“He will literally direct until he drops dead,” Freeman said of him Million dollar baby Director. “Working for him was three of my happiest moments in filmmaking. He is just like John Huston: “The art of directing lies mainly in the casting; Once you cast someone, you get out of their way. “I love that. And Huston was directing until the last moment.”

There is no generally accepted set of rules for getting the best performance from actors, and there is a wide range of styles. There are filmmakers who take an aggressive, hands-on approach – sometimes with traumatizing ends. John Ford was a notorious bully on set. Stanley Kubrick brought his casts to the brink of madness. And David Fincher is known for filming the same scene dozens of times.

Clint Eastwood is on the other end of the spectrum, choosing instead, as Freeman noted, to choose his cast carefully and then let them move on. In the past, he thought his straightforward approach to directing came from his experience as an actor. For him, his preferred environment was productions in which things moved quickly rather than dwelling on take after take.

However, this directing style was challenging for some actors. Tom Hanks, for example, once called Eastwood’s direction “intimidating as hell” and revealed that instead of beginning and ending a scene with the usual shouts of “action” and “cut,” the director simply whispers, “Okay, go ahead. “ and “That’s enough of that.”

It’s easy to imagine John Huston doing the same thing. The experienced director of films like The Maltese Falcon, The African QueenAnd Chinatown was known for his hands-off approach as a director, although he more than made up for it by forcing them to travel to the most difficult filming locations possible. Humphrey Bogart, who starred in several of the director’s most successful films, lamented Huston’s penchant for harsh, isolated filming and productions that were completely behind schedule due to the constraints of the environment. During her months of filming for The African Queen In what was then the Belgian Congo, the crew lived off the grid and had to contend with disease, insects and the monsoon season. All in all, many actors would have liked an ordinary tyrant as the director.

In contrast, Eastwood’s reputation is much more reserved. As Hanks’ comments suggest, the most difficult part of the job for him as an actor may stem more from the personal insecurities the actor brings to the project rather than the harsh working environment the director has created.

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