QUESTION:
After having made Flags of Our Fathers, at what point did
you decide that you had to do a second movie from the Japanese
point of view?
CLINT EASTWOOD: Early in the game.
As I was doing most of the research on this particular
picture, I got curious about the fact that it was a unique
defense, that in most of the defense of the Japanese islands,
the Japanese would build beach fortifications, and they'd
just hold off as long as they could. Then sometimes they'd
do kind of a banzai holdout charge, and then it was all
over. This defense was obviously thought up by somebody
who was very creative, with a little more of a modern mentality.
And he decided to take advantage of this island; they didn’t have any places to hide
or anything, so he would dig within the island. And he dug
miles of tunnels that wove in and out, and interconnected
with bunkers. They built their hospitals underground; they
lived underground. So, they took an immense amount of bombs
and naval shelling. It still didn’t put them out of
action. I thought he must be an interesting guy. So, I called
a friend of mine in Japan, and I asked him if there were
any books on this Lieutenant General Kuribayashi. And he
said, ‘Yes.’ There was a book of letters that
he had written home to his daughter, son and his wife, and
most of it was not during the war. Some of it was later letters
during the war, when he was on Iwo, but most of it was dating
back from 1928, when he was an envoy from the Japanese empire
to the United States. He was up at Harvard; he studied some
English at Harvard. And then he went and became an envoy
in Canada for a short time. He bought a car and he traveled
all over the United States. He liked the United States. He
made a lot of friends here. He didn’t believe Japan
should be fighting the United States. He believed, from a
pragmatic point of view, that it was much too big an industrial
complex. But, anyway, here he is. Now he’s stuck on
the island. He’s back, he’s assigned. But you
do what everybody asked because you're military. He is in
command of Iwo Jima. I thought, ‘This is interesting.’
So, I read all the material there.
I asked Paul Haggis if he had a writer or somebody who
we could get at a reasonable price to come up with a story
on it, because I didn’t
have any money left from the other picture. And he found
a writer – a young Japanese girl who was a writer,
and had written several screenplays, none of which had sold,
at that time, anyway. And she came up with this idea of seeing
it through the eyes of a young private who was conscripted
into the army. And then we see the general through him. We
meet the general through the eyes of the private and through
all the characters we meet. And it turns out there were a
lot of fascinating characters on the island. One was an Olympic
champion, an equestrian – Baron Nishi – who turned
out to be a close friend of Douglas Fairbanks, people like
that. When he was here in the ‘30s, he won the Olympics;
he won the equestrian event in 1932. There were a lot of
fascinating people that were there in the same way, just
fate had led them to this island. So, I just wanted to know
about these people. And the more I got into it, the more
interested I got. So, anyway, she came up with a good storyline.
I said, ‘Write that up; it sounds terrific.’ And
then I went off to Iceland to do Flags.
We started that picture and kept moving
on. They sent me up a draft of it and I liked it. I thought
it was very good. In fact, I was very pleased. I was in
the catbird seat. I was doing a script that I liked, and
I had another good script that I liked right here, too,
on the other side of it, and I thought, ‘How interesting.’ But I thought, ‘I’ll
get to this other one later.’ So I put it away. And
when I came back here and I finished shooting here, I went
into the editing process. Of course, by then you’ve
dismissed the crew, so you don't have that running. We were
down to just a few people, and then I just started thinking
about it. I started seeing if there was another director
I could get to do it. Maybe I’d just mentor somebody
else, find a Japanese director somewhere. Well, I did, and
then, ironically enough, he talked me out of it. He says, ‘Why
don't you do it?’ And I said, ‘Well, I'm not
a kid.’ And finally I said, ‘Fine.’ I thought
about it. I said, ‘Yeah, okay, I’ll do that.’ I
think my wife said the same thing. She said, ‘You do
it. You started with the idea, you might as well just continue
on through.’ So, I did it, and I got Ken Watanabe,
and some very, very fine Japanese actors to come and be in
it. It’s another movie. I think it’s equally
as good, but in a different way. Same campaign, but they
don't look alike.
QUESTION: In terms of the war sequences, how did you find
a new way to show something that has been shown so many times
already?
CLINT EASTWOOD: I don't know. I just
didn’t look at
any war movies. I didn’t go back and revisit all the
ones I’d seen in life. And some of them I thought were
quite good. I just saw documentaries. I went through a lot
of documentaries on the South Pacific war, and then a lot
of them on Iwo. There aren’t a lot of them, but there
are some of them. There are a couple of them that are pretty
good, considering that when you're doing combat footage,
you can only show the one side. You can’t go back and
shoot a reverse of somebody. So, I saw some pretty good combat
footage. Even a couple of shots were actually cameramen who
perished in the battle. You could see that it was a big impact.
I traveled to Iwo Jima twice. And I just got an image of
it, and just did it that way.
QUESTION: All your movies have a very beautiful vision,
such as the desaturation of colors. Is it something that
you decide very early?
CLINT EASTWOOD: No, just as it goes.
