The Legend of Clint Eastwood
The Bridges of Madison County, 1995
When Bruce Beresford was fired, Eastwood took the job of directing himself and Meryl Streep (an Oscar nomination for Best Actress) in this film version of Robert James Waller's best-seller about an incandescent, three-day affair between a roving photographer and an Iowa farm wife. He told TIME's Richard Schickel that he didn't have to waste a lot of energy looking for his character. "I've been that guy," he said, referring to a detached and wandering period in his young manhood; "years of being lost" on the American back roads, unable to define what he was looking for. Those years, those feelings are long gone, but other aspects of that young guy still cling to him; he remains restless, self-sufficient, with a large tolerance for his own company and an equally large indifference toward the good opinion of strangers. "I've always had the theory," he once said, "that actors who beg their audiences to like them ... are much worse off than actors who just say, 'If you don't like this, don't let the door hit you in the ass.'"