"Still Makin' Our Day"

Clint Eastwood is nothing if not Hollywood’s ultimate Renaissance Man in a career that now spans six decades. From a gritty western icon in the CBS TV series Rawhide and in Sergio Leone’s classic “A Man With No Name” trilogy to gritty action icon in the Dirty Harry films to accomplished filmmaker in movies as wide-ranging as Unforgiven, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Flags Of Our Fathers, Letters From Iwo Jima, Changeling, Gran Torino, and Invictus.

Now at 80 years old, Eastwood takes his directing style to the world of fantasy with the drama Hereafter. He first discussed how he was approached to do the film.

“Let’s see,” Clint begins, “Steven Spielberg called me one day and said, ‘I have script I’d love to send over to you,’ and I said ‘Fine, send it over.’ He and I have worked together on a few other projects, and I read it and I liked it. So I just called him back and I said, ‘I’ll do it.’ I didn’t realize I was last on the list, however, I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it.’ So he was going through a minor divorce there with Paramount Pictures or something, so it became a little confusing as to where this would have its life, but I have a relationship with Warners so I said, ‘Well let me take it to Warners.’ Warners liked it and so there we were. I liked the script immediately. There were a few little ideas I had but I just put those in the back of my head.”

“I thought it was good the way it was. It didn’t need rewrites,” he continues, “I haven’t shot a picture with any blue pages in it in a long time; you either like them or you don’t. But I liked this one. Most religions seem to ponder the afterlife, but I thought this was interesting because it wasn’t really a religious project. It had a spirituality about it but

"Still Makin' Our Day"

it was not necessarily tied in with any particular, organized thought. I think everybody, whether you believe in the afterlife or the chance of a near-death experience and you come back and you see some semblance of it, whether that has happened or not I don’t know, but certainly I think everyone’s thought about it at some point or another in time. And it’s a fantasy that if there is anything out there like that it would be just terrific, but that remains to be seen.”

Hereafter tells three different stories about three different people, an American factory worker played by Matt Damon, a French TV reporter played by Belgian actress Cécile de France, and two English boys, played by Frankie and George McLaren, who deal with a death in their lives in different ways that parallel each other. Clint was asked to discuss the research needed not only to explore the film’s themes of death and spirituality, but its visual effects.”

“Yeah, it raises a lot of questions, but that’s where it ends,” Eastwood notes, “The questions are here and you pose the questions and it’s up to the audience to meet you half way and think about it in terms of their own lives and what their thoughts are or what experiences they might have had. There may be some near-death experiences out there and it would be interesting to see what the answers were, but they’re going to have to come up with those answers. As far as the technical thing, like doing the tsunami, I took all the imagery footage that had been shot on that particular tsunami when it was happening, we took that and used that as our influences to get going.”

“But everything else has got to be in the imagination of the performer,” he adds, “Cécile talked to anchor people in French, too, or what have you. Everybody has their way of preparing and I just allow everybody to

"Still Makin' Our Day"

do that on their own, and then if something isn’t working it’s another thing. But if you have people that do that inner research they bring that to the table. So I’m a firm believer in research, but I’m also a firm believer in utilizing the instincts that are within your soul or your body or in your stomach or wherever they reside.

Eastwood was asked if he had his own near-death experiences.

“Everybody’s had some kind of a…” he begins, “I remember when I was very young my dad was taking me into the surf on his shoulders and I fell off. I can still remember today, even though I was probably four or five years old, I can still remember the color of the water and everything as I was being washed around in the surf before I popped to the surface again. But at that age you don’t think too much, I mean you’re just kind of going…well you hadn’t learned any obscenities yet but a lot of them were running through your mind.”

“And then years later, when I was 21 years old I was in a plane, we ditched a plane off the coast of Northern California in the wintertime,” Clint continues, “And I must say that as I was going into shore I kept thinking about should I be thinking about my demise, but all I was thinking about was as I saw lights in the far distance I said “Somebody’s in there having a beer and sitting next to a fireplace and I just want to be in there. So I’m going to make it.” And that was the determination, but there was no sense of fate out there or anything like that. I don’t think you get a chance to think that much. When you get that much of a chance to think you’re usually going to be okay.