I don't plan everything in advance. I strictly stay with
the absolute necessities, the things the art departments
need for sets. You have to make a lot of decisions about
where you want sets, where you want bunkers, where you
want this and that, and location, where this is going to
be. But by and large, I don't go into it, except necessary
things we’re going to need there.
From then on, it’s all impressionistic after that.
As I get into it, okay, we’ll do scenes, we’ll
come up here, we’ll go over there, here to there, put
this in here, make sure the flag’s in here.
QUESTION: You just trust your instinct.
CLINT EASTWOOD: Just trust your instincts.
There’s
an old staying in golf, you’ve studied the swing many
times, and you practice and practice, but when you stand
over the ball, you just have to trust your swing. And you
trust it. And if you don't trust it, you'll ruin it; your
brain will take over. It’s the same thing here. You
just trust your swing.
QUESTION: You dismiss the notion of being an auteur. Do
you consider making films more about teamwork?
CLINT EASTWOOD: I think the auteur thing comes into maybe
the conceptual part, and maybe the fact that you lay out
the idea. The next part of it, and it is maybe the most important
part, certainly as important as the execution. But I always
thought the execution is teamwork, for sure.
QUESTION: You have worked with the same team for a long
time.
CLINT EASTWOOD: Sure. But no matter
what team it is, you have to bring that team together,
and inspire them to be part of it. And yeah, that’s probably why I worked
with the same team a lot, because I know the degree of inspiration
they can go with, and that the enthusiasm that they will
exhibit is tremendous, and that’s what I want. If people
aren’t enthusiastic about making movies – because
I certainly don't need to be doing it anymore, but I do it
because I really like it – I want to be with people
that do it because they like it. Naturally, they want to
make a living also. But they do it because they really like
doing it. I always felt blessed that I was able to make a
living in a profession that not a lot of people can make
a living at, and I was able to do something I liked, rather
than be in a job that I hated. I guess when I was younger
I did so many jobs that I just was there. I did them and
they had multiple demands or minimal demands on any kind
of talent. It was just a just kind of working life. I thought, ‘Jeez,
it’s tough to spend your life doing something that
you really didn’t like.’ I was lucky there, and
so I just keep doing it. That’s what I do.
QUESTION: Uh, have you seen yourself evolve as a director
in the choices you make or what interest you?
CLINT EASTWOOD: Yeah, I'm not conscious
of it because I don't think of it that way. But I do, yeah.
I'm choosing different things. But I think I'm just naturally
gravitating towards different things. As you mature, different
subject matters. And as you're older, you can’t play as many
parts, or you shouldn’t be playing the parts that you
used to play. But also there’s the opportunity to play
parts that you couldn’t have, like Million Dollar Baby,
I suppose. Frankie would have been not a good role for me
back when I was 35 or 40. But it was great for me at 75,
or 74, whatever age I was when we first started that. And
so that’s it. And directorially, I just did some genre
films when I started. I came back to genre films with Unforgiven.
That sort of wrapped up that genre for me. And I just reached
out for other things.
QUESTION: A lot of your movies, especially this one, are
extremely powerful emotionally, and yet never sentimental
in a funny way. Are you thinking about it, or is it just
the way it comes to you?
CLINT EASTWOOD: Well, the way it comes
to you is: you're thinking about it, but I guess maybe
as you're doing things, it’s subconsciously in your mind. You're saying, ‘Well,
I don't want to make this pseudo sappy, pseudo-emotional.
I want to play the more reserved look at this. Later on,
you come and say, ‘Well, now, accentuate this, accentuate
that.’ It’s just a question of taking all of
the puzzle pieces and placing them in what you consider the
right spot. And you hope that the audience feels you were
right. If the audience feels you were right, then they're
in agreement with the way you were proceeding. And if they
don't in massive amounts, then it means you’ve made
a mistake. (laugh)
QUESTION: You appear from your films
to be an individualist. All your characters in this movie
are individuals before being part of the whole war machine.
Why do you think it’s
so unacceptable today in this society?
CLINT EASTWOOD: I don't know. I don't
know what it is. I've always revered individuality. I always
revered people that I thought had an idea and proceeded
through with it. I guess I've been that way since the day
I called my father and told him I was going to study acting
and maybe try to see if I could do well with that, and
he told me, ‘Don't do
that. You don't want to do that, that’s just dream
stuff. Get a legitimate job and move forward.’ And
if I’d listened to him, I’d have gone, ‘Okay.’ But
I didn’t. And, so, that’s the individual part.
You believe in something. If your gut tells you something,
you kind of go with it.
QUESTION: You're talking about your father, and both Flags
of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima are a lot about
the transmission between father and sons, and about families.
Is that something very personal for you?
CLINT EASTWOOD: Well, it was to me.
When you do a war picture, everybody thinks about people
running around, doing war. But to me, this movie was more
than a war picture. It was about people dedicating their
lives to winning this war, but also the families, and their
sacrifices, and the mothers, and the fathers. And whole
families. And then also people being haunted by some of
their acts, whether justifiable or not, and in the name
of their country fighting a war. But they're haunted enough
where they don't even want to talk about it with their
own families for all these years. There's something about
that that I find interesting. It’s
sort of mysterious, but it’s very interesting.
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