In 1987, shortly before his death, an octogenarian John Huston directed The Dead, an adaptation of James Joyce’s story. The filmmaker was supported by two of his children (Anjelica as performer, Tony as scriptwriter) and said goodbye with this intimate and testamentary work. He suffered from emphysema and his strength was already failing. Directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni also faced filming in their eighties, who, with reduced mobility after suffering a stroke, directed Beyond the Clouds with the help of Wim Wenders; Ingmar Bergman who said goodbye with Saraband, a chamber piece with a single stage and his two fetish actors; the incombustible Kurosawa… In almost all cases the twilight tone dominated.
In the 21st century, the perception of octogenarians seems to be changing. On the one hand, we have Joe Biden, whose insecure gait and confusion raise doubts about whether or not he should run for re-election. On the other hand, Mick Jagger, who – halfway between the supernatural and the ridiculous – presents a new album by the Rolling Stones with the trappings and attitudes of an eternal rebellious twenty-something. In the case of cinema, the members of the increasingly large club of octogenarian directors no longer make twilight films. Instead of retiring and relaxing, they decide to lead a large team, submit to demanding schedules and the discomforts of filming. If in its day it was said that fifty is the new thirty, now we will have to coin a reformulation: eighty is the new fifty.
An example of resistance has been Clint Eastwood (93 years old), who since he turned eighty has directed no less than nine films and announces his tenth for 2024: Juror
Martin Scorsese (80 years old), perhaps the most important and influential active filmmaker, has just joined the club. His new film, The Moon Killers (released October 20) portrays the dark underside of the United States through the true story of the wave of murders of members of the Osage Indian Nation, who had the evil lucky that oil was discovered under their lands. It is also a blockbuster and at the press conference the team gave in Cannes, the director joked about the ambition and magnitude of the project: “What else am I going to do at my age but take risks? What am I going to do at this point, be comfortable and sit warm on the set?”
Another newcomer to the select club is Michael Mann (80 years old), who in recent times had only directed the pilot episode of Tokyo Vice. He returns with Ferrari (will arrive in Spanish cinemas in February 2024), a biopic of Enzo Ferrari (played by Adam Driver) focused on 1957, a year marked by the crisis of his company and the recent death of his twenty-four-year-old son from muscular dystrophy. Mann does not seem willing to retire and has several projects in the pipeline; There is talk, among others, of a second part of Heat.
On a less epic scale, Ken Loach (87 years old) has said that he is saying goodbye to cinema with The Old Oak (released at the end of October), faithful to his conception of cinema as a political instrument. On this occasion he recounts the difficult understanding between the few remaining inhabitants of an old mining town and the Syrian refugees who arrive there looking for a new life. Woody Allen (same age as Loach) has also hinted that Lucky Stroke (released September 29), his fiftieth title, could end his career. If so, it will be a more than worthy farewell. After the disaster of Rifkin’s Festival (we have the sad honor of being the country in which he has filmed his two worst films, this one and Vicky Cristina Barcelona), Stroke of Luck is a high. In the wake of his Dostoevskian titles – Crimes and Misdemeanors, Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream and Irrational Man – he uses a postcard-perfect autumnal Paris as the setting for a drama about deception, crime and chance. Not only is it filmed in the French capital, but in French, a language that the New York filmmaker does not master. The reason: that in his country he is still a pest, even though he has been declared innocent by the courts of the accusation of abuse.
Who is also haunted by the shadow of sexual crimes – in his case, proven – is Roman Polanski (90 years old), who after the capital letter The Officer and the Spy has opted for comedy with The Palace, poorly received in the Venice Festival and still no release date in Spain.
If The Officer and the Spy recreated the Dreyfus case, the last two productions by Marco Bellocchio (83 years old) also portray historical infamies: the series Exterior noche (premiered a couple of months ago on Filmin) reconstructs the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro from various angles, while The Abduction (released in theaters in mid-November) tells the true story of a Jewish boy who, in 19th century Italy, was taken from his family to be placed under papal guardianship. Another veteran, Hayao Miyazaki (82 years old), has announced his retirement several times, but ends up returning. He now presents The Boy and the Heron (premiere at the end of October), an intimate foray into the world of adolescence, with many nods to his previous works.
In 2023, two octogenarian directors have died with their boots on. William Friedkin died at the age of 87 on August 7, just weeks before the Venice Film Festival premiere of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. It is the adaptation of Herman Wouk’s Broadway classic, based on his own Pulitzer-winning novel that Bogart played on screen. For his part, Carlos Saura left us on February 10 at the age of 91, just when his documentary The Walls Speak was released (by the way, don’t miss his unfinished memoirs, You Live About Images, which have just been published). However, the longevity record – I would say unbeatable – is held by the Portuguese Manoel De Oliveira, who did not stop making films until his death in 2015 at the age of 106.
