Clint Eastwood Tells Spike Lee to “Shut His Face”
Clint Eastwood has advised rival film director Spike Lee to “shut his face” after the African-American complained about the racial make-up of Eastwood’s films.
In an interview with the Guardian published today, Eastwood rejected Lee’s complaint that he had failed to include a single African-American soldier in his films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, both about the 1945 battle for the Japanese island.
In typically outspoken language, Eastwood justified his choice of actors, saying that those black troops who did take part in the battle as part of a munitions company didn’t raise the flag. The battle is known by the image of US marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi.
“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.” Referring to Lee, he added: “A guy like him should shut his face.”
Read Spike Lee’s Clint Eastwood criticism from Cannes just last month
Spike Blasts Eastwood For Forgetting Black Soldiers in ‘Flags of Our Fathers’ and ‘Letters From Iwo Jima’ Flicks
Spike Lee is slamming Clint Eastwood over his two recent Iwo Jima movies, saying the filmmaker overlooked the role of black soldiers during World War II.
Lee – whose next film is this fall’s “Miracle at St. Anna,” the story of an all-black U.S. division fighting in Italy during the war – said Eastwood’s 2006 movies “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters From Iwo Jima” were whites-only affairs.
“He did two films about Iwo Jima back to back and there was not one black soldier in both of those films,” Lee said Tuesday at the Cannes Film Festival, where he was a judge in an online short-film competition.
Lee said too:
“Many veterans, African-Americans, who survived that war are upset at Clint Eastwood. In his vision of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist. Simple as that. I have a different version,”
Eastwood was in Cannes for his missing-child drama “Changeling,” starring Angelina Jolie. At a news conference for the film, a reporter tried to ask for his reaction to Lee’s criticism, but the moderator cut her off and told journalists to limit questions to Eastwood’s own movie.
Due in U.S. theaters in October, “Miracle at St. Anna” centers on four Americans – played by Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso and Omar Benson Miller - in the Buffalo Soldiers division in Tuscany.
Cannes, France, May 2008.
