Eastwood Honored at Venice Film Fest
August 31 -- VENICE, ITALY — Sharon Stone came to this ancient city of canals and gondolas to present Clint Eastwood with the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion award for a distinguished career.
Eastwood, who is the subject of both a retrospective and a documentary, in turn opened the festival Wednesday with the European premiere of his latest U.S. hit, Space Cowboys. With Eastwood were his "musketeers," as he called them: Cowboys co-stars Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, and James Garner.
Ch-ch-ch-changesEastwood, who was addressed as "Mr. Clinton" by foreign journalists at the opening day press conference, was praised for having reached age 70. "You had to remind me it was 70," he joked. "It is an honor to be working that long, and I hope we've learned something new every day, about filmmaking, about life.
"You keep changing and evolving, and if you don't, you start decaying — and that would be an unhealthy thing."
Added the ever-sarcastic Garner, "I do find as I get older I know a lot less than I did. I'm still learning, and we still think we're young, so don't remind us."
Garner took offense when one critic commented that the NASA flyboys the four portray in Cowboys seem basically like "children with big toys." But Eastwood said, "Let's face it, acting is like being a child, and children do it the best. The whole technique of acting is to be a child again and use your imagination. It's great fun and that's why the four of us keep doing it year after year."
Sutherland's Banana ShakesSutherland showed that he kept that youthful spirit while making Space Cowboys. "I've never been on a roller coaster in my life," he revealed, "and when Clint told me this was what [my] character did, I asked him if I should go try one.
"He took me to Magic Mountain, [an amusement park] north of Los Angeles," said Sutherland. "We went on a thing called The Viper, and before I got on, I thought, 'I should do something [to show that my character is] at home here.'
