Visiting a retired Frank Capra at his Sierra Nevada hideaway, American actor Clint Eastwood was baffled.
“I always thought- ‘He could be making a film right now. He’s as lucid as could be. Here’s the great Frank Capra not doing it,’” Eastwood recalled of the famed director, who died in 1991 at 94, three decades after his last film. “I always thought, ‘I wonder why that is?’”
Eastwood, who at 84 just released the musical “Jersey Boys” and wrapped shooting on the Navy SEAL drama “American Sniper,” isn’t the only filmmaker blowing past conventional retirement age. This Friday, Woody Allen, 78, will release his latest, the French Riviera romantic comedy “Magic in the Moonlight.” He’s also already on to the next one, shooting in Rhode Island this summer.
In June came “Venus in Fur,” from 80-year-old Roman Polanski. And in May, 83-year-old Jean-Luc Godard, the perpetual enfant terrible, premiered his 3-D “Goodbye to Language” at the Cannes Film Festival.
Many of cinema’s auteur have stubbornly persisted, while at the same time churning out frequently acclaimed, often vibrant films in a youth-driven industry.
Certainly, film history is littered with directors who worked well past retirement age. Akira Kurosawa, Sidney Lumet and Robert Altman all worked into their 80s, producing some fine films —Altman’s “Gosford Park,” Kurosawa’s “Dreams,” Lumet’s “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.” Huston, at 81, died months after the release of “The Dead,” his Oscar-nominated adaptation of the James Joyce story. The French film director Alain Resnais was active right up to his passing, at 91, in March.
Such longevity would only be possible for widely admired filmmakers who still have the drive to tell a story and the industry weight to attract financing.
What inspires them?
What compels them to make a film year after year? The answer, Allen said in an earlier interview, is pure distraction from sitting at home pondering, “Gee, life is meaningless. We’re all going to die.”
If for Allen filmmaking is a way to order his day-to-day life, for Eastwood, it’s a means for staying young. Age, he says, is “a mental outlook.” Maintaining interest in moviemaking or anything else is his secret to life.
The Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira is 105. Earlier this year, he shot his latest, a short about Portuguese history.
