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But the main reason things worked out so nicely was Streep's discovery that he was her kind of director and Eastwood's that she was his kind of actress. Her criterion, she said, was someone who "doesn't say anything to me ... leaves me alone." Well, not entirely alone; what she needs is "somebody who inspires your confidence, who sets up a safe world for you [where you can] make your mistakes and go as wild and as far out as you want."
Certainly that's the way Eastwood defines his task: "I feel the director's job, besides picking a script, is casting the right people. But then after that, the real responsibility is to make those people feel at home. Set an atmosphere where everybody is extremely relaxed and there's no tension. Coming from acting, you know what rattles people, what rattles you."
In his view, happy movie locations are, in the famous formulation, like happy families -- all alike. That is to say, they are at once quiet and good humored, energetic and efficient. And that spirit stems from the director. "If you start yelling and becoming obtrusive and beboppin' around, you give the impression of insecurity, and that becomes infectious. It bleeds down into the actors, and they become nervous; then it bleeds down into the crew, and they become nervous, and you don't get much accomplished that way. You have to set a tone and just demand a certain amount of tranquility."
As an actor not only directing himself but also obliged to keep a helpful eye on whomever else he was working with in a scene, he had a rather daunting job. But Streep thought he carried it off gracefully. She had twice before worked with actor-directors and always, disconcertingly, "felt watched in the scenes I was doing with them." That didn't happen here. It was, she said, like doing a two-handed theater piece, with both actors "free to explore how it evolves, almost as if we were making it up as we went along."
"Zen and the art of control" is how one of Eastwood's veteran crewmen once described his working methods-a seeming indifference to auteurial imperatives that somehow gets him, most of the time, exactly what he wants: spontaneity and realism, qualities virtually synonymous in his mind. In practical terms, that means he's always hoping to get the shot he wants on the first take-rough magic being of more interest to him than the more smoothly polished kind.
As it is to Streep-which even she admitted may sound out of character or at least out of image. "You know, people have called me a technical actor," she said. "But I have always loved that first encounter. I almost always like the first reading better than anything we ever do subsequently. I come ready, and I don't want to screw around and waste the first 10 takes on adjusting lighting and everybody else getting comfortable." But this is something more than a personal preference. She likes the reality of a movie scene to "feel captured, as opposed to set up and then driven into the dirt."