If anyone deserves the credit for turning a bestseller into the film Flags of Our Fathers, a harrowing tale of second world war slaughter in the Pacific, it might go to the unlikely figure of Arnold Schwarzenegger. In Hollywood, as the veteran producer Peter Guber likes to say, the highest art is not that on the celluloid — it lies in the art of the deal. In addition, it was Schwarzenegger who, in his own, inimitable words, “made it happen like them gangbusters”.
As with his previous two films, Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood was having difficulties getting Flags of Our Fathers, his first war movie since the very different Kelly’s Heroes, into first gear. One studio had said that Mystic River, in which a Bostonian community tears itself apart after a teen murder, was too working class; it was nominated for two Oscars. Others told Eastwood, as he wandered Hollywood pitching Million Dollar Baby literally door to door, that nobody went to see boxing pictures; it won him two Oscars.
This time the main obstacle was not the accountants, who were finally trusting the director with a £40m investment (a sixth of the budget of Superman Returns) to make an epic war movie, but one Steven Spielberg. Spielberg had tied up the rights to the bestseller Flags of Our Fathers, the chronicle of a son’s quest for the truth about his father’s war, which he envisaged as Saving Private Ryan II. Certainly, the 5ft 7in Democrat was not about to hand the rights over to a 6ft 4in erstwhile Republican to make a patriotic epic as American teenagers marched off to yet another conflict overseas.
Yet Spielberg’s hand-picked scriptwriter, William Broyles Jr, who had worked on Sam Mendes’s Jarhead, had been thrown off by the Iraqi drumbeat. The script went into a drawer and remained there until the 2004 Governors Ball, when the Governator used his power of office to put Spielberg and Eastwood together, and the true movie magic of the deal took place.
Much to Spielberg’s surprise, observers say, Dirty Harry, the man who had campaigned for Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, did not want to remake John Wayne’s gung-ho Green Berets. They did not talk about Ryan’s opening 20 minutes, a shocking assault still unparalleled in modern cinema, or big guns and bigger men, but about the shame that no veteran could articulate: “survivor guilt”. So Spielberg settled for a producer’s credit, rare on a film he has not micromanaged, trusting Eastwood, as he said later, to get it horribly right.
But the project was still stepping on sacred turf. The battle of Iwo Jima, a bloody struggle for a lump of rock in the Pacific in early 1945, has a unique place in the mythologies of both America and Japan. It was the first time in imperial history that Japanese territory had been invaded, and here, Tokyo dictated, would be the last stand. More than 20,000 Japanese dug themselves into aircraft-proof tunnels and bunkers: the strategy was to die, but at such a cost that the soft Yanks would sue for peace rather than invade the mainland 600 miles north.
The strategy nearly succeeded. More than 2,000 Americans perished in the first day. However, flame-throwers and grenades wore out the enemy, and nearly all died, at a cost of three to one — not the 10-to-one ratio desired by Tokyo. The fate of the Japanese is the subject of a forthcoming Eastwood film, Letters from Iwo Jima, which covers the invasion from the other perspective.
For America, Iwo Jima was brought home in a photograph taken almost by accident: six battle-worn soldiers raising the Stars and Stripes on Japanese soil, against a smoky background. Eastwood decided to tell his story through this single image, and largely through the three soldiers who survived — and often wished they had not; accidental heroes, common men who found themselves in unfathomable horror, he said later.
Realising he wanted a film that would shift between the “action” and its effects on the survivors, especially the three young men caught first in the picture and then in the consequent curse of celebrity (it did none of them any good), he tore up the Spielberg script and called in Paul Haggis, the writer- director of that kaleidoscopic tale of urban conflict, Crash. Dialogue was replaced with images that speak for themselves of terror, turmoil and a lingering sense of grief.
Today, Iwo Jima is a war grave, so Eastwood replicated its black volcanic sands in Iceland. For the veteran director, an anti-Kubrick man who often settles for the first take (or, as he likes to put it, “Right, that’s enough of that shit. Let’s move on to the next set-up”), it was a six-week marathon, even before he turned the cameras on historic Washington and Chicago.
He broke with Hollywood tradition by casting only actors under 26 to play the naive, 19-year-old marines, who cheered when told they would be in the first wave of the invasion. And then he traumatised them: “For scenes where there were explosives, I’d talk about safety, tell them to look after themselves, but we’d never rehearse,” he wrote in Parade magazine. He would say, “Let’s roll”, and then blow them up. “Afterwards, one of them would come up to me and say, ‘I didn’t know a bomb would go off there.’ I’d nod and say, ‘And your look was accordingly shocked.’ I wanted to capture that confusion.”
Eastwood was more interested in the fate of the flag-raisers than in the battle itself. “I didn’t set out to make a war movie. I cared about these three fellows, the headliners on the war-bond circus (who were toured around the America to raise money for the war effort).” The one-time Republican, who voted for the political maverick Ross Perot in the 1990s and now describes himself as a libertarian, said he never intended to make an unpatriotic movie, but that’s how some people will read it. “I guess, if you see both the movies together, they sum up as an anti-war movie. Whether it’s about territory or religion, war is horrifyingly and depressingly archaic.”
Eastwood made his directorial feature debut in 1971 with Play Misty for Me, a thriller shot in less than three weeks. He spent nearly six months shooting Flags of Our Fathers, but he is not getting slower; just more ambitious. Not only is this a period piece, but, for the first time, on the advice of Spielberg, the 76-year-old director is using computer-generated imagery to create the 800-strong flotilla that invaded Iwo Jima. In addition, of course, Eastwood composed all the incidental music.
There are nigglers who say Flags is not as loud or exciting as Ryan, missing the point that it is more about the process of mythology than bullets and bombs.
Others find the palette — grey and olive, bursting into red only with viscera (a touch of Schindler’s List) — oppressive. It’s authentic February grimness in the Pacific.
Then there is the politics. Some say there were more black faces at Iwo Jima than Eastwood could find among the Nordic extras. And right-wingers feel that the Man with No Name is now the Man with the Bleeding Heart for displaying how one of the flag-raisers, a Pima Indian called Ira Hayes, was eaten alive by racism. (Nobody complained when Tony Curtis, a nice Jewish boy from the Bronx, played the Arizonan Native American in a 1961 movie called The Outsider. And in 1964, when Johnny Cash recorded a song about the unhappy soldier, The Ballad of Ira Hayes, the song flew up the country charts.) Flags of Our Fathers opened to soft box-office returns in the United States last week, but so did Mystic River in its first week. At one screening in California, I saw veterans weeping quietly, comforted by their wives. For them, this is much more than a movie. This is catharsis. Or maybe, although Eastwood would never say it, it’s a form of art even more important than the deal.
Flags of Our Fathers opens on Dec 22
