Double Trouble

Think your old man is a ball-buster? Try being the son of Clint Eastwood. And then try making a name for yourself in the family business. This month, as Clint and Scott Eastwood go head-to-head at the box office, father and son sit down together for an interview for the first time.

- Michael Hainey

A MESS of gnawed-open peanut shells litters the stoop of one of the Spanish-style bungalows on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, California. Since 1975, this bungalow, in the shadow of the massive Soundstage 3, has been the home of Clint Eastwood’s production company, and when Eastwood and I walk up to the front door, we both notice the shells, bleaching in the hard-white late-afternoon sun.

“Those yours?” I ask him.

“Kind of,” Eastwood tells me. “There’s a squirrel around here. I like to put peanuts out for him. He’s a nice guy. He comes right into the office sometimes. The other day, I opened the door and he was clinging on to it.” 

Eastwood is eighty-six now. But if you think he’s devolved into that old man on your block who walks around talking to squirrels, you’re dead wrong. Eastwood does not stop. Never has. Twenty years after most guys would be in full-on coast mode, Eastwood is still vital and vibrant, still pushing him self creatively. The guy is an inspiration, a reminder that we should always be evolving.

Most days you’ll find Eastwood here, at his office, doing what he likes to do, what gives his life meaning: work. Or, more accurately, creating. Over the past few weeks, he has been holed up in one of the editing bays here,his six-foot-three frame splayed out in an old brown Barcalounger, working with his editor to finish Sully, the thirty-fifth film he’s directed in a career that stretches back to 1955. Sully, which stars Tom Hanks as Captain Chesley Burnett Sullenberger, the pilot who landed his disabled plane in the Hudson River in 2009, is like many of Eastwood’s films of late—the story of a man who takes action and does what is right but suffers consequences at the hands of second-guessers.