Clint Eastwood

Veteran actor Neal McDonough discusses his new film, Boon, and the advice he received from Clint Eastwood.

I remember in Flags of Our Fathers, I was talking to one of the guys there and he goes, “Yeah, I’m one of the new guys on Clint’s team.” I’m like, “Oh, really? He’s always trying to do the right thing and sometimes, doing the right thing is not easy. It’s been in my head for years, and I pitched it to Derek and said, “OK, let’s start working on it.” And then, we have these sessions for hours and we’ll just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, and all of a sudden, the next morning, I’ll have 15 pages sent to me. I want to keep making films like this for years and years to come, and put our kids in it or more friends in it and kind of make them Mercury players like Orson Welles did all those years ago. I’ll wake up in the middle [of the night] and say, “Honey! I got this great idea for a film.” I don’t really have the talent or the time to sit down on a computer and just bang out pages because we got five kids and I’m always acting in something or I’m coaching something. In this last film that I did, The Warrant, which we just wrapped Saturday, there are certain people from that crew that I want to pluck. Make a great film at a good cost and now put it out to the market and see how it does. I think when we go to the cinema, I like to watch a guy who has to grapple with those things and in the end, dusts himself off and gets the job done. So now Ruve and I get to raise the financing. But with Boon, I loved jumping into this one because I got to produce it with my wife, Ruve, but also we had to tell a story of myself having a romance in a film, which I generally don’t do because I don’t do sex scenes. You have to stop being a gun for hire and start creating your own content.” I said [to myself], “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s great.” But, I kind of took it to heart when we did Greater years ago. And of course, he finds his heart and starts doing the right thing and has to take out all the bad guys.