You would be forgiven for thinking the great Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki, 82, has made his last film. After the realism of 2013’s The Wind Rises, which scanned the skies of pre-second-world-war Japan for the industrial-era upcurrents of inspiration, he makes a return to full-blown fantasy in his latest, The Boy and the Heron. It is hard not to take the magus figure of the film’s Great-Uncle, looking for a successor to steward this realm of man-eating parakeets and flying dim sum, as Miyazaki’s Prospero moment; his breaking of his creative staff. Then you remember: this is the fourth time he has announced his retirement.
Miyazaki is not alone in being enticed back in his winter years for “one last job”. Ridley Scott, at 86, has not just made a film about the modest subject of Napoleon Bonaparte, but he also managed to wind up most of France on the press tour while he was at it. It is his ninth movie since 2010 in an extraordinary late-career sprint – with Gladiator 2 coming next year. At 81, Martin Scorsese has just released Killers of the Flower Moon, an alarming reconfiguration of the gangster epics with which he made his name. Clint Eastwood, 93 and filming his 40th directorial effort, Juror No 2, continues to be the poster pensioner for hard-working Americans, while only a worldwide pandemic seemed capable of breaking a Woody Allen film-a-year streak that lasted from 1982 to 2020 (OK, with one other hiatus in 2018). Not bad for an 88-year-old. Roman Polanski, at 90, similarly manages to buck age and controversy to carry on working.
Raging against the dying of the light meter, this directorial gerontocracy is defying the odds to perform one of the most mentally (and, at that age, physically) demanding jobs. It is striking how robust and vigorous many directors are in person – and for a reason. But only the genetically blessed or most driven are able to sustain this intensive activity into their 70s and beyond, let alone to 106 – the age at which Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira was reportedly preparing a new feature when he died. Yes, people are more active later in life these days, but there are limits. Releasing The Old Oak this year, Ken Loach, 87, gave a strong indication that he was now calling time: “Your facilities do decline. Your short-term memory goes and my eyesight is pretty rubbish now, so it’s quite tricky.”
A more brutal school of thinking says that even if you can, doesn’t mean you should. Quentin Tarantino famously declared his intention to quit directing after 10 movies, so as not to sully his filmography with any embarrassing late-career stragglers. “I do think one of those out-of-touch, old, limp, flaccid-dick movies costs you three good movies as far as your rating is concerned,” he said in 2012.
Most directors take their final bow long before their 70th birthday, falling foul of changing studio regimes and tastes. Precious few get to curate their own legacy in the way the cinema-steeped Tarantino aims to, if that’s even possible – other people remain the ultimate judges of your work, however many films you make. Allen might be infuriatingly workaday in his pension-age film-making, but at least that practical attitude extends to the idea of posterity. Asked in 2015 how he wants to be remembered, he said: “I don’t really care. It wouldn’t matter to me, aside from the royalties to my kids, if they took all my films and dumped them. You and I could be standing over Shakespeare’s grave, singing his praises, and it doesn’t mean a thing. You’re extinct.”
Eastwood has a similarly unromantic stance on continuing to direct into his 90s: “I just like it.” But his seventh-age work displays more engagement with the world than Allen’s, interrogating the notion of modern heroism in the likes of American Sniper and The 15:17 to Paris. Praised for invariably bringing his projects in under budget and on time, he’s an exemplar of one type of “late style”: an austere classicism that pares things to the bare essence. At that age, there is no sense in wasting time. Scorsese, a one-time stylistic showboater, recently addressed this: “Do I have to prove that I can do a really beautiful camera move? Like in Goodfellas? Well, I did it. Do it again? Hmm, no. It doesn’t pay. Because that was good for that moment.”
What is thrilling about this elderly crew being able to elongate their careers is the possibility that walking out on the gangplank over the void will lend their art a fresh daring – as it did for David Bowie with his final album, Blackstar. Scorsese addressed mortality directly in The Irishman, where it came as a flat chastisement to gangster self-glorification. But Killers of the Flower Moon feels more adventurous in its urge to rip out the roots of violence and exploitation, and its admission that even the perpetrators don’t understand their actions in the final reckoning. And, in the director’s own appearance as the radio announcer dramatising the Osage murders, the suggestion is that even the narrator can be complicit.
Scott has also shown a penchant for revisionist history as he approaches the finish line. Napoleon is in many ways of a piece with 2021’s The Last Duel, upending patriarchal narratives of authority and force by (very insistently) pointing out that old Boney was little more than Josephine’s plaything. In its bonkbuster energy, the film renders big-ticket history as displaced domestic farce, in the same schlocky key as his fashion family saga House of Gucci. Gruffly disparaging the official line, isn’t Scott in some way pricking the pomposity and presumptuousness of all storytelling, including his own? Telling everyone – including historians who insist the truth is their preserve – to get off their high horse.
He should know. Maybe Scott, the former ad man often derided as a visuals-only hackhas, in his advanced years, been most searching and candid about the role of the artist and the human compulsion to create in the face of death. So preoccupied was Prometheus with these questions that it forgot to tell an Alien story. In the character of the technocrat Weyland, obsessed with meeting his “maker” and father to the android David, Scott dissected the egoism and potential for megalomania that surrounds all creative acts. Michael Fassbender’s David, in turn hating his creator and hellbent on perfecting a life form of his own, is a chilling portrait of the artist.
The most radical and disturbing character to smuggle on board a 21st-century blockbuster, it’s a shame after Alien: Covenant’s disappointing returns we probably won’t get to see the completion of this digital-age Lucifer story. Meanwhile, in Miyazaki’s more benevolent hands, the artist is purely quixotic – there to guide us, if prone to getting lost in his own worlds. But, as The Boy and the Heron acknowledges, a time comes to step down and relinquish power. In the real world, the temptation to hang on never goes away. A Studio Ghibli executive recently revealed that Miyazaki has been popping by the office to “work on ideas for a new film”. If he has broken his staff, there’s still a glimmer in the shards.
• The subheading of this article was amended on 11 December 2023 because an earlier version referred to film directors entering their seventh decade and beyond, when those mentioned are at least entering their ninth decade.
• The Boy and the Heron is released on 26 December
