The movie legend discusses Flags of Our Fathers.
Clint Eastwood isn’t slowing down anytime soon. His latest film, Flags of Our Fathers, is arguably the most ambitious project yet for the 76-year-old icon. Based on the bestselling book by James Bradley and Ron Powers, Flags tells the story behind perhaps the most famous photograph of World War II: “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.” The legendary picture, taken in the early days of the bloody battle, helped inspire renewed resolve in a war-weary American public. Though the image is firmly imprinted in our consciousness, the story of the six soldiers who raised the flag is not. Eastwood’s film aims to tell that story.
With its sheer scale, Flags of Our Fathers represents a departure of sorts for Eastwood, who has become known for smaller, more intimate films like Million Dollar Baby and Mystic River. A centerpiece of the film is an intense, sprawling battle sequence featuring action on land, sea and air. Though he strove for authenticity, depicting the horrors of warfare wasn’t necessarily the director’s top priority. “I wasn't setting out to do a war movie,” says Eastwood. “I'd been involved with a few as an actor but I liked this because it was just a study of these people.”
“It was the biggest Marine Corps invasion in history – the most fierce battle in marine corps history,” Eastwood adds, “but what intrigued me about it was the book itself and the fact that it wasn't really a war story.”
Eastwood instead chose to focus on the men who fought the battle, many of whom were practically babies at the time. “Most of the young men and women who went to war…were skinny kids out of the depression,” says Eastwood. “Most of the kids, the average age was 19 years old. You figured they were probably all born in 1928 or 27 or in the late 20s early 30s, and they were over there, but they all had the spirit. And it was important to tell this story for that reason. It told of a time in our history when there was a lot of spirit.”
Only three soldiers from the famous photograph survived the Battle of Iwo Jima: Rene Gagon, Ira Hayes and John “Doc” Bradley (depicted in the film by Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach and Ryan Phillippe, respectively). When they returned to the States, instant celebrity status was conferred upon them – something they weren’t entirely comfortable with: “Those experiences of being a young man thrown into the ultimate celebrity… they felt very complex about being that, especially when so many of their companions were killed in this ferocious battle,” explains Eastwood.
Sensing a rare opportunity, the Treasury Department chose to capitalize on the soldiers’ newfound fame, sending them out on a public relations campaign of sorts to raise money for war bonds. The soldiers reluctantly obliged, though the fund-raising drive and its aftermath proved torturous. Says Eastwood: “The bond drive was a very strenuous thing for (these) young men — to be sent out and treated like kings and then to have to all of a sudden, the rug's out from under them and they go back to civilian life and there's nowhere to go.”
One surviving flag-raiser who took it particularly hard was Ira Hayes, a Native American who endured harsh racism when he returned home, despite his war hero status. Hayes’s descent into alcoholism comprises one of the film’s more heart-wrenching storylines. “(Ira) found sort of a family in the Marine Corps. He liked it to the point where he wanted to stay there,” says Eastwood. “He didn’t want to come back to the States after combat and do what they’re doing. He had a problem with alcoholism and everywhere they went, they were serving him drinks.”
Recreating the Battle of Iwo Jima was no easy feat, especially since the island is considered a shrine by the Japanese. “Nobody can go there without the Japanese government's approval and the Japanese government feels it's a sacred place because there are still almost 12000 of their men unaccounted for on that island,” explains Eastwood. “We couldn't do the pyrotechnics that we would have to do to actually recreate the invasion, so we went to Iceland.”
To most people, the geography of Iceland doesn’t necessarily evoke thoughts of the South Pacific. “When it was first suggested that we work in Iceland, I couldn’t understand how it would work,” says Eastwood, “but really there's a lot of similarities between Iceland in the summer and Iwo Jima in the winter time…it has tremendous black beaches, black sand beaches, which are very hard to duplicate.”
As a director and storyteller, Eastwood’s style continues to evolve. “I think as I've matured — that's in a sense a way of saying ‘aging’ — I've reached out to different sides of different stories,” says Eastwood. “I started out in movies with a lot of action and that sort of thing, but 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 are closer to me than maybe fantasy characters that I might have been involved with.”
The film’s story explores one of Eastwood’s favorite themes: the deconstruction of the hero myth. “In the era we live in now, everybody’s being considered a hero. In that particular era – the 1940s – heroes were people of extraordinary feats,” says Eastwood. “There are human beings – Americans – who do heroic deeds every day.”
In our modern era of media saturation, so-called “celebrities” are seemingly ubiquitous – a far cry from the 1940s. “Movie actors that were celebrities were a handful, a handful of men and a handful of women that were names,” explains Eastwood. “Now you have to decipher everything because everybody’s a star so you have to have superstars. But people are stars who are just heiresses or something now… They didn’t have that sort of thing then.”
Check out ReelzChannel.com's Flags of Our Fathers page for clips from the film and more!
Flags of Our Fathers opens nationwide on October 18th.