by Marc Eliot
Clint first came upon the project while he was in production on Million Dollar Baby:
I ran into Steven [Spielberg] at a function, and he said, “Why don’t you come over [to DreamWorks] and do something for me, you direct and you and I will produce it.” I said okay, I was geared up and ready, he had a few scripts [adapted versions of the book], but he hadn’t found anything he really liked. At the time I was working with Paul Haggis, on Million Dollar Baby, so I said, “Let me talk to Paul about it.” He read the material, we had a few meetings, and he sat down and wrote a script.
Haggis’s (and William Broyles Jr.’s) major cinematic leap was to tell the story in flashback, to keep the story pulsating and maintain a contemporary feel.
With Spielberg in place as one of the producers, Clint and Malpaso were able to bring Warner into the project. Filming began shortly after Million Dollar Baby was completed. In typical Clint fashion, the cast lacked a superstar—the biggest “name” in the film was Ryan Phillippe.
Then midway through production, as if to underscore the difference between himself and Spielberg, Clint made a decision to do something no one had ever done before.
I started wondering, what about the other [Japanese] guys: What was going on in their minds? What were their lives like? I mean, it was pretty miserable for the Americans on that island—can you imagine what it was like for the other guy, who didn’t have the same equipment, the same access to food and water—there was no water on Iwo Jima, the only water you get is from rain—so they were trapped out there, living on weeds and plants, worms, anything they could find. So they were an interesting group of people. Now that decades had gone by, I thought it was important for the Japanese public to appreciate those men, even though it’s not about winning or losing, who won or who lost. It’s about the sacrifices they made for their country, rightly or wrongly—they made them.*
Thus was born the notion of making a simultaneous, or parallel, film, the same story seen from the other side, to be called Letters from Iwo Jima. Ken Watanabe would play the lead—he was a bigger international star than anyone in Flags of Our Fathers. Clint received permission from the Japanese government to shoot some scenes on Iwo Jima. (The property had been returned to them in the early 1960s.) But for economy and accessibility to mountains and underground tunnels, the bulk of both films was shot simultaneously on a volcanic island in Iceland, and they were released within weeks of each other.
After the war ended, it had taken decades for Japanese cinema to get art-house distribution in America because of the hard feelings left behind by Pearl Harbor. Marlon Brando (of all people) had been the first to attempt a sympathetic portrayal of the Japanese, during the postwar occupation at least, in Joshua Logan’s Academy Award-winning Sayonara (1957). It was a daunting challenge to try to make Americans believe that the Japanese were human beings, let alone a cultured civilization capable of love, warmth, and dignity. Logan’s and Brando’s Academy Award-winning film opened the door to Japanese cinema’s acceptance in the United States. But forty years later the industry still felt it was unlikely that any sizable audiences would go see Letters from Iwo Jima. Characteristically, even if Clint was aware of the whispers, he proceeded as planned.
“Between the two films together, I was trying to make an anti-war statement,” he said. “It’s hard to make any war picture and make it a pro-war statement.” Strong and perhaps surprising sentiments, ndeed, from someone whose credentials were strewn with films of flagrant violence, messy bloodshed, and the twitchy pleasures of psychotic murderers, and especially along with the likes of Spielberg, whose vicarious-thrill movies were usually filled with fantasies of glory rather than realistic gore.
Flags of Our Fathers was released on October 20, 2006, amid high hopes it would be the big fall movie. Two months later, on December 20, Letters from Iwo Jima was put into limited distribution in the States, after having its world premiere and initial, highly successful run in Japan. Three weeks later, on January 12, 2007, it went into major nationwide distribution.
Shortly before Flags was released, Clint went on what was for him a PR spree, agreeing to sit for an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, whose resident film critic had, through the years, been up and down about him. But this time Peter Travers was unequivocal in his praise for Clint’s decidedly nonconservative, non-flag-waving view of heroism and its inevitable fallout. He gave the film three and a half stars (out of four):
The ambitious script … jumps back and forth in ways that could have been a jumble if Eastwood wasn’t so adept at cutting a path to what counts. Eastwood’s film is a fierce attack on wartime hypocrisy and profiteering, and also an indelibly moving salute to the soldiers who don’t deserve to walk alone for following their own sense of duty … one thing is for sure, Eastwood will do it his way. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the gold standard.
Richard Roeper, one of the sharper new multimedia critics, wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times that Flags of Our Fathers “stands with the Oscar-winning Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby as an American masterpiece … but it is also patriotic because it questions the official version of the truth, and reminds us that superheroes exist only in comic books and cartoon movies.”
