Clint Eastwood returns fire

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‘A guy like him should shut his face.’

You could almost feel his old 357 Magnum smoking as Clint Eastwood finally responded to Spike Lee’s sniping about the lack of African American soldiers in Eastwood’s recent World War II films, ‘Flags of Our Fathers’ and ‘Letters From Iwo Jima.’ Complaining that Eastwood had made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for four hours without one ‘Negro’ actor on screen, Lee told journalists at the Cannes Film Festival that ‘if you reporters had any balls you’d ask him why. I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It’s not like he didn’t know.’

In an interview published today by the Guardian, Eastwood justified his cinematic judgment call with a withering dismissal of Lee’s charges.

Eastwood insisted the black troops on Iwo Jima were not part of the company that raised the flag. ‘The story is ‘Flags of our Fathers,’ the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn’t do that,’ the filmmaker said. ‘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 added, of Lee: ‘A guy like him should shut his face.’

Warming up to the topic, Eastwood made reference to his upcoming film, ‘Changeling,’ which he says is set in an era where there were few blacks in Los Angeles. ‘What are you going to do ... make it look like a commercial for an equal opportunity player? I’m not in that game. When I do a movie and it’s 90% black, like ‘Bird,’ then I use 90% black people.’

One of Eastwood’s upcoming projects focuses on Nelson Mandela’s efforts to bring national unity to post-apartheid South Africa. Asked about how historically accurate it would be, he responded: ‘I’m not going to make Nelson Mandela a white guy.’