Credit: Far Out /Warner Bros. Pictures
Sat 15 August 2026 19:15, UK
As an actor, director, and producer, Clint Eastwood had his bases pretty well-covered whenever the time came for the legendary star to decide on his next project, whether it was in front of the camera, behind it, or both.
However, at no point in his iconic career has the four-time Academy Award winner ever been credited as a screenwriter, which left him at the mercy of the scripts he was given. He was capable of doing the odd polish here and there, but for the most part, he’d use the draft he read as the blueprint.
Eastwood has made countless films where he’s admitted to not changing a single word of the script, so when he perused something that wasn’t up to his standards, he’d usually toss them away. Either that, or if Steven Spielberg had been interested at one point, he’d be more likely to make it a top priority.
That makes it strange to discover that when the grizzled veteran was offered the chance to take the reins on a literary adaptation, he gave the screenplay a once-over, came to the conclusion that he wasn’t sold on the prospect, and then agreed to direct the picture and play the leading role anyway.
1997’s Absolute Power won’t be remembered as one of his best, but the resoundingly ineffective political thriller did carry the novelty value of having Eastwood reunited with his Unforgiven co-star, Gene Hackman, with the latter playing a president who frames the former’s thief for a murder he watched the commander-in-chief commit alongside his Secret Service cronies.
“When Castle Rock asked if I would be interested in that, I said, ‘Not particularly,’” the face of the revisionist western confessed. “I liked the character, and I liked the excitement, but it didn’t seem to be going anywhere.” More than that, in David Baldacci’s novel of the same name, on which the film was based, Luther Whitney gets killed off around the midway point of the story.
Whether it was for narrative or egotistical reasons, Eastwood didn’t see the point in playing a character who didn’t survive until the third act, which initially soured him on directing, too. “The protagonist gets killed off prematurely, I thought,” he suggested. “There should be someone the audience is pulling for that has a better resolution.”
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
By that, he meant the character played by Clint Eastwood, obviously. By the time Absolute Power went in front of the cameras, the story had been changed so that the leading man was alive and well by the time the credits roll, sending audiences home on a happy ending by reuniting with his estranged daughter, too.
A little ego never hurt anyone, especially in Hollywood, but it’s still interesting that the Dirty Harry frontman had little interest in helming the film until the script was sufficiently revised to ensure that the role he’d been earmarked to play didn’t slip out of the spotlight at any stage.
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