He has shot two films back to back about events surrounding the terrible second world war Battle of Iwo Jima. Flags of Our Fathers, which tells the story from the American side, opens in Britain on December 22; Letters from Iwo Jima, which focuses on the Japanese soldiers who fought and died on the bleak Pacific island, will be released in America shortly before Christmas, and over here in February. Both films are likely to be in Oscar contention. The late surprise may be that Letters from Iwo Jima, despite being shot entirely in Japanese, could be the stronger contender.
The two films are powerful indictments of war and violence, and of the cost of creating false heroes. As such they are a remarkable late chapter in the career of a man whose reputation was carved in blood. First as the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns of the late 1960s, then in the vigilante-style Dirty Harry cop thrillers of the 1970s, Eastwood became a byword for brutal and amoral movie violence. In recent years, though, with a freer hand as a director, he has become the most articulate and powerful voice in Hollywood when it comes to warning of the horror that violence and war wreak on individuals and on societies.
I met Eastwood recently as he was overseeing post-production on Letters in a small suite of offices on the Warner Bros lot in Burbank. Eastwood’s Malpaso production company has been in the same building there for more than 30 years. He still works with many of the same people he has for decades, including Joel Cox, who has completed 20 films with him. Henry Bumstead, Eastwood’s long-time production designer, who worked on both Flags and Letters, died earlier this year, aged 91.
We got together late in the afternoon as Eastwood, scooping out half an avocado with a teaspoon, was catching up on lunch. His career may have been built on the threat of violence behind his famous screw-eyed scowl, but in person I realised that his quick and easy smile is a far more lethal weapon. He was wearing a loose, casual, light-grey suit, and as he sank into the couch beside me, the knees on his seemingly endless 6ft 4in frame seemed to reach up to his ears. His familiar voice, which you could recognise blindfold after just a syllable, is fainter and wispier than in his heyday, but he still looks so terrific that at the end of our interview, I ask him how he stays fit (apart, obviously, from eating half an avocado when others would tuck into something more fattening). He tells me that after we finish up, which is not until early evening, he plans to head back to his LA home and work out for an hour or so. Which is more than I’ll be doing.
Eastwood is an easy conversationalist, but he much prefers talking about process — how he does things, rather than why. “Believe me, I am the last person who is any good at being self-analytical,” he tells me with a gentle laugh as I try to probe. But I really do want to understand why he went from being the actor holding the smoking gun to the director warning about the dangers of firing that weapon.
“I suppose I’m a different person now,” he finally acknowledges. “In the Leone pictures, the violence was somewhat operatic. The Dirty Harry pictures were accentuated by having clever dialogue, comedic lines, so the violence became more voyeuristic. In the stories I have done latterly, I have tried to deal with violence seriously. I feel that if you are going to make a film about violence, you have to make a statement that violence is not fun and games, it is not comedic. In Flags, we show how much the war affected these people, that when they came back, they did not want to talk about it. I didn’t want to make war a glory thing, which is why I shot it in muted colours and black-and-white.”
The point of departure for Flags of Our Fathers is one of the most iconic images in the history of war: the photograph of six soldiers, none of whose faces can be seen, struggling to raise the American flag on a mountaintop over Iwo Jima. The image came to exemplify the resolve and unity of purpose of the American people as they fought the evils of Japanese and German dictatorship. Eastwood says that he had wanted to film Flags after he read the bestselling nonfiction book, published in 2000, by James Bradley and Ron Powers, telling the story of the men who raised the flag and how their lives were changed by the way that image came to be used to fuel the American war machine. Bradley is the son of John Bradley, one of the men in the photograph. He knew nothing of his father’s role until the end of the latter’s life.
“I liked it because it wasn’t just a war story,” says Eastwood, whose own father was a shipyard steelworker during the conflict. Eastwood was 11 when America was drawn into the war by the attack on Pearl Harbor, and was drafted during the Korean war. “You can do a story about all the battles and stuff like that, but it was so much more than that. It was a mystery story, a guy not knowing how his father had participated in the war, and why his father had kept it secret for so long. I wanted to pay tribute to that generation. We should never forget they made great sacrifices so that our lives could be a lot more comfortable today.”
