The only movie Clint Eastwood seriously considered quitting: “I asked myself if it was worth it”
Nobody would even contemplate calling Clint Eastwood a quitter behind his back, never mind to his face. And yet, a combination of hard graft and tragedy left the legendary actor and filmmaker wondering if he’d be better off packing his bags and heading home.
For someone who built their career on being a model of efficiency on both sides of the camera, it’s jarring to hear Eastwood admit that he was caught in the midst of an existential crisis. He’d never walked away from anything before, and while he didn’t follow through on this occasion, it speaks to just how difficult the production was.
From the outside looking in, 1975’s The Eiger Sanction was a straightforward proposition. Embracing his usual action hero schtick, Eastwood plays an ex-assassin lured back for the fabled ‘one last job’ to make a perilous journey to the summit of the titular mountain, discover which one of his colleagues is a double agent, and make sure they don’t leave the peak alive.
However, from beginning to end, it was anything but simple. Eastwood was never particularly happy with the script, and his participation was a business decision more than anything else. By starring in a Universal picture, he’d finish up his contract with the studio and realise his dream of upping sticks and relocating to Warner Bros, which would become his home for the next half a century.
He also insisted on doing his own climbing and stunts, which drew plenty of panicked glances from the studio, especially when dozens of more experienced mountaineers had perished on the Eiger. “It was a very difficult picture to make,” he understated. “And the mountaineering sequences, especially, posed enormous problems.”
Eastwood wanted to get his death-defying scenes out of the way early, so they were mostly captured across the first two days of principal photography. Unfortunately, tragedy struck after a week when crew member David Knowles rappelled down to a ledge to shoot footage and was killed instantly by a falling rock.
“On the seventh day of filming, we lost one of our mountaineers,” he reflected. “And believe me, I asked myself repeatedly if it was worth it.” Following Knowles’ death, Eastwood was ready to pull the plug on The Eiger Sanction completely, something that was technically within his remit as the leading man and producer through his Malpaso company.
After all, if one of the film’s backers and its biggest draw decided to abandon ship after a week of shooting, the whole thing would have fallen apart. Instead, Knowles’ fellow climbers insisted that he and they fully understood the risks of what they were getting into, and his passing would ultimately become meaningless if the picture he’d died making wasn’t completed.
Cooler heads prevailed, and Eastwood agreed to carry on with The Eiger Sanction, which was the closest he’d ever come to quitting a movie during production before or since.
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