Credit: Far Out / Warner Bros / Claire Folger
Sat 26 September 2026 19:45, UK
Every movie plays differently to each viewer and audience, but there can’t be many tougher or more intimidating crowds than having Clint Eastwood peruse your work.
Since his face has become so ingrained in cinema history, you can imagine how many filmmakers over the years have been sitting there, knowing the living legend is in the room, and wondering if they should try to sneak a glimpse at his expression, if they’re not shitting themselves too much, obviously.
Eastwood’s thousand-yard stare, curled upper lip, and stone-faced expression have become baked into the cultural consciousness, and the last thing anyone wants to see when he’s watching anything they’ve been involved in is the expression that’s been iconic since A Fistful of Dollars debuted in 1964.
Then again, the four-time Academy Award winner thinks Tropic Thunder is hilarious and once referred to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining as being “as dead as a dick,” so you really never know how he’ll respond to anything. On the plus side, though, he can be equally apathetic toward watching his own work.
No shortage of actors or filmmakers struggle to think of anything worse than wrapping their peepers around something they’ve either made or starred in, but it does become a little easier with the passage of time. Not for Eastwood, right enough, who had a very brief dalliance with a 1974 cult classic of his.
“Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was on the other night,” he remarked in 2014. “I watched it for ten minutes, and then shut it off.” While you might think 40 years hadn’t been enough to convince him to give it a whirl for the first time in a long time, the icon actually had ulterior motives for changing the channel.
“I did think, ‘I gotta see that movie again,’” he added. “But I’d want to watch it from the beginning, to get the nostalgic buzz from it.” Apart from the fucking insane and incredibly distracting way that Jeff Bridges eats ice cream, and if you’ve seen Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, you’ll understand, it’s a great movie.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
Michael Cimino’s feature-length directorial debut was an impressive calling card, outlining him as a talent with great potential, which he quickly realised with The Deer Hunter before torpedoing his entire career with Heaven’s Gate, and Eastwood was happy to let the first-timer take the reins and put his own stamp on the road-tripping and vaguely homoerotic crime caper.
Sadly, he never confirmed if he’d ever gotten around to firing it up and watching the whole 115-minute escapade from beginning to end, but let’s hope that he did, because it doesn’t get mentioned enough as one of Eastwood’s superior efforts, which it is, even if the competition on that front is pretty stiff.
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