Eastwood discovered that the rights had been bought by Steven Spielberg, who was thinking of it as a companion piece to Saving Private Ryan. But Spielberg had problems getting a script he liked, and in February 2004, at the Governors Ball, on the night of the Oscars, Spielberg walked over to Eastwood, whom he had known for 35 years, and suggested he take over the project. They shook hands on the spot, and Eastwood brought in Paul Haggis, with whom he was working on Million Dollar Baby, to write the script. In the end, Eastwood, who is famous for doing things with as little fuss as possible, pretty much shot Haggis’s first draft; just as he used his first and only take for most of the scenes in the films, an unheard-of economy in today’s Hollywood. And for Flags, which cost about $90m, Eastwood hired little-known actors, because “the average age of the guys who went to Iwo Jima was 19”, and he felt seeing well-known actors playing them would work against their believability.
What makes the film so fascinating is that the story behind the Iwo Jima photograph is more complex than anyone realised until recently. Eastwood’s film is told in three distinct timelines: Bradley’s present-day search for the truth about his father’s role in the war and the raising of the flag; the lead-up to combat and the battle itself; and the subsequent drive to sell war bonds. As soon as the Pentagon realised the power of Joe Rosenthal’s image, which was splashed across front pages all over America, the three surviving Marines were flown back to the States and packaged as the “heroes of Iwo Jima”, celebrities on a nationwide drive to flog war bonds to raise much-needed money for the war.
The fight for the island of Iwo Jima, which began on February 19, 1945, was one of the bloodiest and most pivotal battles in the Pacific theatre. The small volcanic island was being used by the Japanese as an early-warning station, pinpointing US aircraft on bombing runs heading for Japan. Losing too many planes, the Americans had to take the island, and they threw huge forces at it. They were stunned by the ferocity and ingenuity of the Japanese resistance. By the fifth day, having suffered terrible losses, they had managed to push the Japanese back into the caves and 18 miles of tunnels they had built under the island.
To inspire their soldiers, American commanders ordered that a flag be raised over Mount Suribachi, the highest point on the island. But word came that the Secretary of the Navy wanted it taken down so he could keep it. A Marine runner, Rene Gagnon, was ordered to raise another, larger flag in its place. When he got to the top of Suribachi, which had been captured by the 5th Marine Division, he found an old Japanese water pipe to attach the flag to, but it was so heavy that he enlisted four Marines, who had been laying a telephone line to the top of the mountain, and John Bradley, a Navy corpsman (a medic), to help him raise it. Rosenthal, an AP photographer, saw what was happening and piled up rocks to give himself a better vantage point. He only just managed to get the shot. Less than 18 hours later, his photograph had been radioed to AP in New York, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Except, as the film shows, there was much more to it. American troops didn’t take Iwo Jima for another bloody month, as the battle was taken to the incredible
warren of caves and tunnels built on the orders of Lt Gen Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the Japanese commander. In the end, nearly 30,000 Japanese and Americans lay dead.
Meanwhile, the three surviving flag-raisers — Bradley and Marines Gagnon and Ira Hayes — were being presented to huge, adoring crowds. Hayes, a Native American (played wonderfully by Adam Beach) found it hardest to cope with the strain of being cast as a hero when so many of the people he believed were true heroes, the friends and comrades whose dismembered bodies lay scattered across Iwo Jima, would never come home. The film achingly depicts Hayes’s slide into alcoholism and despair. But the bond drive was fantastically successful, raising almost double the $14 billion expected, enough to help finance the war until its terrible conclusion at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Eastwood was unable to shoot the battle scenes on Iwo Jima itself: it is considered sacred ground by the Japanese because so many of their soldiers are buried there. He shot much of the film in Iceland, which has similar topography and black-sand volcanic beaches. In April this year, though, he finally got permission from the Japanese government to shoot a few scenes of Letters from Iwo Jima, which cost about $20m, on the island.
