Letters from Iwo Jima
Interview: Clint Eastwood on Letters from Iwo Jima
"Part way into the research for the book and how to do it, I started getting interested in Lt. General Kuribayashi," said Eastwood. "I was kind of wondering what kind of person he was to defend this island in a ferocious way but also in a very clever way by tunneling the island and putting everything underground, doing it differently than most of the Japanese defenses were at that time. Most of them were beachhead defenses and using a lot of artillery from the sea. You couldn’t do that effectively with this particular battle."
The concept of showcasing the letters Japanese soldiers sent back home came from the key research material Eastwood found. "I sent to Japan and got a book about General Kuribayashi. It was a book of letters, and the letters were to his wife, his daughter and his son, and a lot of them were mailed from the U.S. when he was here as an envoy in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s. He was a very sensitive man, very family-oriented, missing his family very much. In those you got a feeling for what he was like. Later on, we found out some stories, some fact and some up to a point, and then the island gets lost, because there were no survivors that we could find that knew exactly what happened at the end."
Ken Watanabe plays Kuribayashi in the film, representing the conflict between the old school of suicide mission armies and the sheer futility of that philosophy. "General Kuribayashi was a unique guy. He liked America, he thought it was a mistake to go to war with America. He thought America was too big an industrial complex, from a practical point of view. He had a lot of resistance among his own troops about his defense of the island. A lot of his fellow officers thought he was crazy doing this whole tunneling thing. But he turns out to be an interesting person. And in our research, we found out there were many other interesting people that were there, and the young Japanese conscriptees that were on the island were very much like the Americans. They didn’t necessarily want to be in the war. They were sent there being told, 'Don’t plan on coming back,' something you could not tell an American with a straight face. That would be a tough sell. Most people go into combat thinking, 'Yes, it could be dangerous and I could get killed, but I could also make it back and go back to normal.'"
Perhaps Eastwood's film can be a learning experience for today's youth, who does not have much exposure to this aspect of their past. "After the war, Japanese history was left very still. There wasn’t much talk about the war. It’s not taught in schools. None of the actors in Letters from Iwo Jima knew anything about the battle of Iwo Jima, these Japanese fellows that came over. They were very curious about it. The current generation doesn’t know very much about that. I thought it was important to tell that history not only for Japan because these are people that gave up a lot for their country and made the ultimate sacrifice in most cases. I think it’s important internationally because I think it’s important to realize that war is a futile exercise at best. People are trying to kill one another who under other circumstances could be extremely friendly. So it doesn’t speak well for mankind that we keep having wars. But we’ve had them since the beginning of mankind. I don’t have the answer but I try to tell what little knowledge I have."
Letters from Iwo Jima is now playing in limited release.
For the trailers, stills, posters, review and more movie info, go to the Letters from Iwo Jima Movie Page.
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