Clint Eastwood

The actor nobody wanted in the studio offices

Clint Eastwood was fired from Universal Pictures in 1959 because one executive thought his Adam's apple was too big. His jaw was too tight, and he spoke so softly that he was barely audible in sound tests. That young man who dug ditches and cleaned pools in Los Angeles didn't look like star material by the system's standards.

But fate is capricious. In 1964 he agreed to travel to Spain to shoot A Fistful of Dollars because he needed the money and wanted to see Europe. He was paid just 15,000 dollars to play a nameless drifter who barely opened his mouth. And that laid-back demeanor, which in Hollywood was a flaw, was exactly what fascinated Sergio Leone.

Nobody believed in the European western.

The Dollars Trilogy was so successful that Eastwood returned to the United States with enough clout to set his own rules. In 1967 he founded Malpaso Productions. The name was a private joke about a creek near his home in Carmel, but it also served as a statement of intent. He wanted to control the money and the schedule.

The director who never repeated takes

His debut behind the camera in 1971 with Escalofrío en la noche laid the foundation for his working method. Eastwood shoots fast and almost never does more than two takes per scene. He hates long rehearsals because he believes they kill the actor's spontaneity. As a result, his shoots often wrap days ahead of the studio's schedule.

In 1992 he released Unforgiven and changed the Western genre forever. The film cost 14 million dollars and ended up grossing 159 million dollars at box offices around the world. It was the moment critics stopped seeing him as a simple tough guy and started treating him as a serious filmmaker.

And the gamble paid off.

During the 2000s he kept a work pace that defied all biological logic. In 2004 he shot Million Dollar Baby in just 37 days. Warner Bros. didn't want to finance a story about boxing and euthanasia, so the director put his own salary on the table to get the project off the ground.

Old Age as a Working Tool

Unlike other directors of his generation, Eastwood didn't retire when the market changed. In 2014 he directed American Sniper and scored the biggest commercial hit of his career. The film brought in 547 million dollars at the global box office while he was already blowing out 84 candles.

In 2021 he released Cry Macho, in which he returned in front of the camera to play an aging horse breeder. Many assumed it would be his final goodbye to the big screen. But the filmmaker chose to ignore the rumors and immediately started looking for a new script that would take him back to the set.

Filming of Juror No. 2 wrapped in 2024.

This latest production was affected by the writers' and actors' strike that paralyzed the industry for months. The final cut of the film was completed at the Malpaso studios with a very small technical crew. The estimated budget for this feature was set at 30 million dollars.