This Sunday, November 19, 2023 at 9 p.m., Arte broadcasts La Sanction, fourth feature film directed by Clint Eastwood. A film whose filming was notably marked by a tragic accident which shocked the actor-director.
Among the approximately 70 films in which Clint Eastwood has played, The Sanction, broadcast this Sunday, November 19, 2023 at 9 p.m. on Arte, is certainly not the most evocative of his very long career. He plays Jonathan Hemlock, a respected academic who finances his ruinous passion by accepting contracts as a hitman for an obscure government intelligence agency. When he has decided to hang up the phone, he accepts one last mission: eliminate the two men who killed an agent in Zurich. Hemlock makes the first disappear but learns that the second has not yet been identified. He just knows that the man is limping and that he is going to participate in the perilous ascent of Mount Eiger, in Switzerland…
The Sanction: when Clint Eastwood met John Williams
Far from being the most notable feature film of Clint’s career, The Sanction remains no less eventful. Indeed, this is the only film for which John Williams composed the music for Clint Eastwood. He was approached by the studio and producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown, just after the immense success of the soundtrack for Jaws by Steven Spielberg, the same year in 1975. Knowing Eastwood’s appetite for jazz, the future composer of Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park thus incorporated this style into his score, which also included a classic and traditional orchestral sound.
This tragic event which mourned the start of filming
According to the specialized site IMDB, Clint Eastwood wanted to perform all his stunts, including the most dangerous. However, the filming was quickly mourned by the death of mountaineer and understudy David Knowles, aged 26, killed by a falling rock. Deeply shocked and marked by this tragic event, the actor from The Good the Bad and the Ugly plans to leave the project. But that was without counting on the strength of persuasion of the other mountaineers present there, who finally convinced him to stay.