In his big-screen roles ranging from the nearly hanged Man With No Name to magnum-toting cop “Dirty” Harry Callahan to gruff boxing coach Frankie Dunn, Clint Eastwood has famously been a man of few words.
But the actor-turned-Academy Award-winning director has a lot to talk about when it comes to his latest film Flags of Our Fathers, a poignant adaptation of the bestselling book that chronicles the experiences of the young military men who famously raised the American flag after the harrowing, hard-won Marine Corps invasion of Iwo Jima during World War II, and the intense psychological aftermath when they are brought home and pressed to serve as poster-boy heroes for the war effort after so many of their brothers-in-arms were lost in battle.
And quite simply, when the 76-year-old screen icon with over 55 feature films as an actor, 27 as director and four Oscars on his mantle decides to talk, Hollywood.com just shuts up and listens.
Hollywood.com: What about this particular moment of World War II struck you as a filmmaker?
Clint Eastwood: Well, one there’s never been a story on Iwo Jima—even though there’ve been pictures that used the name in the title, but of the actual invasion, there hasn’t been. It was the biggest Marine Corps invasion in history. It was the most fierce battle in Marine Corps history, but what intrigued me about it was the book itself and the fact that it wasn’t really a war story. I wasn’t setting out to just do a war movie. I’ve been involved with a few of those as an actor, but I liked this because it was just a study of these people. I’ve always been curious about a family who find out things about their relatives much later after the fact. I’ve talked to many vets of this campaign and many other campaigns, and the ones who were on the frontlines the most and have been through the most seem to be the ones who are the quietest about their activities. It’s a sure thing if you hear someone being very braggadocio about all their experiences in combat that they were probably a clerk-typist somewhere on the rear echelon. There seems to be a commonality with these kind of people. They came back and it was a time in history when you didn’t have a lot of psychiatric evaluation and coddling. When they came back they were told to just go home and get over it. If they didn’t have wives or loved ones to help them, they had to adjust on their own or else they didn’t adjust on their own. Being a young man and thrown into the ultimate celebrity—and this is what I hope the picture makes a comment on, celebrity—and they didn’t feel that. They felt very complex about all of that, especially when they had so many of their companions killed in this ferocious battle and the famous photograph. The Joe Rosenthal photograph was taken four or five days into the battle and it wasn’t even a fourth of the way there yet. But it signified a unity that I’ve always been curious about
HW: You use a very unique storytelling structure, flashing between the battle at Iwo Jima, the War Bond tour and the present day. Was it difficult to adapt this non-fiction work into a dramatic piece?
CE: [Screenwriter] Paul [Haggis] likes to joke about this. After our first meeting he said, “I have about an eleven percent chance of being successful with this.” I said, “Well, it’s going to work out. Don’t worry. You just keep looking straight ahead.” Then we would talk every day or so over the phone and talk about philosophies and the way to get started. He was having trouble getting into it. So we talked about doing it in various acts, but the trouble is to show the impact that it has on the three soldiers and their recollection. It’s a very difficult process to work with because you go from present day—which would be 1994 in this case—and then back to one period of time and then up to another period of time and then back and then up to present day. The only other time that I’ve done that was with a picture called Bird a years ago. I had the difficulty of going into flashbacks and then a flashback within in a flashback and then having to unwind and come back and not keep the audience only moderately confused as to what’s going on so that we could get back to the present day of that particular picture. We finally decided that this was the way to do it, through a journalistic manner. Because James Bradley wrote his book as he researched, doing literally a detective story, going around and talking to people, it laid out that way. It just seemed like the logical way to do it. Otherwise it’s a big sprawling book and it covers a lot of chapters on a lot of various items that you’d have to sit there and pick out what story you wanted to do, just the Bond drive or the battle. But you have to have the impact of the battle to show the complexity of the Bond drive, of the emotions of the guys. I guess that Adam Beach’s character sort of sums it up when he’s on the train and he says, “We shouldn’t be here.” There are a lot of little key places that guide you back and that is one of them.
