The grand old man of Hollywood is tired of the same old stories — and he isn’t shy about making his feelings known.
Clint Eastwood, the cinema legend who turned 95 on Saturday, has spent decades compiling a movie career familiar to virtually all Americans.
And in an interview with an Austrian newspaper this week, he had harsh words for those currently in charge of the business.
“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,” Eastwood told the Kurier, a German-language daily based in Vienna, according to Reuters.
“My philosophy is: Do something new or stay at home.”
From a figure like Eastwood, that has to be painful for Hollywood to hear.
Eastwood starred in the “Dirty Harry” franchise — a series of five films spanning 1971-1988. (The “make my day” line — after a typically Eastwood-esque shoot-em-up scene in 1983’s “Sudden Impact” — is a bedrock of American culture.)
And his string of Western classics — including the immortal, revenge-themed thriller “The Outlaw Josey Wales” — certainly had no problem mining traditional storylines, though with Eastwood’s particular touch.
But, as Eastwood told the Kurier, that was a long time ago.
Are you a fan of Clint Eastwood?
Eastwood’s movies over the past several decades have taken different twists, like “Million Dollar Baby,” which dominated the Oscars in 2005.
He’s also been an unabashed patriot, celebrating the life of Marine marksman Chris Kyle in the 2014 “American Sniper” — which received six Oscar nominations and won one.
His most recent, “Juror No. 2,” is a Hitchcockian look at a murder case in which one of the jurors might have played a bigger role in events than he’s letting on.
An honest appraisal of “Juror No. 2,” even from a confirmed Eastwood fan, would have to be something like: The premise is great. The follow-through is less great, and the ending, frankly, comes across as contrived to the point of desperation. But there are worse ways to be entertained for a couple of hours.
But the point is, it was a movie that stood by itself.
It wasn’t “Dirty Harry” No. 275, or another awful “Star Wars” spinoff, or another supercilious superhero farce, or yet another one of those god-awful, live action warpings of a classic that have stained the once-revered Disney name and infuriated the American public.
That’s the state of Hollywood today, and it has been for decades.
And a nonagenarian like Eastwood, a man with a towering image in his profession and his country, remembers when things were better.
“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,” he said, according to Reuters.
And even at his advanced age — unlike certain Democratic politicians Americans could name (particularly ones hailing from Delaware) — he is in the physical and mental shape to do his part to improve things.
And he doesn’t sound like he plans on stopping any time soon. He’s already in the pre-production phase for his next project, Reuters reported.
“There’s no reason why a man can’t get better with age. And I have much more experience today,” he told the Kurier, according to Reuters.
“Sure, there are directors who lose their touch at a certain age, but I’m not one of them.”
Hollywood should be listening to him.
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