Clint Eastwood ponders mortality with 'Hereafter'
BURBANK, CALIF. — Clint Eastwood, who turned 80 this year, recalls how his longtime production designer Henry Bumstead once answered a question about growing old.
Bumstead, who kept working until his death four years ago at 91, replied: "Oh, to be 80 again."
"I thought, yeah, that's it," Clint Eastwood said in an interview at the Warner Bros. office he has occupied since 1976. "When I'm 80, I'll be saying, 'Oh, to be 70 again,' or something like that."
The prolific director, who entered a career peak in his 70s with such films as "Million Dollar Baby" and "Mystic River," said he aims to keep working as long as he's able and gives little thought to mortality, the subject of his new drama "Hereafter," which follows three characters searching for answers about life after death.
Now that he is 80, how old does he feel? "Eighteen," Clint Eastwood jokes, before dismissing the age issue with a shrug.
"I don't think too much about it. I don't feel any different than I did at 70," Clint Eastwood said. "Whatever I feel internally, now is the best age for me, because I feel better now, I guess because I've lived a lot of life. I've been able to accomplish a certain amount of things, and I haven't beaten anybody up doing it. so I'm OK about it.
"Physically, I don't know if can run as hard as I could at 60 or 70. but I probably could. I probably could get close."
Clint Eastwood thinks back to shooting 2004's "Million Dollar Baby," which followed 1992's "Unforgiven" as his second Academy Award winner for best picture and director, and how each day he and collaborators would do dips on the parallel bars on the set of the boxing drama. Clint Eastwood said he could do more dips than colleagues 40 or 45 years younger.
That's not a boast from the soft-spoken Clint Eastwood, who rose to fame on TV's "Rawhide," became a big-screen star with "A Fistful of Dollars" and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" and was an icon of vigilante justice with his "Dirty Harry" movies. He's simply acknowledging the discipline he knows he possesses to work hard and efficiently.
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That's part of the secret of his decades-long affiliation with Warner Bros., where executives have signed off on story angles that don't scream box office
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