HW: For years you carried an image of one of the toughest guys on screen, and this film, like all of the movies you’ve directed, peels back the tough image and shows such great sensitivity. How do you find the balance between those two things?
CE: I don’t know how I balance anything. I just kind of go along. I think that as I’ve matured—which is essentially a way of saying aging—I’ve become or reached out to different sides of different stories and different stories that maybe were appealing to me. Maybe they were appealing to me as a young man, but the pressure was on as a young man when I started out in movies with a lot of action and that sort of thing. As I got to this stage in life now, where I’m sort of retreating to the back side of the camera, I just felt that it’s time to address a lot of different things that were maybe closer to me maybe rather than fantasy characters that I might’ve been involved with.
HW: You use lesser-known actors in this film—Ryan Phillippe is arguably the most recognizable face in the cast. What prompted the decision to veer away from “movie star” casting?
CE: Well, using lesser-known actors was because the average age of the people sent to Iwo Jima was 19 years old, except for some of the officers I talked to. I talked to an officer a day before yesterday who was there. He retired as a general, but he was their captain then and he was only 24. The oldest of our group was [Barry Pepper’s character] Mike Strank who was 26 years old and the other Marines called him “Old Man.” It’s hard to be called Old Man at 26, but I guess because of his leadership qualities he was sort of viewed that way. I think that because of the age and us having to use young people, it lent itself to using lesser-known actors. Also, if you have big name actors coming on the screen in a situation sometimes it takes a little while to adjust to the fact that here is someone who is well-known and then having to believe in them as the character…In this case you can kind of accept in a faster fashion the fact that these people are the characters.
HW: Adam Beach in particular seems to embody Ira Hayes, the most conflicted of the young men depicted in the flag-raising photo.
CE: The story of Ira Hayes has been told before, but Adam Beach is a North American Indian and so we don’t have a Caucasian playing it. I had seen him doing some other smaller roles, but he came in and did a reading on tape and it was very good. You could see a lot of possibility there, and so I hired him and he turned out to be even better than I expected he would be, because Ira Hayes was a very complex person. He was a person who was a sharecropping kid from Arizona who goes into the Marine Corps. All of a sudden he’s in the Marine Corps and he’s got a uniform and he makes a lot of friends and finds a sort of family in the Marine Corps. He liked it to the point where he wanted to stay there. Everything in this picture is true. Sometimes that’s an advantage and sometimes that’s a disadvantage, but everything here did happen.
HW: What did you hope to get from your actors, and how did you go about doing or getting that from them?
CE: I just wanted them to get to know these people and know what they went through and maybe give the audience a feeling of what it was like at that time and what these people dedicated their lives to, or donated their lives for. I wanted that feeling of false celebrity, which is something that we’re seeing as quite common these days. There’ve been books written about it and [Tom] Brokaw’s book of course, The Greatest Generation. There was a lot of talk about the Greatest Generation, and so it was fun to just visualize the Greatest Generation. We live in a time now where it’s different. We have a voluntary military. The country is a lot more comfortable now, as far as economics go. We’d just come out of rough economic times back then. In fact, right now we’re probably a lot more spoiled in the country than we were then. So it’s the idea that war is more of an inconvenience now, where then it was an absolute necessity.
HW: At this point in modern history it will be inevitable to compare what’s going on with our current war to the issues raised in your film. What are your thoughts?
CE: All wars have their problems. It was a different time in history of course. We had been fighting in the European theater. We were at war, but then when it was brought to us in Pearl Harbor it became a reality that if we weren’t careful, if we didn’t fight this one out, we might be speaking another language today. So it was sort of simple, and most of the young men and women who went to war were kind of skinny kids out of The Depression. The average was 19 years old. You figure that they were all born somewhere in the late 20s, early 30s. They were over there, but they all had the spirit. So it was important for us to tell this story for that reason. It told of a time in our history when there was a lot of spirit. The icon itself of the flag-raising, though it was a candid shot at the time, and as a matter of fact it didn’t have any significance at the moment because it was the second flag-raising—It was just a shot that was very rare. It’s a work of art because it’s people not looking into the camera and smiling at their aunt in Des Moines. It showed the unity of people working towards a common cause. That in itself showed a time when people felt that they had to be victorious in this war. As to how it compares to today, I suppose that war is war. Whenever you’re in there, if you’re on the front lines there are always the various problems that you have to deal with that are hard for us to understand when we’re not the ones in combat situations…It was a time of great effort in the country. It was a great moment in history as far as American unity went. The country seemed much more unified—I’m sure it wasn’t, but it seems in hindsight—than it is today because the war were in today is a different kind of war—it’s ideology and religion. There are a lot of factors coming into it that may make the next war even more difficult, but this one was much more cut and dried.