Eastwood says he became fascinated by Kuribayashi, who, he discovered, had in the late 1920s been an envoy in America and Canada, and had later published a book of
letters and drawings for his family about his experiences there. “It was so charming,” says Eastwood. “It seemed like he was a regular guy and a sensitive father who had great love for his family and his children, like any other person. I thought that was very interesting.” Eastwood also discovered that, because of his travels, Kuribayashi liked America and Americans, and was opposed to the attack on Pearl Harbor because he knew Japan could not overcome US industrial might. Among the other Japanese on Iwo Jima portrayed in the film is Baron Nishi, an equestrian champion who won the gold medal at the 1932 LA Olympics and became friends with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.
But Eastwood says it was much harder putting together a realistic script about what had happened on the Japanese side because so few survived. Kuribayashi’s ghastly tactic was for the Japanese to fight to the death in the caves and tunnels. In the end, many committed suicide by holding grenades against their bodies rather than suffer the dishonour of being taken captive.
Yet Eastwood says he was intrigued as much by the similarities of what the young Japanese and American troops suffered as by the differences between them. “The young Japanese conscriptees were very much like the Americans,” he says. “They didn’t necessarily want to be in the war, but they were sent there and told, ‘Don’t plan on coming back.’ That’s something you could not tell an American with a straight face.”
Eastwood was surprised by how little younger Japanese people now know about the war. “It’s not taught in schools,” he says. “None of my actors in Letters knew anything about the Battle of Iwo Jima. I thought it was important to tell that history for Japan, because these are people who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. I think it’s also important internationally, because it’s important to realise that war is a futile exercise at best, and people are trying to kill one another who, under other circumstances, could be extremely friendly.”
Eastwood is aware of parallels between Flags and the Iraq war, particularly in the creation of false heroes. He points to the uncanny similarity between the “heroes of Iwo Jima” and Jessica Lynch, the young medic who was rescued in the early days of the Iraq war and “hero-ised” by the Pentagon and the press.
“They were trying to make her Wonder Woman,” he says, “standing up with a machinegun and fighting off all those troops. Of course, it didn’t happen, and she felt like an idiot. She felt like the guys in our film, because they knew the people who were killed back on the island were the real heroes.”
But Eastwood insists he made Flags and Letters to be commentaries on the effects of war on ordinary lives, not critiques of the Iraq war — although he says he’s not troubled if people want to see them that way. He chuckles when I tell him some of his old friends on the political right think he’s gone soft in his dotage.
“I would love to be a pacifist. I would love the Iraq war to be settled. I would love it if the Iraqis embraced democracy. I would love it all to be a tremendous success. But I’m not one of those guys who thinks democracy is the greatest for everybody. I think it’s great for us, I think it’s great for some other countries, but I don’t feel it should be imposed on countries that have had centuries of dictatorships and monarchies or what have you. But I would love to be wrong.
“It doesn’t speak so well for mankind that we keep having wars, but we’ve had them since the beginning of mankind. I don’t have the answer to war, but I just try to tell these stories with what little knowledge I have.”
Spielberg, who knows something of what it means to be a director, and who is a producer on Flags of Our Fathers, says: “The most wonderful thing of all about this story has been watching Clint remain the same man he’s always been; that is to say, totally unimpressed with himself. ‘Lessness is bestness,’ he likes to say — and that applies especially to his own ego and his dependence on trust. Trust — in his cast, in his crew — reflects Clint’s trust in himself, in his own instincts, whether he’s casting or choosing material, or setting up a shot.”
High praise indeed.
Flags of Our Fathers opens on December 22, Letters from Iwo Jima on February 23
Clint Eastwood: why I was driven to tell the stories of Iwo Jima
Every movie I make teaches me something, and that’s why I keep making them. I’m at that stage of life when I could probably stop and just hit golf balls. But in filming these two movies about Iwo Jima, I learnt about war and about character. I also learnt a lot about myself.
