for women of her time -- to go into her career, saying 'This is all I want.' She was ahead of her time."
And formidable to the end. It was Gandy who, following Hoover's death, destroyed the infamous files he kept on presidents and power brokers.
Says Eastwood, "She stood her ground. After 50 years of being on that job, nobody could burn her down ... (Hoover) had one or two people he trusted and that was the end of it probably."
kevin.williamson@sunmedia.ca
More Artists