Clint elaborated more on the film’s powerful tsunami scene.

“Let me

"Still Makin' Our Day"

just regress a little bit,” he says, “I thought the unusual aspect of the script was taking actual events and placing them into a fictional story. And so the tsunami of four years ago out in the Pacific was one, and then the London bombings of course. I thought that was a unique thing to do. But the tsunami was very difficult to do. I kept having fantasies of huge hoses and thousands of gallons of water running down the streets and what have you, and I figured out how to do that. I figured that would be prohibitive. Where would we do that? In the old days I supposed you would have done that on the set and you would have done little set pieces and turned a lot of water loose. But with the element now of computer generated elements you could go ahead and do it, even though water is probably the most difficult thing to do in a CGI basis.”

“I have a fellow named Michael Owens who has worked with me on Letters from Iwo Jima, Flags Of Our Fathers, and back as far as Space Cowboys,” Eastwood adds, “So he kept very much hip on the technology as it has been improving over the years. We went through it and figured out what shots we would need to do live and then we did it. But it took a lot of different places. Cécile [de France] was in a tank in London for nine hours without getting out too much, and she had to have a skin replacement afterwards. But then we went to Maui and shot in the ocean and on the streets of Lahaina. We had to preplan it in order to piece all the elements together with the connective shots and what have you. If you don’t preplan CGI, it’s the most expensive thing in the world, so you have to plan every single shot and that’s

"Still Makin' Our Day"

normally not the way I shoot, but in this thing it worked out rather well. We hired a company named Scanline and they did a terrific job.”

Eastwood was asked whether or not he himself would have preferred to have the tsunami scene be showed in Hereafter’s theatrical trailer.

“Yeah, I would have preferred to not show the tsunami and have it just sprung on everybody, but that’s just not the practicalities of life,” Clint admits, “You do want people to come in and see it, and hopefully they’ll enjoy it. It’s a tricky story because this particular screenplay you have to flesh out all the characters and it’s tough to do. It’s tough to market a film like this. You bring up an interesting point. Most of the time you’re fighting the studio a little bit because they want to tell the whole story in a matter of 30 seconds, and so they try to put a little bit of everything in there so you end up with a lot of nothing, really.”

“They made some trailers that had accentuated the story and then some that accentuated the tsunami,” he continues, “The problem with accentuating the tsunami is all of a sudden in becomes an action movie and everybody goes there with the expectation that maybe they’re going to see two hours of flooding, and that may not be the case so much. But if you go into the stuff with the kids and you go into a lot of detail then they’ll think maybe this is a story that doesn’t have as much action-adventure.”

Clint talked about working with twin child actors Frankie and George McLaren who play English boys Marcus and Jason.

“The interesting thing with child actors is kids are natural actors,” Eastwood believes, “They’re wonderful actors and most kids are acting all the time. They’re out in the yard playing and they’re imagining things happen and they can get very vivid. But unfortunately, once

"Still Makin' Our Day"

they’ve been organized into acting and you get a stage mother sitting there saying, ‘No, do it this way.’ And I’ve watched many times over the years in other films that I’ve done where a director will try to undo a lot of bad habits that had been instilled. And so when I looked at people for this picture, young kids, I picked the two that were the least experienced. In fact, they had no experience; they’d never been in film before. They said they’d been in some grammar school plays but I doubted that.”

“But they had the faces and I’m one of those guys who believes if you cast a film correctly, and that’s with professionals or with amateurs, you’re probably 80% there,” he adds, “If you cast a film incorrectly then you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle. But I just figured I could pull things out of them without them knowing it better than trying to get somebody organized. And we auditioned about three or four sets of identical twins. They looked great but there was a lot of acting going on, and so I said these guys have the right face, they’re from the right neighborhood, they had certain elements that these kids needed to have built into their system, so they didn’t have to get in there and act like something else that they weren’t.”

Eastwood also discussed how a big part of shaping his films is shooting the rehearsals.

