DiCaprio, Eastwood bring 'J. Edgar' to life

LOS ANGELES – The 81-year-old Clint Eastwood had already growled his way to the top of the box office with a couple of Dirty Harry movies before Leonardo DiCaprio was born in 1974.

Now these Hollywood heavyweights from different eras have come together in "J. Edgar," an examination of FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover.

The vast age difference between star and director was never a problem. In fact, DiCaprio says the only difficulty was just trying to keep up with Eastwood because his commitment to the job is astounding.

Eastwood smiles at the compliment and says, "Aging, so far, has been OK. A lot of people regret it because we live in a society that reveres being at the prime of life. But you have certain primes at certain times. And mine happens to be now.

"I am doing better at certain things than I have in the past. And not so good at others."

Directing is one of the things he's doing better because he has passion. There's a scene in the movie where Hoover and his long time associate Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) get into a fistfight. Eastwood didn't just tell the actors how he wanted the scuffle to go, he actually acted out the entire sequence.

Eastwood has had that enthusiasm for directing from the start. He knew after the first film he directed, "Play Misty for Me," released three years before DiCaprio's birth, that it was a job he could do on a full-time basis.

The problem was that he kept being offered acting jobs, so he bounced between being in front of and behind the camera for 40 years.

"I do believe if one keeps busy, it's good for them," Eastwood says. "You keep yourself mentally in shape. If you keep yourself mentally in shape, chances are physically will follow suit."

Directing is certainly a place where Eastwood keeps in shape both ways. He's become known as a director who likes to only shoot one or two takes of a scene and then move on to the next scene.

Eastwood smiles and says that's a little bit of an urban myth and that while he does like to work quickly, he's always willing to keep going until he and the actors are happy with the scene.

DiCaprio describes Eastwood's style of directing as expecting actors to "plant your feet and tell the truth" and if that takes one or 11 tries, then that's what you get.

"J. Edgar" is the 35th film Eastwood has directed. You don't work that long behind the camera without learning a few tricks to help the actors.

A major portion of the film takes place when Hoover is in his 70s, which required as much as six hours of makeup to transform DiCaprio.

All of those scenes were saved for the last two weeks of filming. DiCaprio says that gave the actors time to get their footing with their characters before having to take on the added burden of the makeup.

"The challenge for me was not just the prosthetic work and move like an older man, but more so how to have 50 years in the workplace and talk to a young Robert Kennedy as if he's some young political upstart who didn't know what the hell he was talking about," DiCaprio says. "Clint created an environment for all of us to focus on the acting and the drama and interaction of the characters.

"His style of directing is so catered for actors because he has the bare minimum of people on set. They sort of fade away and that third wall begins to fade away and you feel like you are submerged in reality."

Eastwood says it also helped that the young actors had an 81-year-old man on the set they could use as an example of how to play an older character.