Five Things Clint Eastwood Can Teach Us About Reinvention

Want to reinvent yourself? First, you've got to ask yourself one question: "Do I feel lucky?"

Sorry, but who could resist quoting the signature line from the 1971 action flick Dirty Harry in a post about actor/director/producer Clint Eastwood, the macho action hero turned art film auteur who is one of the great reinvention stories in Hollywood history. Eastwood, who turns 80 in May, isn't the only movie leading man who also turned out to be a gifted director. (Robert Redford, who won the Academy Award for best director for Ordinary People in 1981, immediately comes to mind, but lover of the arcane that I am, I'm more partial to Charles Laughton, whose lone directorial effort, 1955's Night of the Hunter, was a commercial flop but eventually became regarded as one of the best American films ever.)

Remarkably, there was a time when Eastwood was dismissed as a hunky but limited actor--spaghetti western director Sergio Leone reportedly remarked that Eastwood had only two facial expressions, "one with the hat and one without it." Today, in contrast, Eastwood--who has won four Oscars, two for directing and two for producing the best picture, is regarded as one of moviemaking's real innovators. Here are a few things that you can learn from his remarkable career.

1. You may have hidden talents that you simply haven't used up until now. Eastwood got his first break as an actor in the early 1950s not because he was a trained thespian--he wasn't--but because studio honchos were impressed by his handsome profile and athletic physique. Back then, they probably would have laughed at the suggestion that there was an artistic genius lurking behind that façade. But Eastwood eventually leveraged his clout as a movie star to gain creative control over his projects. In 1971, at age 41, he made his directorial debut with Play Misty for Me, which became both a critical and a financial success.

2. Dare to try difficult things. As he's gotten older, Eastwood has take on increasingly challenging, even risky projects--such as the 2006 film Letters from Iwo Jima, which portrayed the World War II battle from the Japanese perspective, and 2008's Gran Turino, in which he portrayed an embittered, alienated and racially prejudiced ex-factory worker who nevertheless chooses to sacrifice his life to save a young Hmong immigrant. Casting himself as an unlikeable character was a daring choice for Eastwood, but he didn't flinch. As he told an interviewer for Britain's Guardian:

I liked the dilemmas he had to go through. I liked the message of antique America that is maybe obsolete. Walt may be obsolete. But he does learn new things.

3. Focus on creating to satisfy yourself, not others. Eastwood easily could have kept playing variations of his Dirty Harry Callahan and Man With No Name characters until he'd wrung out every last dollar out of those franchises. But as he explained in a 1993 Psychology Today interview:

As you get older you try to do things that please you more. You get a little more selfish. You start thinking I want to do things where I enjoy myself. I don't want to go and just jump across buildings. You know, shoot nameless people off the top of stagecoaches or what have you. That's not interesting.

4. Don't be afraid to reexamine your first act--and if you choose, to question it in your new work. Eastwood first became a star through his interpretation of the cowboy hero and the police detective as jaded existentialists in a lawless, senseless world who dispassionately gunned down the bad men without regret or remorse. That ultraviolent modernist take on machismo made him an icon to generations of male moviegoers. But Eastwood himself felt deeply conflicted by the myth he'd come to embody, and in his second act as an auteur, he dared to reexamine and debunk it. As he told Psychology Today:

That's why Unforgiven (1992) became a very important film for me, because it sort of summed up my feelings about certain movies I participated in - movies where killing is romantic. And here was a chance to show that it really wasn't so romantic.

5. Rely on your life experience to give you confidence. Given our societal love of schadenfreude, Eastwood always had a lot to lose if he fell flat on his face. But that never has deterred him. As Eastwood told the Guardian in 2008:

At some point, after you've done this for so many years, you kind of think, well, everything is do-able, it's just a question of how difficult it can be,' he says. 'I don't sit there and worry about it. You just do it. It's not like somebody's standing you up there and saying, "OK, recite the Greek alphabet" or something.'

Btw, if you've got a creative re-invention model that you'd like me to write about, please drop me a line.