June 8, 2008

Eastwood puts Lee in his place

"I'm not going to make Nelson Mandela a white guy"

Clint Eastwood said Spike Lee should "shut his face" after Lee's claimed that there are not enough black actors in his films. Lee must have forgot about Bird.

"When I do a picture and it's 90% black, like Bird, I use 90% black people," said Eastwood, referring to his 1998 film about jazz musician Charlie "Bird" Parker.

Speaking to the Guardian newspaper, Eastwood said his 2006 film Flags of Our Fathers was historically accurate.

The Oscar winner insisted that black troops were not involved in raising the flag at Iwo Jima.

"If I go ahead and put an African American actor in there, they'd say 'this guy's lost his mind,'" he said.

At this year's Cannes Film Festival, film-maker Lee challenged reporters to ask Eastwood why there were no black actors in either of his films about the Battle of Iwo Jima. "That was his version. The Negro version did not exist," said Lee.

Eastwood said that there was a small detachment of black troops in the World War II battle, but they were part of a munitions company.

"The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn't do that," he told the Guardian. "It's not accurate."

Eastwood added that he would not compromise the facts with future projects.

"I'm not in that game. I'm playing it the way I read it historically, and that's the way it is," he said.

His next project, The Human Factor, will look at post-apartheid South Africa: "I'm not going to make Nelson Mandela a white guy," he joked.