Clint Eastwood didn’t just direct “Jersey Boys” — he also gave his Frankie Valli a driving lesson.
Like the Broadway hit it’s based on, the film chronicles the rise and fall and redemption of pop music’s Four Seasons. Not surprisingly, there’s a lot more action on-screen, including a botched burglary in which a 16-year-old Frankie — played by Tony winner John Lloyd Young — plows through a plate-glass window.
But the car Frankie was driving had a stick shift, and Young, a 38-year-old Californian who was doing some of his own stunts, had never tackled a manual transmission before.
Enter Dirty Harry.
“Very patiently, more patiently than my own father when he was teaching me how to drive, Clint and I drove around the Warner Brothers back lot,” Young tells The Post. “Clint gives actors what they need, then sets them free.”
The 84-year-old Eastwood also knows how to corral a cast. For “Jersey Boys,” the jazz-loving director found three of his Four Seasons in the musical’s Broadway and road companies. The exception: “Boardwalk Empire” star Vincent Piazza, who plays the group’s loose cannon, Tommy DeVito.
“Vincent was our wild card,” Young says. “It was great that he had no experience with the show coming in. We never knew what he was going to do, and that kind of shook everything up.”
Also new to “Jersey Boys” was Christopher Walken. He plays soft-hearted gangster Gyp DeCarlo, who turns to mush whenever young Frankie sings “My Mother’s Eyes.”
“Walken has a rock-star status as an actor, so he’s very reserved and guarded,” Young says. “And he was that way on the set, very shy. We talked a little, but I left him his space.”
One day, there was a knock on Young’s trailer door. In walked Walken, with a surprise: a framed photo of Frankie Valli with Frank Sinatra.
“He’d put it together and gave it to me out of nowhere as a gift,” Young marvels. Later, he and the rest of the cast persuaded the famously offbeat Walken to join in the film’s Bollywood-like song-and-dance finale.
Another memorable moment in their 38-day shoot was more low-key. The crew was shooting a scene in what was supposed to be Valli’s Fifth Avenue apartment, complete with baby grand piano. While the rest of the cast and crew took a break, Young stayed behind in his director’s chair — only to hear a familiar theme he couldn’t quite place.
“I got up and I see Clint sitting alone at the piano, playing the theme he composed for ‘Mystic River,’ ” he says.
“It was a beautiful, solitary moment when I caught our director — the musician.”