Clint is a registered Republican:Eastwood explores why we fight in 'Flags of Our Fathers'
BY JOHN CLARK
Clint Eastwood has been talking all day about his new film, "Flags of Our Fathers," and he's running about two hours late. When it's suggested that he should have been in charge of his schedule rather than the publicists - after all, he's known as one of Hollywood's most efficient directors - the Oscar-winning icon says that wouldn't have worked; he doesn't know anything about riding herd on a bunch of journalists.
"A man's got to know his limitations," Eastwood says, echoing his most famous character, Dirty Harry, in that instantly recognizable whispery voice.
In "Flags," Eastwood explores the visceral nature of heroism as played out on Iwo Jima, a strategically situated western Pacific island controlled by the Japanese that was attacked by American forces in February 1945. The battle lasted a month; of the 22,000 Japanese dug into the island, 21,000 were killed, as were approximately 6,800 American soldiers.
The Allied victory was memorialized by a famous photo of six servicemen raising the flag on Mount Suribachi, the highest point on the island. What happened to these men, both on the battlefield and after, is what interested Eastwood. Three of them were killed in the days following the flag raising. The three survivors - John Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) - were sent back to the States, where government ad-crats trotted them around the country as heroes to get the public to buy war bonds. They were celebrated in baseball stadiums and in Times Square. They met President Truman.
"Even though they'd been through an overwhelming event, the largest battle in Marine Corps history, this was a total other onslaught of the senses," Eastwood says.
In fact, they felt undeserving of the hero treatment and guilty that they were there and their buddies were not. The toxic effects of celebrity is something Eastwood - a star now for 40 years, since he moved from TV's "Rawhide" to spaghetti Westerns like "A Fistful of Dollars" (1964) and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" (1966) - knows something about, and it's one of the things that attracted him to this story.
He also wanted to pay his respects to the sacrifices made by the so-called "Greatest Generation." And finally, he says he found the film's structure appealing: It's told through a series of interviews of Iwo Jima survivors by the son of one of the flag-raisers. (The film was adapted by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis from James Bradley and Ron Powers' nonfiction book.)
It is, Eastwood says, about "a son trying to understand where his father had been, what he had done during the war, that he had won the Navy Cross, why he didn't talk about it. And then the son unraveling the story."
The actor has been asked repeatedly whether "Flags" has anything to say about the Iraq war. He insists that he didn't have Iraq in mind when he made it and that whatever parallels there are is true of all wars - how messy and terrifying they are. Eastwood is a registered Republican and former mayor of Carmel, Calif. |
