Clint Eastwood will celebrate his 93rd birthday on May 31st. And he has just given himself the best possible gift in advance: in mid-June, he plans to start shooting a new film, which also acquires special significance because it will be number 40 in his extraordinary career as a director, which began in 1971 with Obsession. deadly (Play Misty For Me).
The project he is currently working on is Juror No. 2 (Juror number two), a drama with connotations as classic in American cinema as the identity of the director himself, since it is set in the world of courts and more specifically within an oral trial.
What has been known for a couple of weeks, when some digital media first revealed the project, is that Eastwood, always in search of attractive scripts, spoke out for this story written by Jonathan Abrams, author of Impossible Escape, a thriller that brought together Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2013.
The plot of Juror No. 2 takes place in the middle of a murder trial and focuses on the title character, who comes to the conclusion that he may have been responsible for the violent death of the victim. As it is a fact that forces him, as a jury, to pronounce himself, the character faces a dilemma: either he chooses to manipulate his peers to condition the verdict or he directly decides to reveal the truth and prevent, without incriminating himself, that the defendant receive a sentence.
It seems a given that this role will be played by Nicholas Hoult, who we recently saw alongside Anya-Taylor Joy in The Menu, and is also about to reappear in local theaters as the lead in Renfield, the film in which he plays the faithful and bloodthirsty follower of Count Dracula, personified by Nicolas Cage.
Hoult will be joined in Juror No. 2 by Toni Collette, another figure who is about to return to the big screen on local billboards as the star of The Mafia Heiress, opening on Thursday, April 27. The two will meet again under the orders of Eastwood and will share a shoot again two decades after the celebrated experience of A good boy (About a Boy), in which they are mother and son. Collette's role will be that of the trial prosecutor.
The project followed the usual lines of Eastwood films until its completion was confirmed. It all starts when the director, always looking for attractive scripts, stops at one of them, acquires the rights to make it into a movie, and starts working on successive rewrites to adapt the original text to his own vision. In successive drafts, the original ages of the central characters were modified and a key secondary role was added that did not appear in the first version. There were also delays related to the tight shooting schedule of the actors Eastwood wanted for the lead roles, especially in the case of Hoult.
Behind all these details, a very relevant piece of information appeared in the last few hours. The Hollywood Reporter suggested that Juror No. 2 could be the last film of Eastwood's film career. With words worthy of an elegy, one of the most important publications in the entertainment capital noted that "the actor and director wanted to find one last project to ride into the sunset with his head held high."
But this almost poetic language may have slightly more earthly explanations. Eastwood's most recent film, Cry Macho (2021), did not have a good response among critics, and its release in theaters was a complete failure for the public. It cost about 33 million dollars, a budget that Eastwood strictly adhered to as usual in his films (and even underspent that total), but the global collection barely reached 15 and a half million.
The Cry Macho shipwreck coincided with the change of command at Warner, the studio that produced Eastwood's films for more than half a century. Citing various Warner executives as sources, The Wall Street Journal reconstructed the moment during which the studio's new CEO, David Zaslav, wanted to know why despite some reservations and unfavorable screenings Cry Macho was greenlit, filmed, and released. premiered with the known results.
Senior executives pointed out that the studio owed Eastwood a debt of honor based on the countless successes he produced as an actor and director for the Warner brand, from Dirty Harry to The Mule to The Unforgivable ( Oscar winner). They also noted that he always met deadlines and never strayed from budgets set for each production, never spending a dollar too much. Zaslav countered that the studio owed no one any favors, quoting Jay Mohr's famous response to Tom Cruise in the movie Jerry Maguire: "It does not show friends, it's show business."
Finally, there was an agreement and Warner will once again support Eastwood in this new film that could be released, judging by the background and his recognized speed to carry out the filming plans, before the end of this year. Everything indicates that this time he will only be in charge of production and direction, as he has been doing for the last 50 years. With everything that happened with Cry Macho, it is not difficult to imagine that this film meant the final farewell to act in his case. Although with Eastwood the last word is never said.
