Clint Eastwood at Hitchcock, it was almost possible! Discover the meeting between the two men and the film which was to bring them together on the same poster.
In September 1968, filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock was released in L’Etau theaters with Frederick Stafford and Dany Robin, but at the same time he was already imagining what his next film would be. And for this new project, he contacted a very fashionable actor, recently turned director: Clint Eastwood. He offers him a role, but the latter is not very excited, as recalled Entertainment Weeklyquoting the words of the ex-man with no name:
Hitchcock wanted me to act in one of his films. I was not crazy about the script. I had lunch with him in his offices. When I walked in, he was sitting up straight and he didn’t move. Only his eyes moved. They followed me across the room.
Because of his doubts about the story, Eastwood declined the offer of “Hitch”, and could have been replaced by another actor, since the names of Walter Matthau, Sean Connery and Steve McQueen were also mentioned. the time. Except that the project never saw the light of day.
Paramount Pictures
Clint Eastwood in 1968
Eastwood was indeed tipped to play in The Short Night. The filmmaker had asked screenwriter James Costigan (who will sign Les Prédateurs) to write an adaptation of the novel The Short Night of Ronald Kirkbride mixed with the real life of spy George Blake, a KGB mole infiltrated at MI6.
The master of suspense finally abandons the project to shoot Frenzy then Family plot. At the end of the 1970s, however, he put The Short Night back to writing. But Hitchcock wanted to open his film with a rape scene, which caused the departure of his collaborator Ernest Lehman, hired in October 1977 to go over the script.
DANIEL ANGELI / BESTIMAGE
Hitchcock in 1975
It is finally a version written by a third author, David Freeman, which is today the most easily accessible, since it is reproduced in this book. We would therefore have followed the journey of Gavin Brand, a double agent who escaped from prison. He is pursued by Joe Bailey the brother of one of his victims, who works for the CIA. Bailey manages to meet Brand’s family, but falls in love with his wife, who also falls under his spell. The day Brand reappears, the situation obviously becomes more complicated…
On the casting side, the role of Brand’s wife could have been played by Liv Ullmann or Catherine Deneuve. In The Expressin 2002, the actress confided this:
There was Hitchcock, whom I had met thanks to François Truffaut, in Paris [en 1969, NdlR]. We had lunch together, he told me about a spy film project. The script wasn’t developed, and he died before he could. That’s a shame. It seems that he was very hard on his actresses, but I would have liked to enter his universe.
The film will remain an aborted project, the end of which was caused by the disappearance of Alfred Hitchcock on April 29, 1980. Since then, Universal, which owns the rights to the screenplay, has never put it into production.
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