Are there any other great directors with a gap as long or similar?
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joekiddlouischama — 9 years ago(December 21, 2016 10:22 PM)
Visiting a retired Frank Capra at his Sierra Nevada hideaway, Clint Eastwood was baffled.
"I always thought: He could be making a film right now. He's as lucid as could be. Here's the great Frank Capra not doing it,'" Eastwood recalled of the famed director, who died in 1991 at 94, three decades after his last film. "I always thought, 'I wonder why that is?'"
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765657148/Working-late-in-life-directors-refuse-to-say-cut.html
Frank Capra - I met Capra when I was making
High Plains Drifter
in Mono Lake, North California. I was staying in Silver Lake, four houses down from Capra, and I got the chance to talk to him. Afterwards, every time I came by, I paid him a visit, but I never worked with him.
Capra's movies have an underlying energy which, although it's difficult to define, he alone possesses. Anyone can shoot a scene, but like all the greats, Capra added something that was neither written nor visualized, but which permeates all his work. All the greats have this gift to some extent. It depended on the material, their enthusiasm, the problems they had to solve.
http://www.focusfeatures.com/article/clint_eastwood_talks_directors
Eastwood filmed
High Plains Drifter
(1973) in the late summer and early autumn of 1972. In recent years, he has often expressed befuddlement or regret that some of the great directors whose movies he grew up with in the 1940s, and who he followed in the 1950s as a fledgling young actor developing a deep interest in film, retired decades before they died. Whether directors such as Capra and Billy Wilder (two often cited by Eastwood) quit Hollywood voluntarily (perhaps, in part, because of the expectation that you just retired when you reached a certain age), or whether the studios basically pushed them out the door due to ageism, they p111cotentially still had a lot to offer. (Wilder passed away twenty-one years after his final film came out.)