Dirty Harry comes clean
Friday June 6, 2008
http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview...283921,00.html
'A guy like him should shut his face' - Clint Eastwood on Spike Lee. Photograph: Nicolas Guerin/Corbis
Clint Eastwood folds his gangly frame behind a clifftop table at the Hotel Du Cap, a few miles up the coast from Cannes, sighs deeply, and squints out over the Mediterranean. "Has he ever studied the history?" he asks, in that familiar near-whisper.
The "he" is Spike Lee, and the reason Eastwood is asking is because of something Lee had said about Eastwood's Iwo Jima movie Flags of Our Fathers, while promoting his own war movie, Miracle at St Anna, about a black US unit in the second world war. Lee had noted the lack of African-Americans in Eastwood's movie and told reporters: "That was his version. The negro version did not exist."
Eastwood has no time for Lee's gripes. "He was complaining when I did Bird [the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker]. 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." As for Flags of Our Fathers, he says, yes, there was a small detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima 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 shouldn't be demanding African-Americans in Eastwood's next picture, either. Changeling is set in Los Angeles during the Depression, before the city's make-up was changed by the large black influx. "What are you going to do, you gonna tell a fu*kin' story about that?" he growls. "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 picture and it's 90% black, like Bird, I use 90% black people."
Eastwood pauses, deliberately - once it would have provided him with the beat in which to spit out his cheroot before flinging back his poncho - and offers a last word of advice to the most influential black director in American movies. "A guy like him should shut his face."
Eastwood knows how to handle controversy. Four years ago, his boxing flick Million Dollar Baby, which garnered him best picture and best director Oscars (giving him five in total, including two for Unforgiven and a premature lifetime achievement gong back in 1995), was attacked by Christian groups. They had objected to the plot's "assisted suicide" of a paralysed athlete. "People who hadn't even seen the movie were saying that it's pro-euthanasia, but it wasn't," Eastwood says. "If you had asked Frankie [his character in the film], 'Do you believe in euthanasia?', he'd have probably said no. But that was the circumstances of the moment. Highly dramatic circumstances."
follow link above for the rest of the story
Friday June 6, 2008
http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview...283921,00.html

'A guy like him should shut his face' - Clint Eastwood on Spike Lee. Photograph: Nicolas Guerin/Corbis
Clint Eastwood folds his gangly frame behind a clifftop table at the Hotel Du Cap, a few miles up the coast from Cannes, sighs deeply, and squints out over the Mediterranean. "Has he ever studied the history?" he asks, in that familiar near-whisper.
The "he" is Spike Lee, and the reason Eastwood is asking is because of something Lee had said about Eastwood's Iwo Jima movie Flags of Our Fathers, while promoting his own war movie, Miracle at St Anna, about a black US unit in the second world war. Lee had noted the lack of African-Americans in Eastwood's movie and told reporters: "That was his version. The negro version did not exist."
Eastwood has no time for Lee's gripes. "He was complaining when I did Bird [the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker]. 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." As for Flags of Our Fathers, he says, yes, there was a small detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima 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 shouldn't be demanding African-Americans in Eastwood's next picture, either. Changeling is set in Los Angeles during the Depression, before the city's make-up was changed by the large black influx. "What are you going to do, you gonna tell a fu*kin' story about that?" he growls. "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 picture and it's 90% black, like Bird, I use 90% black people."
Eastwood pauses, deliberately - once it would have provided him with the beat in which to spit out his cheroot before flinging back his poncho - and offers a last word of advice to the most influential black director in American movies. "A guy like him should shut his face."
Eastwood knows how to handle controversy. Four years ago, his boxing flick Million Dollar Baby, which garnered him best picture and best director Oscars (giving him five in total, including two for Unforgiven and a premature lifetime achievement gong back in 1995), was attacked by Christian groups. They had objected to the plot's "assisted suicide" of a paralysed athlete. "People who hadn't even seen the movie were saying that it's pro-euthanasia, but it wasn't," Eastwood says. "If you had asked Frankie [his character in the film], 'Do you believe in euthanasia?', he'd have probably said no. But that was the circumstances of the moment. Highly dramatic circumstances."
follow link above for the rest of the story