HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Spike Lee should have known better than to mess with "Dirty Harry."
Clint Eastwood has fired back after Lee recently lashed out against the Hollywood legend for overlooking black soldiers in his two latest films, "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima," which were both released in 2006.
"Has he ever studied the history?" the 78-year-old Eastwood asked in an interview Friday with The Guardian.
With regards to "Flags of Our Fathers," Eastwood says, yes, there was a small detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima, "but they didn't raise the flag. The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn't do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people'd go, 'This guy's lost his mind.' I mean, it's not accurate."
Eastwood was responding to remarks Lee recently made while the two Hollywood heavyweights were attending the Cannes Film Festival.
"He did two films about Iwo Jima back to back and there was not one black soldier in both of those films," an irate Lee, 51, told reporters at the festival.
"Many veterans, African-Americans, who survived that war are upset at Clint Eastwood. In his vision of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist. Simple as that. I have a different version," Lee said.
Eastwood says this isn't the first time the "Do the Right Thing" filmmaker has taken aim at him.
"He was complaining when I did Bird [the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker]," Eastwood told the Guardian. "Why would a white guy be doing that? I was the only guy who made it, that's why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead he was making something else."
Lee's next film, "Miracle at St. Anna," is a movie about an all-black group of U.S. soldiers fighting in Italy during World War II. It is due in theaters in the fall.
Eastwood, meanwhile, is due to release, "Changeling," which stars Angelina Jolie and is set in Los Angeles during the Depression era, prior to the city's cultural make-up changing with a large influx of African-Americans moving there.
"What are you going to do, you gonna tell a f***in' story about that?" he barked. "Make it look like a commercial for an equal opportunity player? I'm not in that game. I'm playing it the way I read it historically, and that's the way it is. When I do a picture and it's 90% black, like Bird, I use 90% black people."
As for what advice he has for Lee, Eastwood said, "A guy like him should shut his face."
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