Actor Clint Eastwood has worked with a variety of filmmakers during his years in the film industry. In his experience, there was one filmmaking habit he could barely tolerate from other directors.

It might have also showed Eastwood what not to do when he indulged in a career behind the camera.

Clint Eastwood once called out directors who did too many takes

Eastwood became interested in directing fairly early in his acting career. After getting his big break in the classic Western series Rawhide, he asked to direct a couple of episodes.

“Then, the production company reneged on their promise that I could do it,” Eastwood once told DGA.“They said that CBS didn’t want actors who were in the shows to be directing the shows. So I kind of dropped the idea for a while and then, after I’d been working with Sergio Leone on A Fistful of Dollars, observing the crews in Europe and getting a broader look at filmmaking around the world, I got interested again.”
Opportunity presented itself when Eastwood eventually directed his first feature Play Misty for Me.
“It was a great experience, and I had the bug after that,” Eastwood said.
It was perhaps because of his own time as a filmmaker that Eastwood understood the process behind other directors. At one point, Eastwood became very critical of directors who did multiple takes. So much so that he called into question their qualifications and expertise as filmmakers.
“Some of these new directors will shoot 30 takes of a scene just because they don’t know what they want. They wind up with thousands of feet [of film], then they cry for some some editor to come in and save their butts. If you can’t see It yourself, you shouldn’t be a director,” Eastwood once told The New York Times.
Clint Eastwood has been known for only doing a couple of takes
Eastwood seems to have maintained his philosophy for limited takes in his more mature years. Actors like Matt Damon have been pleasantly surprised by the veteran star’s efficiency as a filmmaker. The Bourne Identity star had even gotten chewed out by Eastwood for wanting to do more than one take in Invictus.
“We did the first take, it went pretty well, but Clint says, ‘Cut. Print. Check the gate.’ Which means we’re gonna move on,” Damon recalled on Hot Ones. “And I said, ‘Hey, boss, maybe you think we can get one more?’ And he just turned and he goes, ‘Why? You wanna waste everybody’s time?’ I was like, ‘Ok, we’re done. Alright good, let’s move on.’”
But Eastwood believed his own habit for working quickly in films came down to his work on the small screen.
“I came up through television, and in television you had to move fast. The important thing, of course, is what comes out on the screen. I like to move fast only because I think it works well for the actors and the crew to feel like we’re progressing forward,” he said.
However, Eastwood cautioned that his reputation as a quick director could easily backfire.
“You don’t want to do Plan 9 from Outer Space, where the gravestones fall over and you say, ‘I can’t do another take. We’re too busy. Move on.’ You’re still making a film that you want to be right. But I find, as an actor, that I worked better when the directors were working fast,” he said.
Clint Eastwood once preferred directing over acting
Although he’s experienced massive success doing both, Eastwood asserted that there were certain benefits being a filmmaker had over being an actor.
“To doing both jobs, I’ve done it so many times that I never put the difference in. Directing a film is the same… it’s a little more leisurely that way. You don’t have to suit up. People aren’t coming in and combing your hair or whatever. It’s a little more leisurely, but different. But they both have an adventure. It’s a new adventure,” he said.
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Oscar-winning actor John Wayne is one of Hollywood’s biggest icons. The world knows him for his war and western movies that audiences of all ages could enjoy. However, he also turned down a fair amount of roles over the course of his career. Wayne rejected the lead role in High Noon and called it “the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”

Wayne didn’t serve in the military, which would later become one of his biggest regrets. Nevertheless, he was still a major patriot. Wayne was vocal when it came to speaking his mind about his conservative Republican values. He frequently spoke his mind about his perspective and how they related to the social and political climate in interviews. Wayne turned down some roles in movies such as Steven Spielberg’s 1941 as a result of his patriotism.

However, Wayne’s views were also at odds with many of his colleagues. His 1971 Playboy interview remains in many minds. Wayne openly said a slur against the LGBTQ community and made racially problematic statements. He’s a Hollywood icon who was never afraid to speak his mind, regardless of who or what it was about.

Ronald L. Davis’ Duke: The Life and Image of John Wayne explores the Oscar-winner’s past and his interactions with various Hollywood productions. He was offered the role of Marshal Will Kane in Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon. He turned the role down, which then went to actor Gary Cooper instead.

The story follows Will as he’s getting ready to leave the small town of Hadleyville, New Mexico, with his new wife, Amy (Grace Kelly). He discovers a criminal who was set free and is set on seeking revenge on the marshal who originally turned him in. The townsfolk cower in fear of his return, so Will has to face him alone.
“The most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” Wayne said. “I’ll never regret having helped run Carl Foreman [High Noon’s screenwriter] out of the country.” Foreman was a member of the Communist Party for a time, which Wayne called out.
Davis noted that “Duke incorrectly remembered the Western’s final scene as one in which the United States marshal played by Gary Cooper throws his badge to the ground and steps on it.” However, Cooper’s character never steps on the badge. Rather, he tosses it to the ground before retreating to the desert.
Gary Cooper won an Oscar for ‘High Noon’
Wayne would finally win an Oscar with his third nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role for 1969’s True Grit. However, he was earlier nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role for Sands of Iwo Jima and Best Picture for The Alamo.