Most of the major critics got it, and said that both films were among the best and most important movies in Clint’s body of work—but neither clicked with audiences. Flags of Our Fathers earned about $66 million, less than half of Million Dollar Baby, against $55 million in production costs. Using the standard formula that a film has to gross twice what it cost to break even, the film wound up losing a significant amount of money. Letters from Iwo Jima did even worse and exposed the huge miscalculation in Clint’s overview; during one of the most vicious post–World War II wars in modern American history, audiences in this country simply weren’t interested in a sympathetic view of the enemy—any enemy.
The films had their social critics, one of the most outspoken being Spike Lee, the African-American filmmaker, who had strong objections to Clint’s take on the events of Iwo Jima. At the May 2008 Cannes Film Festival Lee was promoting his own World War II film, Miracle at St. Anna, about the exploits of the all-Black 92nd Buffalo Division, which fought the German army in Italy during the war. There Lee publicly criticized Clint and Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima for not having “a single African-American character or actor. There were many African-Americans who survived that war and who were upset at Clint for not having one [in his two films]. That was his version: The negro soldier did not exist. I have a different version.”
In response, Eastwood, who suspected Lee was trying to promote his films by criticizing Clint’s, angrily told the Guardian:
As for Flags of Our Fathers, he [Lee] says 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. 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.
Lee returned fire.
First of all, the man is not my father and we’re not on a plantation either. 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. If he wishes, I could assemble African-American men who fought at Iwo Jima and I’d like him to tell these guys that what they did was insignificant and they did not exist. He said, “I’m not making this up. I know history. I’m a student of history.” And I know the history of Hollywood and its omission of the one million African-American men and women who contributed to World War II. Not everything was John Wayne, baby �
�� 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. For him to insinuate that I’m rewriting history and have one of the four guys with the flag be black … no one said that. It’s just that there’s not one black in either film. And because I know my history, that’s why I made that observation.*
After Clint publicly warned Lee to “shut his face,” it was Steven Spielberg who finally got both sides to calm down, convincing Spike Lee to back off. “After game three, L.A. Staples Center, Lakers [vs.] Celtics, I’m going to the bathroom and Spielberg’s sitting there with Eddie Murphy and Jeffrey Katzenberg,” said Spike Lee. “And Katzenberg was getting on me about leaving Clint alone. I said, ‘Steven, let me talk to you for a second.’ So we talked. I conveyed a message and he said, ‘I’ll call Clint in the morning.’ And it’s hunky-dory. He said he was gonna make a call, he made it, squashed.” A couple of months later, Lee even sent his new film over to Clint for a private viewing
Despite Lee’s accusations (or possibly because of them—Lee and his films are not exactly laden with Oscars or nominations), the Academy found Clint’s films good enough to nominate, even if its perception of Flags of Our Fathers was, inexplicably, one of über-patriotism rather than a profoundly vivid criticism of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq.
On Sunday night, February 25, 2007, the seventy-ninth annual Academy Awards were held once again at Hollywood’s Kodak Theater. This time television talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres hosted, in an attempt by the Academy to give a more modern look to its annual ritual of self-congratulation and to improve its ratings—the Oscars were a TV show, after all, and more often than not hosts were taken from that pool of talent rather than from the world of film.
There was a different feel in the air this year; for one thing, the Academy had moved up the presentation by nearly a month from the previous year to prevent declining ratings for the telecast. Awards programs were becoming a TV genre all their own, between the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the People’s Choice Awards, and at least a half-dozen others related to film (and another dozen for music, TV, and theater), so the giving of the golden statuette was somewhat anticlimactic. And, by February, it was felt, a healthy number of the new year’s films, were, at least theoretically, in theaters, making it increasingly difficult to look back at what was essentially old news.
This year’s awards featured a rematch: Scorsese was back with The Departed, his sharp, return-to-form street-cred policier, a remake of Wai-keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak’s Hong Kong original Infernal Affairs (2002); Clint was back as well with a Best Director nomination, but not for Flags of Our Fathers—it was, shockingly, for Letters from Iwo Jima.*
Scorsese’s nomination was easy to understand, in light of his strong film, and that begins to explain why Letters was nominated over Flags. Clint had once been an Academy outcast, but ever since his explosive leap to prominence in the ranks of the Academy with Unforgiven, his public and industry images had melded into each other, and according to Variety editor Peter Bart, he had become Hollywood’s elder statesman; meanwhile Scorsese continued to be the industry’s aging and defiantly independent “bad boy.” Like a film-without-a-film, the Oscar presentations were moral stories as well as economic victories and almost always followed the standard rules that the villain rarely gets the girl, or in this case, the Oscar. This year, however, the feeling ran heavily throughout the industry that Scorsese had made the better film (better than Flags of Our Fathers). While television had taken over the crime genre as its own never-ending source of good triumphing over evil, Scorsese’s movie transcended the usual laboratory-and-clues mundanity to spill over with the dynamics of the human moral condition. Clint, meanwhile, had made just another war movie. As good as it was—and few conservative Academy members thought it was all that good—in a nod of respect to Clint, they nominated his other movie, which nobody saw, thus ensuring that at least this time around, Scorsese could win. The other films in the Best Picture contest, all considered long shots by the pollsters and the pundits alike, were Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s Little Miss Sunshine, and Stephen Frears’s The Queen.
