When it comes to the most respected names in Hollywood, particularly in the war and western genres, it’s hard to look beyond Clint Eastwood. From his role as ‘The Man With No Name’ in Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy to taking the directorial reigns with movies such as Bridges over Madison County and Gran Torino, Eastwood has always been top of the pile.
However, you don’t get to the top without ruffling a few feathers along the way, and one person who is no fan of Eastwood is his fellow director Spike Lee. The Do The Right Thing filmmaker had expressed his disapproval of the casting of Eastwood’s war films Letters from Iwo Jima and Flags of Our Fathers while promoting his own movie, Miracle at St Anna.
“Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not one Negro actor on the screen,” Lee said. “If you reporters had any balls, you’d ask him why. There’s no way I know why he did that. But I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It’s not like he didn’t know.”
Eastwood responded: “The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn’t do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people’d go: ‘This guy’s lost his mind.’ I mean, it’s not accurate. A guy like him should shut his face.”
The actor and director also pointed out the fact that Lee had previously called him out when he made the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker Bird. “He was complaining when I did Bird,” Eastwood said. “‘Why would a white guy be doing that?’ I was the only guy who made it, that’s why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead, he was making something else.”
Eastwood went one further to claim that he’s not “in the game” of representation for representation’s sake at the cost of narrative accuracy. “What are you going to do, you going to tell a fuckin’ story about that?” he said. “Make it look like a commercial for an equal opportunity player? I’m not in that game. I’m playing it the way I read it historically, and that’s the way it is. When I do a movie, and it’s 90% Black, like Bird, then I use 90% Black people.”
Lee was less than impressed by Eastwood’s “shut his face” comments and later responded by trying to ease the feud, admitting to Eastwood’s quality as an actor and director. “First of all, the man is not my father, and we’re not on a plantation either,” he said. “He’s a great director. He makes his films, I make my films… And a comment like ‘A guy like that should shut his face’ – come on, Clint, come on. He sounds like an angry old man right there.”
However, the director was not willing to concede the fact that Eastwood should have had more directors in Iwo Jima. “You never see a Black face,” he said. “This is the last straw. I feel like I’ve been denied, I’ve been insulted, I’ve been mistreated. But what can you do? We still have a strong underlying force in my country of rabid racism. I never said he should show one of the other guys holding up the flag as Black. I said that African-Americans played a significant part in Iwo Jima.”
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