Clint Eastwood to Spike Lee: “Shut Your Face!”

Clint Eastwood told Spike Lee to enjoy a nice warm cup of shut the f*ck up after Lee pointed out that he had not included a single Afro-American soldier in his movies [Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima] about WWII.

Of course Lee brought it up during a press conference promoting his own war movie, which, I’m sure, has a lot of black soldiers in it.

Lee ranted to reporters in Cannes last month saying, “Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not one Negro actor on the screen. If you reporters had any balls you’d ask him why. There’s no way I know why he did that. But I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It’s not like he didn’t know.”

Eastwood responded to Lee’s allegations saying, “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.” He then said sharply, “A guy like him should shut his face.”

Eastwood’s next film, called The Human Factor, is about Nelson Mandela and post-apartheid South Africa. He says of the film, “I’m not going to make Nelson Mandela a white guy.”

Be Sociable, Share!

•