Publicizing the new box set of Dirty Harry DVDs, Clint Eastwood took the opportunity to respond to Spike Lee’s comments from the Cannes Film Festival. As you’ll recall, Lee took issue with Eastwood’s two-part World War II film, specifically the paucity of black faces in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. “Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total and there was not one Negro actor on the screen," Lee told reporters. "If you reporters had any balls you'd ask him why. There's no way I know why he did that -- that was his vision, not mine. But I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It's not like he didn't know.”
This isn’t the first time Lee has gotten all up in Eastwood’s grill. “"He was complaining when I did Bird [the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker],” Eastwood tells The Guardian. “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.”
Eastwood realizes there was a “small detachment” of Negro soldiers on Iwa Jima, but in his words, “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 sums up the Miracle at St. Anna director succinctly: “A guy like him should shut his face.”
With that out of the way, Eastwood is free to talk Dirty Harry, and to clear up those rumors that he’s taking the character out for one more spin in the upcoming Gran Torino. “Some idiot came up with some theory…Not at my age,” he stresses. “There are certain age limits on police officers. They'd have retired me out at 65.”
Related:
Spike Lee Blasts Clint Eastwood, Coen Brothers
Under the Hood of Eastwood's "Gran Torino"