No country for old men? Why Miyazaki, Loach and Scott can’t stop making movies

Together with Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood, long celebrated film directors are proving that entering their seventh decade and beyond is no barrier to ambition

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.