Flags of Our Fathers Poster
Eastwood, Bradford, Pepper Talk Iceland Battles in Flags of Our Fathers
“I felt that most of the films I’ve done I like muted colors, depending on the mood you’re trying to set,” he said. “In this particular film, unlike say, I’ll just compare another one, Mystic River, where I kept everything in sort of the same vein, in this one I felt the various present day, the bond drive time period, the war time period had their own look, so to speak. War is not a glamorous event, although we’ve seen a lot of combat footage shot in color over the years, but it never quite looks like it does when it’s more subdued. I didn’t want to glamorize it with a Wizard of Oz, three-stripe Technicolor glow. I wanted it to be more of what it is. I’m sure people looking back who were there, and if people look back on it, don’t see it in vivid color.”
So it’s up to the actors to share what the battlefield replication in Iceland, and the one day of Iwo Jima photography, actually looked like. “More like what it’s really like to be standing outside on the beach,” said Jesse Bradford. “More like just real. Iceland is interesting. The beaches are black sand. That wasn’t a trick. A lot of overcast days. A lot of weird, windy, rainy kind of weather but then sometimes it would just be crystal clear and blue skies and you could see for 1000 miles out to sea and everything. You’re getting a modified version of what it was really like.”
The imagery hit Barry Pepper a little harder. “Pretty black, pretty bleak,” he said. “Iceland is a volcanic island and it’s like endless tundra, volcanic tundra wasteland. Very much like the arctic so the beaches are black and you fly in and you land and you’re just depressed instantly. You know you’re going to be there for two months and you just look 360 degrees on the horizon is just endless, bleak volcanic tundra. All the pictures and research that we’d done on Iwo Jima, we felt like we had found the best place on earth to film it.”
At least there were some explosions to liven things up. “We had earplugs sometimes,” said Bradford. “If you’re going to be firing a rifle right up next to your head, they usually advised us to wear earplugs. The mortar explosions, not very loud. Sounds more like popping a paper bag. It doesn’t have any boom to it. They also shot off some kind of big artillery gun thing, woo, that was loud. Man, that was loud. We were all there waiting for it too. We all lined up and said, ‘Oh, they’re going to shoot the thing soon’ but it was worth it, man. you get a bunch of actors together, young male actors, and give ‘em guns and bombs, and it’s kind of fun.”
Flags for Our Fathers opens this Friday, October 20th.
For the trailers, stills and more movie info, go to the Flags of Our Fathers Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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