Nine years after Gran Torino, he will be the star of The Mule.
The 15:17 for Paris is not yet released in France that Clint Eastwood is already working on his next film, which he will also be the star, as in Gran Torino , his big success of 2009. The Tracking Board announces that the director wants to shoot The Mule from the true story of Leo Sharp, a man arrested at the age of 87 (Eastwood battery) because he was carrying cocaine in his pick up. He was trying to get him from Michigan to Mexico, hired by the Sinaloa cartel. During his trial, it turned out that he was hired when he was 80 years old to participate in the traffic because he seemed unsuspected: veteran of the Second World War, he had made a career as a horticulturist and specialized in lilies, flowers that have earned him many awards and some fame in the United States. During his seven years in the cartel, he allegedly transported $ 3 million worth of drugs, and was sentenced to 3 years in prison in 2014. A reduced sentence because of his age. He died while incarcerated, two years later, at age 92.
This case made a lot of noise during the trial in the US, so that a film project was immediately launched by the independent studio Imperative. Ruben Fleischer, the director of Gangster Squad, was then approached. Finally, Warner Bros. teamed up with Imperative to produce Eastwood’s project, based on a screenplay by Nick Schenk (who wrote Gran Torino ) and Dave Holstein (known for the Weeds series ).