Clint Eastwood Versus Spike Lee
Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood aren’t really feeling each other right now. Following an interview Friday (June 6) where East told Lee to “shut his face” and stop criticizing him about not including African-Americans in his 2006 Iwo Jima movies, “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters From Iwo Jima,” Lee has responded calling the “Dirty Harry” actor “an angry old man” and saying that “we’re not on a plantation.”
Lee told ABCNews “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,” Lee continued. “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.”
Eastwood says that Lee needs to learn his history, explaining that there were only a small group of black troops on Iwo Jima, but his film wasn’t based around them.
“[The black troops] didn’t raise the flag,” Eastwood explained. “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.”