Three of the most powerful directors in Hollywood, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas, assembled onstage to announce the winner of the award for Best Director. Coppola and Lucas had been part of the seminal 1970s San Francisco film movement that had helped to change the perception of American film from studio domination and toward larger independent films. The three titans gathered around the mike and did some obligatory and predictably goofy patented Academy Award blather (“It’s better to give than to receive … no it’s not!”) and interminably back-patted themselves. Then they finally got around to reading the names of the Best Director nominees. When Coppola read Scorsese’s name aloud, the audience burst into enthusiastic applause, at least twice as loud as they would for anyone else. When Coppola read Clint’s name, the audience applauded dutifully. Ruiz, looking resplendent in a ruby-red dress with earrings hanging from her ears like giant shiny stalactites, smiled at her husband lovingly as she enthusiastically clapped. Clint, lips twitching as he chewed either gum or his lip, never broke his stare, aimed intently and directly at the stage.
Now it was Spielberg’s turn to open the envelope. The tension in the room was negligible. “And the Oscar goes to … Martin Scorsese!” Scorsese threw his hands up in mock disbelief, like someone at a surprise party who was tipped off in advance, and then bolted toward the stage and his rendezvous with Oscar glory. Clint joined the standing ovation, his face frozen in a runner-up smile.
The Departed won four of the five Oscars it was nominated for that night, including Best Picture, losing only Best Supporting Actor (Mark Wahlberg). When the final award was handed out (to Graham King as producer), the long evening came to an end, as did Clint’s latest, and perhaps last, chance to enter the pantheon of Best Actor Oscar winners. As the celebrity crowd left the building on their way to the various parties, with handshakes of congratulations flying through the crowd like a flock of birds madly flapping their wings, Clint and Ruiz quietly slipped away, unnoticed and unbothered, and headed home.
The next morning, back in Carmel, after breakfast and on the way to the golf course, Clint began formulating his next film.
Two more years would pass before another Clint Eastwood movie appeared. He was fast approaching eighty, and at last and inevitably, time seemed to be slowing his crank-’em-out pace. Increasingly, he spent his days on the golf course and looking after his business interests until, finally, he found two projects he wanted to do, one as director, and one more to act in—a last-chance effort to win that elusive Best Actor award.
The next one he chose to direct was Changeling.* It was to be a joint venture between Imagine Entertainment, Universal, and Malpaso, making it the first film in fifteen years that a Clint project had no participation from Warner. In the aftermath of his double crash-and-burn Iwo Jima set, all sides had apparently agreed on a pause, if not a clean break, in the long-standing partnership.
The story of Changeling involves a woman who single-handedly takes on the corrupt L.A. police department over what she believes has been the kidnapping of her child by the authorities themselves. Stories of men (or women) alone who take on the system always appealed to Clint, and this one had some fresh angles he liked, not the least of which was that the hero happened to be a woman. He had had great fortune with a emale lead in Million Dollar Baby and was eager to revisit that setup.
Based on a true story, the film originated in the 1970s, in a telephone tip that had come to TV scriptwriter and former journalist J. Michael Straczynski. Someone had informed him that officials were about to dispose of several potentially incriminating documents concerning a city council welfare hearing involving Christine Collins and her son’s disappearance. Intrigued, Straczynski did some research and wrote a screenplay base
d on what he had found. The Strange Case of Christine Collins was optioned several times but never got made. Twenty years later, in 1996, after a long and successful run in TV, Straczynski took another shot at the story. He wrote a new script in only about two weeks and got it to producer Ron Howard, who read it, liked it, optioned it through his Imagine Entertainment production, and fast-tracked it, intending to produce and direct it in 2007, immediately following the release of his The Da Vinci Code. But Howard opted instead to direct Frost/Nixon, then the prequel to The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, so he and his partner, Brian Grazer, pitched Changeling to Clint in February 2007. He agreed to direct it, citing the script’s focus on its heroine, Collins, rather than the “Freddy Krueger” story of the crimes as the reason why.
