Eastwood, Lee feud over war movies
Posted by admin on Jun 8, 2008
The war of words between two of Hollywood’s greatest directors continued to rage on this weekend.
Last month at the Cannes Film Festival, Spike Lee criticized Clint Eastwood for his World War 2 movies about Iwo Jima. Lee said he was upset that neither “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters From Iwo Jima” didn’t portry any African-American soldiers in the epic battle.
The former “Dirty Harry” fired back in an article printed Friday in the U.K.’s Guardian saying, “A guy like him should shut his face.”
Eastwood tells the paper he studied Iwo Jima and says a small detachment of black troops were there as a part of a munitions company, “but they didn’t raise the flag. 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.”
Lee, the lauded director of such films as “Do the Right Thing” and “Malcolm X,” wasted no time responding to Eastwood.
“First of all, the man is not my father and we’re not on a plantation either,” Lee tells ABCNEWS.com. “He’s a great director. He makes his films, I make my films. The thing about it though, I didn’t personally attack him. 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.”
The actor/director says he will take “the Obama high road and end the fued right here.”
Spike Lee’s next film, “Miracle at St. Anna,” is about an all-black U.S. division fighting in Italy. It will hit theaters in September.
