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Having earned the right to do whatever he wanted, Clint Eastwood saw a sea-change in cinema as the perfect opportunity to stick his middle finger up at the Hollywood establishment.
From the outside looking in, he’s never been that kind of filmmaker. Eastwood made the movies that he wanted to make, and because he was Clint Eastwood, Warner Bros gave him the freedom to make them, knowing that the ‘one for me, one for them’ policy suited both parties down to the ground.
In a way, he was Christopher Nolan’s progenitor, until the studio fucked it up. The four-time Academy Award winner spent decades almost exclusively working with Warner Bros, delivering a steady stream of box office hits and acclaimed awards season contenders, without rocking the boat or breaking the bank.
As a traditionalist, when the effects-heavy blockbuster era took over, Eastwood started feeling like a man out of time. To combat what he saw as the entire industry prioritising spectacle over story, he did something that nobody expected and made a big-budget, sci-fi adventure flick with plenty of CGI.
In his first return to the genre since he made his feature-length debut in 1955’s Revenge of the Creature, the icon hired himself, Tommy Lee Jones, James Garner, and Donald Sutherland to lead Space Cowboys, which kicked off production in July 1999 at a cost of $65million, making it his most expensive directorial effort yet.
“We’re as good as any young guys around,” he claimed at the time. “Hollywood is a very faddist community, and right now, there’s a fad for the impressionistic, MTV style, where the stories are completely abbreviated, and no one cares about the characters. Those stories are OK, I suppose, but not for me.”
To understand his thinking, all you need to do is look at the highest-grossing hits of 1998. At the top was Armageddon, a brainless sci-fi film with Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck, with the rest of the year’s top-earning titles all boasting a combination of either high concepts or movie stars, if not both.
Excluding Saving Private Ryan for obvious reasons, the rest of ’98’s ten most lucrative titles were Godzilla, There’s Something About Mary, A Bug’s Life, Deep Impact, Mulan, Dr Dolittle, Shakespeare in Love, and Lethal Weapon 4, movies you couldn’t imagine Eastwood wanting anything to do with in a million years.
To play the business at its own game, he made a high-concept adventure film of his own, populated by stars of his generation, with the focus on letting the narrative do the talking, not the set pieces. It worked, since Space Cowboys was a hit, living up to its self-appointed billing, with Eastwood describing it as “a little resurrection” for both his cast and the old-fashioned summer movie at large.
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