Clint Eastwood Bemoans Remakes, Urges Filmmakers To ‘Do Something New’

After four Oscar wins, veteran filmmaker Clint Eastwood has picked up some nuggets of wisdom to impart on his colleagues.

The venerated actor and director recently gave an interview to Austrian newspaper Kurier, per Reuters, urging fellow filmmakers to come up with original ideas and bemoaning the “era of remakes and franchises.”

“I long for the good old days when screenwriters wrote movies like Casablanca in small bungalows on the studio lot. When everyone had a new idea,” the Juror #2 director said. “We live in an era of remakes and franchises. I’ve shot sequels three times, but I haven’t been interested in that for a long while. My philosophy is: do something new or stay at home.”

The 95-year-old behind Oscar winners like Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven, both of which he also starred in, added in the interview that he has no thoughts of retiring and planned to keep working “for a long time yet.”

When asked how he remains energetic, he replied, “There’s no reason why a man can’t get better with age. And I have much more experience today. Sure, there are directors who lose their touch at a certain age, but I’m not one of them.”

Eastwood added that throughout his half-century-long career, he has been pushed to adapt, which enabled him to pick up new skills: “As an actor, I was still under contract with a studio, was in the old system, and thus forced to learn something new every year, and that’s why I’ll work as long as I can still learn something, or until I’m truly senile.”