Flags of Our Fathers Poster
Interview: Clint Eastwood
“There's never been a story on Iwo Jima, even though there have been pictures that have been entitled using it in the title,” said Eastwoood. “But the actual invasion, it was the biggest marine corps invasion in history, the most fierce battle in marine corps history, but what intrigued me about it was the book itself and the fact that it wasn't really a war story.”
The book focuses on James Bradley’s relationship with his father, John Bradley, and trying to find out about his experiences in World War II. So the film also takes the approach of showing how the battle informed the troops return home selling war bonds, and old age.
“I wasn't setting out to do a war movie. I'd been involved with a few as an actor, but I liked this because it was just a study of these people, and I've always been curious about families who find out things about their relatives much after the fact. The kind of people that have talked to me about this campaign and many other campaigns, and the ones who seemed to be the most in the front lines and have been through the most seem to be the ones who have been the quietest about their activity.”
It wouldn’t be much of a mystery if every marine laid it all out in easy to read memoirs. “It's a sure thing that if you hear somebody being very braggadocio about all their experiences in combat, sure thing that he was probably a clerk typist somewhere in the rear echelon. But there seems to be a commonality with these kind of people like John Bradley was, that they came back and it was a time in history when you didn't have a lot of psychiatric evaluation and coddling. When they came back they were just told to go home and get over it. If they didn't have wives or loved ones to help them, they had to adjust on their own, or else they didn't adjust on their own. So it's just those experiences of being a young man thrown into the ultimate celebrity.”
The famous photo of the marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima turned the actual marines into media spectacles upon their return. “The picture I hope makes a comment on celebrity, of being treated like a president, maybe not always a president, but being treated like a celebrity, and they didn't feel that. They felt very complex about being that, especially when so many of their companions were killed in this ferocious battle. And the famous photograph, the Joe Rosenthal photograph, was taken four or five days into the battle. It was not even a fourth of the way there yet, but it signified a unity that I've always been curious about. So that's it.”
Flags for Our Fathers opens to theatres today.
For the trailers, stills, more interviews and additional movie info, go to
the Flags
of Our Fathers Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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