VIENNA (Reuters) -Hollywood star Clint Eastwood urged fellow filmmakers to come up with new ideas as he approaches his 95th birthday this weekend, observing in a newspaper interview that the movie business is now full of remakes and franchises.
Oscar-winning director Eastwood told Austrian newspaper Kurier he planned to keep working, saying that he was still in good physical shape and hopeful that no one would have to worry about him in that regard “for a long time yet.”
Eastwood’s most recent film, legal drama “Juror#2”, came out in the United States last year and the newspaper said he was currently in the pre-production phase for another movie.
When asked for his view on the current state of the film industry, the star of movies such as “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” and “Dirty Harry”, and director of dozens of films including “Unforgiven” and “Million Dollar Baby”, said:
“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,” according to the German text of the interview published on Friday.
“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. My philosophy is: do something new or stay at home,” added Eastwood, who will turn 95 on Saturday.
Asked where he got his energy from, Eastwood said:
“There’s no reason why a man can’t get better with age. And I have much more experience today. Sure, there are directors who lose their touch at a certain age, but I’m not one of them.”
Eastwood, who made World War II thriller “Where Eagles Dare” in Austria with Welsh actor Richard Burton in the late 1960s, told the paper the secret to his success was that he had always tried something new as a director and an actor.
“As an actor, I was still under contract with a studio, was in the old system, and thus forced to learn something new every year,” he said. “And that’s why I’ll work as long as I can still learn something, or until I’m truly senile.”
(Writing by Dave Graham; editing by Giles Elgood)
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