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Eastwood couldn't have said it better himself. On the other hand, he does know how -- and when -- to ask his actors and technicians for more. One day in Iowa he had a fairly serious grumble fit when a magazine printed a story claiming he was getting everything he wanted on the first or second take. He thought the item implied either indifference or cheapness on his part, and he was not amused. "We're not making Plan Nine from Outer Space here, you know," he snapped.
The man does have a temper, and now and then he lets fly with it when he's directing-"when people talk outside, or a truck doesn't stop, when time doesn't stop for the moment he wants to get," was how Streep put it. Yet it always comes as a shock, she added, because "it's an instantaneous rise. You think, 'Where did that come from?' because all day we haven't heard anything, even a whisper. And then, suddenly, everyone kind of flattens into the furniture and the walls."
But not for long. And especially not on this picture. One night after work in Iowa, as Streep and Eastwood lingered over dinner with a journalist, he confessed that usually "there's a three-quarter point in a picture where you kind of wonder, 'What am I doing here? Why am I doing this?' You just get that little flash, just a little insecurity thing." He was well past that point in Bridges, and it hadn't happened. Audiences, one suspects, will get all the way to the end without asking those questions either. For the film is, as Streep said, "a romantic story in a very unromantic time." All of us feel an urgent need to embrace the former and banish the latter, at least for a couple of hours.