I was a teenager when the Battle of Iwo Jima took place. I remember hearing about the bond drive and the need to maintain the war effort. Back then, people had just come through 10 years of a depression, and they were used to working for everything. I still have an image of someone coming to our house when I was about six years old, offering to cut and stack the wood in our back yard if my mother would make him a sandwich.
The Americans who went to Iwo Jima knew it would be a tough fight, but they always believed they’d win. The Japanese were told they wouldn’t come home — they were being sent to die for the Emperor. People have made a lot out of that very different cultural approach. But as I got into the storytelling for the two movies, I realised that the 19-year-olds from both sides had the same fears. They all wrote poignant letters home saying: “I don’t want to die.” They were all going through the same thing, despite the cultural differences.
I guess if you see both of the movies together, they sum up as an antiwar film. Whether it’s about territory or religion, war is horrifyingly and depressingly archaic. But I didn’t set out to make a war movie. I cared about those three fellows — Bradley, Hayes and Gagnon — the headliners on that war-bond circus. The young men were taken off the front lines, wined and dined, introduced to movie stars. But it felt wrong to them.
I can certainly understand. I think every celebrity, false or otherwise, wonders how he got to his position. I remember years ago working with Richard Burton, and somebody asking him about his great success. And he said: “I attribute it to luck.”
I also wonder how I got this far in life. Growing up, I never knew what I wanted to do. I was not a terribly good student or a very vivacious, outgoing person. I was just kind of a backward kid. I grew up in various little towns and ended up in Oakland, California, going to a trade school. I didn’t want to be an actor, because I thought an actor had to be an extrovert — somebody who loved to tell jokes and talk and be a raconteur. And I was something of an introvert. My mother used to say: “You have a little angel on your shoulder.” I guess she was surprised I grew up at all, never mind that I got to where I am. The best I can do is quote a line from Unforgiven: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
Life is a constant class, and once you think you know it all, you’re due to decay. You’re due to slide. I have to keep challenging myself and try something I haven’t done before. The studios aren’t always happy with that. When I wanted to make Mystic River, the studio said: “Uh-oh, it’s so dark.” And I said: “Well, it’s important. And it’s a nice story.” Then the next movie, Million Dollar Baby,
they said: “Who wants to see a picture about a girl boxing?” And I said: “It’s really a father-daughter love story. Boxing just happens to be what’s going on. They didn’t have much faith. So there are always obstacles and people afraid to take risks. That’s why you end up with remakes of old TV shows as movies. But playing it safe is what’s risky, because nothing new comes out of it.
I found it fascinating to make Letters from Iwo Jima in a whole different culture and language. Sure, I didn’t understand what the actors were saying, but all those Italian movies I did in the 1960s taught me that acting is acting.
The actors on both movies were fine, dedicated young men. For the scenes where there would be explosions, I’d talk about safety, but we’d never rehearse. I’d say: “Take care of yourself. Let’s roll.” Afterwards, one of them would come up to me: “I didn’t know a bomb would go off there.” I’d nod and say: “And your look was accordingly shocked.” You don’t know what’s going to happen in combat, and I wanted to capture that confusion.
As for me, I like being behind the camera instead of in front of it. I can wear what I want. Will I act again? I never say never. I like doing things where I can stretch and go in different directions. I’m not looking to take it easy. Like the Marines on Iwo Jima, I understand that if you really want something, you have to be ready to fight.
The second world war was supposed to be the war to end all wars, and at its close everybody was dancing in the streets. But a few years later we were in Korea, and then Vietnam. And now Iraq. Who knows where it will end? For us, at this moment in history, it’s very difficult to feel idealistic. We seem to be at our most creative figuring out ways of destroying each other.
But there’s always hope. The soldiers who raised the flag were common men in an almost unfathomable situation. I’m amazed when I look at what these young men did. This is my tribute to them.
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