I first read this enjoyable piece back in 2016 and
saved it with the aim of reproducing it here. Too many other things no doubt
had me side-tracked or I was just too busy. Nevertheless, I thought it was about time to post it for fans that
might had missed it originally.
Few people can get away with teasing a man like his daughter
can.
On a May afternoon, in a small office at his Malpaso
Productions on the Warner Bros. lot, Clint Eastwood and his daughter Alison
were discussing the 86-year-old director and actor’s career advice to his
children.
“I just said, whatever you do, do it well,” Clint said. “If
you’re going to be a phone operator, be the best phone operator.”
“Phone operator was my backup career,” Alison said, drily,
provoking an amused smile from her dad.
“I guess they don’t really have phone operators any more, do
they?” Clint said.
Instead Alison, 44, entered the family trade. Her second
feature as a director, a Mississippi-set drama called “Battlecreek,” recently
played the Santa Barbara and Newport Film festivals. The movie, which does not
yet have a distributor, is based on a script by Alison’s childhood friend from
Carmel, Anthea Anka, the daughter of singer-songwriter Paul Anka, and stars
Bill Skarsgard as a young man with a rare skin disorder that requires him to
live his life at night.
Made for $1.5 million and backed by a solo, Texan financier
named Michael G. Wallace, “Battlecreek” was a family affair in many respects.
Alison’s older brother, Kyle, a jazz musician who lives in Europe, composed the
score; her husband, sculptor Stacy Poitras, worked on the production design;
some of her father’s long-time associates, such as editor Gary Roach, helped on
the post-production.
The daughter of Clint’s first wife, Maggie Johnson, and one
of his sprawling brood of eight children, Alison shares some obvious qualities
with her father -- they’re both long-limbed and unpretentious, and they love
animals. When she’s not making movies, Alison runs the Eastwood Ranch
Foundation, which rescues animals from high-kill shelters. Clint, who hand
feeds the squirrels outside the Malpaso offices, briefly and excitedly
interrupted the interview to show his daughter a picture of a baby possum that
had recently shown up at his building.
On this afternoon, Clint was in his office to look at some
final visual effects shots on “Sully,” his upcoming film starring Tom Hanks as
the US Airways pilot who heroically landed a plane on the Hudson River in New
York, which Warner Bros. will release in September. It’s Clint’s first film
since 2014’s “American Sniper,” which set box office records and earned six
Academy Award nominations, including best picture.
“He still manages to make films about real people, and
people go see them,” Alison said of her father’s work. “We are besieged by
every type of franchise film -- remakes, sequels. When can we start bringing back
real human beings’ stories?”
Clint said he has always avoided giving thought to a film’s
commercial prospects, a luxury Alison, who is in the midst of meeting with
potential distributors for her film, doesn’t quite have.
“I didn’t know if ‘American Sniper’ was going to do well,”
Clint said. “I just thought the story was interesting, the character and the
dramatic circumstances. I don’t think I’ve ever made a picture because I
thought it was going to make money. If you start by thinking about the end
result, you’re probably going to end up disappointed.”
Alison grew up slapping the clapperboard on her father’s
film sets and stealing cookies from the craft services truck, and made her
screen debut at the age of 7 in her father’s movie “Bronco Billy” before going
on to play a larger role as Clint’s daughter in “Tightrope” (left) when she was 11.
“It’s been a great pleasure to grow up in the business and
have experiences I never would have had unless he was who he is,” Alison said.
“I cherish those. It’s always difficult not to live in somebody’s shadow, but
as long as you do your own thing and find your own voice, you can navigate
through it.”
Navigating that road got harder in adulthood, Alison said,
as she appeared in Clint’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and a
smattering of independent and TV films without finding her niche as an actress.
In 2007 she made her directorial debut with “Rails & Ties,” a Warner Bros.
drama starring Kevin Bacon and Marcia Gay Harden that got mixed reviews and
drew little interest at the box office.
“Sometimes [being an Eastwood] gives people a preconceived
idea of who you are, which isn’t always good,” Alison’s brother, Kyle, said, talking
by Skype from France. “My dad’s always given us the advice to be serious about
what you do and work hard at it, and Alison has done that.”
“I want the same thing for them that every parent wants,”
Clint said, of his kids. “For them to have a good life, a healthy life. You try
to give them ideas about certain things. My youngest daughter, Morgan, when I’d
drop her off at school, she’d say, ‘You can drop me off here. It’s OK.’ The
first couple times it happens you think, ‘Hey, they’re ashamed of me!’”
The
dad-shaming can’t be all that bad -- Morgan recently tweeted an old picture of
her father at the Oscars with Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg with the words
“squad goals.”
“I’m sure I did that too,” Alison said, of distancing
herself from her famous father as a teen. “But you come back around and think,
‘Why would I ever have thought that person was a big dork? I love that person!’
It’s human nature to create that separation and then you make your way back
around.”
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