LOS ANGELES — Few people can get away with teasing a man like his daughter can.

On a May afternoon, in a small office at his Malpaso Productions on the Warner Bros. lot, Clint Eastwood and his daughter Alison were discussing the 86-year-old director and actor's career advice to his children.

“I just said, ‘Whatever you do, do it well,'?” Clint said. “If you're going to be a phone operator, be the best phone operator.”

“Phone operator was my backup career,” Alison said dryly, provoking a smile from her dad.

Instead, Alison, 44, entered the family trade. Her second feature as a director, is a Mississippi-set drama called “Battlecreek.” The movie, which does not have a distributor, is based on a script by Alison's childhood friend Anthea Anka, the daughter of singer-songwriter Paul Anka, and stars Bill Skarsgard as a young man with a rare skin disorder that requires him to live his life at night.

Made for $1.5 million, “Battlecreek” was a family affair in many respects. Alison's older brother, Kyle, a jazz musician who lives in Europe, composed the score; her husband, sculptor Stacy Poitras, worked on the production design; some of her father's longtime associates, such as editor Gary Roach, helped on the post-production.

The daughter of Clint's first wife, Maggie Johnson, and one of his brood of eight children, Alison shares obvious qualities with her father: They're both long-limbed and unpretentious, and they love animals. When she's not making movies, Alison runs the Eastwood Ranch Foundation, which rescues animals from shelters.

On this afternoon, Clint was in his office to look at some final visual effects shots on “Sully,” his film starring Tom Hanks as the US Airways pilot who heroically landed a plane on the Hudson River in New York, which Warner Bros. will release in September. It's Clint's first film since 2014's “American Sniper,” which set box-office records and earned six Academy Award nominations, including best picture.

“He still manages to make films about real people, and people go see them,” Alison said of her father's work.

Alison grew up slapping the clapperboard on her father's film sets. She made her screen debut at age 7 in her father's movie “Bronco Billy,” before going on to play a larger role as Clint's daughter in “Tightrope” when she was 11.

“It's been a great pleasure to grow up in the business and have experiences I never would have had unless he was who he is,” Alison said. “It's always difficult not to live in somebody's shadow, but as long as you do your own thing and find your own voice, you can navigate through it.”