I’m Spartacus!” – “I’m Spartacus!” – “I’M SPARTACUS!” Every film buff knows that moment, every panel-show comedian riffs on it. A mob of defeated slave rebels in the pre-Christian Roman empire is told their wretched lives will be spared, but only if their ringleader, Spartacus (Kirk Douglas), comes out and gives himself up to be executed. Just as he is about to sacrifice himself, one slave, Antoninus (Tony Curtis) jumps up and claims to be Spartacus, then another, and another, then all of them, a magnificent display of solidarity, while the man himself allows a tear to fall in closeup.

This variant on the Christian myth – in the face of crucifixion, Spartacus’s disciples do not deny him – is a pointed political fiction. In real life, Spartacus was killed on the battlefield. The screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo, the blacklisted author who had to work under aliases and found no solidarity in Hollywood. Yet Douglas himself, as the film’s producer, stood up for Trumbo. He put Trumbo’s real name in the credits, and ended the McCarthy-ite hysteria.

Kirk Douglas in SpartacusHe’s Spartacus: Douglas in his most famous role.The main reason the scene is so potent is its extraordinary irony. Who on earth could claim to be Spartacus when Spartacus looked like that? Douglas is a one-man Hollywood Rushmore, almost hyperreal in his masculinity. He is the movie-world’s Colossus of Rhodes, a figure of pure-granite maleness yet with something feline, and a sinuous, gravelly voice. Douglas is a heart-on-sleeve actor, mercurial and excitable; he has played tough guys and vulnerable guys, heroes and villains. And, as a pioneering producer, he brought two Stanley Kubrick films to the screen: Spartacus (he hired Kubrick to replace Anthony Mann) and his first world war classic Paths of Glory in which he was superb, playing a principled French army officer.

One hundred years ago today, Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch, the son of a Moscow-born Russian Jewish ragman, in upstate New York. An uncle had been killed in the pogroms at home. In his 1988 memoir, The Ragman’s Son, Douglas describes the casual antisemitism he faced almost throughout his career. Rebranding yourself with a Waspy stage-name was what actors – and immigrants in general – had to do in America to survive and thrive.

After a start on the Broadway stage, he made his screen reputation playing the driven fighter Midge Kelly in the exhilarating boxing movie Champion (1949), which earned him the first of his three Oscar nominations. Champion has stunning images and a notable slo-mo scene: it is much admired by Martin Scorsese and transparently an influence on Raging Bull. In Detective Story (1951), directed by William Wyler, Douglas gives a grandstanding star turn in a melodrama set in a police station, playing the vindictive, violent McLeod, an officer with an awful secret. It was a movie that laid down the template for all cop TV shows, including The Streets of San Francisco, which was to star Douglas’s son Michael.
But it was in Ace in the Hole (1951), directed by Billy Wilder, that Douglas gives his first classic performance: the sinister newspaper reporter Chuck Tatum, who prolongs the ordeal of a man trapped in a cave to create a better story. He is an electrifying villain in that film, a Phineas T Barnum of media untruth. At one stage he slaps the wife of the trapped man (whom he is also seducing) because she wasn’t sufficiently demure and sad-looking for his purposes, like an imperious film director looking for a better performance. He is also brilliant in Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) as Jonathan Shields, the diabolically persuasive movie producer who betrays everyone.
Arguably, it is in Paths of Glory (1958) that Douglas finds his finest hour as the tough, principled Colonel Dax, who stands up to the callous and incompetent senior officers of the high command. Douglas’s handsome, unsmiling face is set like a bayonet of contempt.
Douglas himself prizes his sensitive and Oscar-nominated performance as Vincent van Gogh in another Vincente Minnelli film, Lust for Life, from 1956. Some may smile a little at this earnest and high-minded movie now, but it is very watchable, with a heartfelt belief that Van Gogh’s art can be understood by everyone. There is a bold, passionate performance from Douglas, who simply blazes with agony. Not everyone liked it. John Wayne famously stormed up to Douglas after a screening to rage: “Christ, Kirk, how can you play a part like that? There’s so goddamn few of us left. We got to play tough, strong characters. Not those weak queers!”
Douglas has endured a scene of almost Freudian trauma in his career. Having bought the rights to Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in the 1960s, he himself played the lead for its Broadway adaptation: McMurphy, the subversive wild-man imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital.
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