“I love to shoot rehearsals because I’m always curious about watching actors the first time they run it across their mind and the thinking it out,” he says, “Naturally. an actor learns all their lines at home and they know a certain approach to a sequence, but just to see it run across the first time, so sometimes I’ll try that. I’ll do it without rehearsals or I’ll tell them to rehearse it but just talk it, kind of get

"Still Makin' Our Day"

the geographics of the scene.”

“But I love that spontaneous thing,” Clint adds, “It doesn’t always happen that way. Sometimes you need more time depending on the performer. In Bryce [Dallas Howard]’s case it was better just to go for it right away because obviously she had a good understanding of where she was going with it. And with Matt and Cécile the same thing. In this particular film everybody was ready to go kind of thing, except with the kids naturally it took a little bit more effort, but that’s another thing.”

Clint was asked what was the hardest and easiest thing about shooting Hereafter.

“I don’t know,” he replies, “ I was thinking back on doing A Perfect World years ago, where I had a kid actor and he had some experience, but he was a kid that had great body English and everything, but kids are like animals; they’re good for one take and then their attention span, they kind of go off into another little journey in their head. But then I had professional actors working with them and they wanted to rehearse and they wanted to be organized or feel in a comfort zone, so that became big dilemma of how to do that. So I had to cover the kid mostly by himself at the beginning or at least favored the kid, because I knew that eventually, when we got around to other coverage of the professional actor the kid was going to be bored with it all.”

“So you have to make adjustments on every project,” Eastwood continues, “ In this case it was no problem, and Cécile does speak English well so it was no problem. She knows French very well too. And Bryce, I don’t know what languages. It all just comes together. It’s amazing that any of it ever comes together; I guess that’s why I’m still doing it. I’m always amazed that this is actually kind of working.

"Still Makin' Our Day"

And then of course, as I’ve told Matt many times, let’s not think too much about this. Let’s just go and roar with it.

He was then asked what was the easiest film he’s ever director.

“This one,” Eastwood answers, “Except some of the technical stuff, but it was easy because the people were all great. It was the best ensemble I’ve worked with.”

Eastwood was also asked whether he ever went into directing a film concerned about how audiences will respond to it.

“No, you try to put it on the way you perceived it when you first read it yourself,” Clint replies, “And so you get your own opinions and go with it.

Finally, Clint was asked on how he’s managed to still stay relevant as a filmmaker at the age of 80 and what he believes are the common themes found in now all 32 of his films he’s directed.

“What was the old John Ford thing? Ask him a long question and he went, ‘Cut’?” he replies, “I like to think there are different themes in every film. I don’t know if there’s an ongoing theme. Is that what you’re suggesting? There seems to be. Even as far as Letters From Iwo Jima there’s a real sense of people struggling for control and respect as they get older, and it’s not always an easy battle. You know, it’s very subjective. That’s a very difficult one for me to answer. I think it would be easier for someone else to evaluate than it would be for myself because I don’t think of it in that way. Everything to me is spontaneous. Unforgiven is probably an example of a script where I like it right away but I said ‘This is great but I’d like to do this when I’m older.’ So I stuck it in the drawer for 10 years and then took it out. Other projects just come to me, Perfect World, or whatever, they just

"Still Makin' Our Day"

sort of fall. And I have no real rhyme or reason.”

“I wish I could give you some sort of pseudo-intellectual thing that would be great, and maybe if this was a French cinema class, I’d have to fake something,” Eastwood continues, “But I’m not really the person to ask on that. If I start evaluating myself, I would be afraid that I would not be able to think intelligently about every project and the various meaning thereof. I was always sort of shocked. I knew Frank Capra a little bit and I spent some time with him at June Lakes, where he lived in the summertime. He was always so bright I always figured why isn’t this guy still working? And I also knew Billy Wilder somewhat and he had actually stopped working in his 60’s, and I thought God, that’s amazing. Here’s a guy who is bright and lived well into his 90’s and didn’t work. I never could figure that. I figured your best years should be at a point when you’ve absorbed all this knowledge. Now, maybe they just didn’t keep up with the times, or they picked material that didn’t work and they have a few pictures that don’t do so well. People are very fickle, Hollywood is very fickle and they kind of move on. There’s a Portuguese director who is still making films at over a hundred years old, and I plan to do the same thing.