HW: This film is very much a deconstruction of the hero myth, a recurring theme in some of your movies, and the celebrity myth as well.
CE: Yeah, that’s very important in this movie, because in era that we live in now everyone is being considered a hero. In that particular era, the 40s, heroes were people of extraordinary feats. Human beings, Americans do heroic deeds every day. You probably all saw the news where that fireman jumped out of the car and he saved these people who were burning in the car while he was on his way back from work. People do deeds like that all the time. People also say, “Well, it’s not my problem.” There are exceptions. Growing up, guys who I thought of as heroes were, like, Joe Lewis, and maybe during the war there was General Patton, of course, and maybe Eisenhower who was the head of the Allied Forces, and Gary Cooper. There was a few people. There were a handful of movie actors, celebrities—a handful of men and a handful of women that were names. Now you would have to decipher who’s the star because everyone now is a star—you have to have “superstar” after the name. People are “stars” who are just heiresses or something now [Laughs]. I don’t have an example of that. So we’re in a much different era because they didn’t have that sort of thing then.
HW: The movie also highlights the importance of wartime propaganda in that era—not just as a slick means of “selling” the war but also as an important psychological and financial factor in winning the war.
CE: I think that what we tried to tell or what we tried to show was the propaganda machine as it actually appeared. Yeah, growing up we watched all of the war movies, and the war movies were all very much full of propaganda and there was always the bad guys and the good guys. But most of the servicemen were portrayed by actors who were at least in their thirties, some in their forties and on up, and that is inaccurate because the majority of them were in their teens and early twenties. I think that the oldest person in the campaign—the oldest guy was 60 years old. He was the oldest officer, but most of the officers were probably in their twenties and most of the infantry people were in their teens…Really, what sums it up is that these guys who were sent off to do this were just kids. They were sent off to fight for their country and if you watch the ending credits we tried to show the real people and you realize that those 19-year-olds looked about 45 in a matter of a two-week period or a three-week period. So how much it can change a person and how appreciative they are to have made it through is interesting. This general I talked to the other day said that he doesn’t say much about it, but he just said, “I’m one of the lucky ones.” And we should be appreciative of them for doing it, because if they didn’t do it we would’ve had combat on our shores, and combat on our shores is something that no American would look forward to. But don’t give up. We have to always be vigilant because such a thing could happen.
HW: At this point in your career is it hard for you to find projects that interest you and challenge you?
CE: It goes in waves. Sometimes you think, “Well, I’ll take some time off.” I did Mystic River and I was going to take some time off after that project and then Million Dollar Baby came around and I thought, “Ah, I have to do that.” So I went right into that and with this one, I had tried to buy this book sometime earlier and DreamWorks had bought it. Then I ran into Steven Spielberg and he said, “Why don’t you come over and direct this film.” I had liked the book and so I shook hands and said, “Yes. I’ll do that.” He didn’t have a screenplay that he was happy with, and so we kind of had to start from scratch, and since I was working with Paul I brought him in and the rest is where we are.
HW: With the great successes recently of true stories and biopics on screen, has there ever been any talk about doing a movie about your life?
CE: A movie about me? No, no. I don’t feel that my life is that interesting which is maybe why I became an actor. I feel that I just do a job, and I’ve been lucky enough to work in a profession that I enjoy. I still enjoy it and obviously so because I’m doing it still. I don’t seem to have any ambitions about retiring. If I do I haven’t found out about them yet. Maybe I’ll just wait until they retire me.
