Clint Eastwood: How Hollywood legend shut down Dame Judi Dench on set
Clint Eastwood on set of J Edgar (Image: GETTY)The 87-year-old found this particularly frustrating when being directed by Eastwood, who regularly didn’t allow more than one take.Impersonating their back-and-forth conversation, she said: “‘Mr Eastwood, could we possibly do that again?’ ‘Why?’ ‘Sorry?’ ‘Why?’ ‘Well, because we’ve just done it once. Could we have another go?’ ‘No.’”
Hanks told Jimmy Kimmel previously: “Well, here’s the deal in other movies they make a big deal about ‘Action!’ Y’know, ‘Alright, start it up, get ready everybody we’re rolling, we’re rolling, we’re rolling…and everybody, stand by! AND… ACTION!’ That’s what most movies are like.”
Eastwood, on the other hand, would quietly raise his finger in a circle on the Sully set to signify “rolling” and everybody else in the crew would do that same thing.
Hanks continued: “And then he’s standing right next to you and he says, ‘Okay, go ahead.’ And then you do it and maybe he’ll say, ‘Just take that again. Just do it one more time.’ And then you do it and he says, ‘Alright that’s enough of that.’
The star asked him what the deal was and where that came from. Eastwood replied that when he was doing his early 1960s Western TV show Rawhide playing Rowdy Yates, he had all these old movie directors who just loved the megaphones and the attention and they would do that.
Hanks shared: “So he and all the other cast members of Rawhide were on their horses and they were supposed to have a conversation and that whole build-up to ‘ACTION!’ would make the horses [freak out and buckle]. So one day he just said in his inaudible way, ‘Is there any way that you could just, y’know, tell us to ‘go’ instead of saying ‘action’ so the horses won’t flee?’”
He added on The Graham Norton Show when telling the story: “When you’re in a Clint Eastwood movie, you don’t know the camera’s rolling, and you hear over your shoulder, ‘Alright, go ahead.’ You just keep doing it until you hear him say, ‘That’s enough of that.’ And then you move on to the next setup. It’s intimidating as hell.”
Despite Eastwood’s different way of working, Dench admitted to Louis with a smile in her recent interview: “Clint Eastwood is the most laidback man I have ever met. You start at nine, you finish at four.”
Putting on the 92-year-old’s deep croaky voice, she said: “‘In your own time,’ that’s what he’d say. Then at the end of the scene, he says, ‘Stop.’ Not ‘cut’. And he didn’t shout it, either. Just that, ‘In your own time.’”