To boldly go with the old 'farts'

There is a theory that no one over the age of 25 should allow themselves to be photographed from below. In Space Cowboys, Clint Eastwood has himself shot upwards, downwards, backwards and sideways, until the bags under his eyes all but blindfold him. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Do it thoroughly. Become the poster boy for Generation LXX. And make a lot of money.

Clint Eastwood turned 70 this spring, which makes him the eldest but one of the Space Cowboys quartet - James Garner at 72, Donald Sutherland at 65, and Tommy Lee Jones a comparative chicken at 53. Add to that the fact that the film took $18 million in its opening weekend alone - the biggest ever for an Eastwood movie - and it certainly seems to buck the current '25 and under' cinema demographic.

'We're as good as any young guys around,' says the man himself, only half jokingly. 'But Hollywood is a very faddist community, and right now there's a fad for the impressionistic, MTV style where the stories are completely abbreviated and no one cares about the characters. Those stories are OK, I suppose, but not for me. This is about older people coming back. A little resurrection. One of the problems for actors as you get older is that they want you to play the roles you used to play, and I don't want to play a 40-year-old guy.

'My philosophy is, if it ain't fun at this stage in my life, I don't want to be doing it.' He'd rather play the piano, play golf, or play with his three-year-old daughter (by decades-younger newscaster Dina Ruiz). Eastwood is talking in Venice, where Space Cowboys opened the film festival, and he is looking almost as youthful as a man with a three-year-old daughter should do. Laid back. Flaunting what Richard Burton once called his 'dynamic lethargy'.

Space Cowboys is about 'a bunch of old guys who blackmail their way into space'. ('We've got three weeks to send four old farts into space,' as a character puts it more forcefully.) A superannuated satellite has gone dangerously wrong and the man to fix it is the man who designed it (Eastwood), and he won't go up unless he can take his buddies. Back in the Fifties they were Air Force pilots training to be the first Americans in space, until NASA gave that honour to a chimpanzee. This is Revenge Of The Oldies, done with a self-mocking bonhomie.

'I'm not afraid of growing older, and neither are my colleagues, so we can laugh about it. I don't believe your masculinity diminishes as your wrinkles increase.' On the cheeks - or anywhere else. Space Cowboys features the four lined up bare-assed, and it isn't pretty. You wouldn't - as Donald Sutherland points out - get four younger stars to do that readily.

But his team have nothing to prove, says Eastwood. 'Like a lot of other older guys, they're not fighting any insecurities. A friend once told me, there's one good thing about being past 60. When you get this far, what can they do to you?'

Space Cowboys, once again, is Eastwood against the forces of hypocrisy. 'I've always enjoyed that. I've always hated bureaucracy and bullshit. I guess I've been a bit of a rebel in my day.'

It's true that Eastwood used to buck the system, quietly. But that's hard to remember now, when the system is turning his way. Since Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood has been all but canonised by the film community. The Venice Festival gave him a career award - presented by Sharon Stone, a glorious paparazzi opportunity. But so did the Deauville Festival plan to give him one: Billy Wilder once said awards are like piles - everyone gets them in the end. Eastwood is more diplomatic, once a local politician and still naturally polite. But, it puzzles him slightly.

'I've always had a rough time thinking in terms of a lifetime's achievement. I've always thought I was in the middle of life, not at the end of it. Now they're suggesting it, maybe this would be a good moment to retire...' Not seriously?