In ‘Hereafter,’ Clint Eastwood asks eternal questions but offers no answers
BY DENNIS KING
NEW YORK – As an actor, Clint Eastwood has dispatched more than his share of fictional adversaries into the great beyond. But as a director, when it comes to the mysterious passage from life to death, he admits he doesn’t have any answers. Only questions.
And those are posed with admirable art, rigorous curiosity and glancing uncertainty in his new film “Hereafter,” a moody, yearning examination of life’s most nagging question: What happens to us after we die?
At a press conference hosted by Warner Bros. before the film’s closing-night premiere at the New York Film Festival, director Eastwood and his cast engaged in a rambling exchange with film journalists that sometimes smacked of an airy New Age seminar on the afterlife.
“Most religions seem to ponder the afterlife, but I thought this was interesting because it wasn’t really a religious project,” Eastwood said. “It had a spirituality about it, but it was not necessarily tied in with any particular organized thought.
“And I think everybody, whether you believe in the afterlife or the chance of this near-death experience and coming back, whether that has really happened or not, I don’t know, certainly everyone has thought about it at some point in time,” he said. “And it’s a fantasy that if there is anything out there like that it would be terrific. But that remains to be seen.”
“Hereafter,” which stars Matt Damon as a self-questioning San Francisco psychic, interweaves the stories of three unrelated people in far-flung locales struggling with the overwhelming tragedy of sudden death and seeking to find answers about eternal life.
“It was a terrific script,” Damon said of Peter Morgan’s speculative screenplay. “It was really tight. It read like a play in a sense where sometimes when you do a play you just explore the material and every answer you need is there. I’m somebody who does a lot of research normally on my own, but in this case I really didn’t want to go down the rabbit hole. It was really all on the page.”
“The film is really a story of inquiry and curiosity and a feeling of incompleteness and a feeling of living with mystery,” said Morgan, whose resume includes celebrated scripts for “Frost/Nixon” and “The Queen.” “And that’s something that unites every one of us. Other than the act of being born, none of us know where we’re going. None of us has any idea, and we’re going to do all of it alone. I thought it would be quite interesting just to provoke those questions without offering any answers. You know, it’s very private.”
Eastwood emphasized that the film poses mysteries with no concrete solutions.
“The questions are there,” he said. “You pose the questions and then it’s up to the audience to meet you half way and think about it in terms their own lives and what their thoughts are or what experiences they might have had.”
For his part, Eastwood said he has had a couple of brushes with death that left him vaguely wondering about eternity.
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