Reported by Brian Truitt, USA Today Nov 27, 2018.
One positive about being Clint
Eastwood,Oscar winning director: Make a movie about men in the twilight of
their lives – like, say, the world’s oldest drug courier – and you always have
a really good option as your star.
Still, Eastwood didn’t initially
think of himself to star in “The Mule” (in theatres Dec. 14) until a fellow
producer suggested he'd be the best man for the job.
“All of a sudden, I started
thinking, 'Well, it might be kind of fun to play a guy who was even older than
me,' ” Eastwood, 88, recalls with a chuckle during an exclusive interview, his
first for the movie.
His newest film – Eastwood
directs and stars for the first time since 2009’s “Gran Torino” – is inspired
by the true story told in a 2014 New York Times Magazine article “The Sinaloa
Cartel’s 90-Year-Old Drug Mule.” It chronicled how Leo Sharp, a Detroit
horticulturalist and World War II veteran, ran into financial trouble with his
flower business and wound up transporting kilos of narcotics from Mexico.
In “The Mule,” lonely and
cash-strapped Earl Stone (Eastwood) is estranged from his ex-wife Mary (Dianne
Wiest) and daughter Iris (real-life daughter Alison Eastwood) – though he has a
better relationship with his granddaughter Ginny (Taissa Farmiga). He's facing
foreclosure on his daylily farm when he accidentally and unknowingly gets
involved in an illegal but well-paying operation.
“Then it's, ‘Maybe if I tried it
one more time I could afford to do this and that,' " Eastwood says.
“Pretty soon, he's in high cotton, getting paid an enormous amount of money to
transfer this material. It's an enormous amount of money that he's able to
spend helping people, but he's really into criminal activity.”
That ties into the parallel story
of Colin Bates, the DEA agent played by Bradley Cooper who's charged with
chasing down Stone and ending this trafficking ring. Eastwood’s supporting cast
includes Michael Pena and Laurence Fishburne as government operatives, Ignacio
Serricchio as Stone’s cartel handler and Andy Garcia as a cartel boss.
Stone’s story is different from
Sharp’s, mainly because “we don't know what he incurred when he was on the road
doing all these trips,” Eastwood says. One detail that the filmmaker did hook
into: Sharp was making so much money that he became a Robin Hood-like character
who would stop and help those who needed it. “He was able to get his farm out
of hock and live a rather odd life.”
While “doing things that most men
his age would not be doing” as a “wealthy knight of the roads,” Stone also
tries to mend relationships with his family before it’s too late, Eastwood
adds. “All of these factors fit in to make it a character that's got
complications, just like everybody does in real life. Sometimes people wander astray
and then they try to reinstate feelings, and it's very difficult.”
Eastwood patterned his character
partly off his own grandfather, who owned a chicken farm that the filmmaker
would visit as a child. “He wasn't the guy who went off and did a lot of wild
things, but he could have been, if he was of a different nature,” Eastwood
says. “He worked as an older man, he moved like an older man, and I tried to
emulate his walk and talk and everything else.”
But Eastwood could also
personally understand the character’s predicament and choices because "I'm
fairly far along in life,” he says. Stone’s illegal work “becomes a savior for
him, but morally, it's collapsing. So on one hand, life's coming up, and the
other hand, it's going down. And one of these days, he has to pay the piper on
it and face the fact that he's been doing the wrong thing.”
My special thanks to Dave Turner and Olly Peden
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