The war of words between Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood might have been overblown but Steven Spielberg still intervened.
There are a lot of things that Spike don’t like, and one was the way Clint depicted World War II. When Eastwood’s double header Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima came out in 2006, it was his chance to return to a genre he hadn’t touched in decades. But for Spike Lee, Clint Eastwood only served to erase a significant part of history, thus launching a bitter but short-lived feud between the directors that only another cinematic icon could resolve.
Spike Lee’s issue with the movies – particularly Letters from Iwo Jima – was that very few, if any, Black people were depicted, although it has been estimated that no fewer than 700 Black soldiers took part in the namesake 1945 battle. It was, to some, as if Eastwood was limiting the event to the flag raising, captured in Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph. As Lee put it, “Clint Eastwood did two films about Iwo Jima back to back and if you blinked you would miss the one Black person that was in it. There were Black marines in Iwo Jima.”
Clint Eastwood, naturally, wouldn’t just sit back and watch Spike Lee run all over his lawn like that, saying, “This guy’s lost his mind…A guy like that should shut his face.” Careful, Clint, you heard what Spike said about Wim Wenders…
Time does heal most wounds, but Spike Lee found a mediator in Steven Spielberg (who we know has no time for BS), who approached the 25th Hour director at an L.A. Lakers game. “He said, ‘Spike, stop talking about Clint Eastwood.’ I said, ‘I’m not…I’ve said all I’m gonna say,’ and that was it.” In a separate interview regarding that same Lakers game, Lee remembered, “I said: ‘Steven, it’s over with Clint Eastwood.’ Steven laughed and said: ‘I’ll call Clint and tell him in the morning.’ I said: ‘It’s over!’”
Spike Lee would get to tell his own side of WWII not long after Clint Eastwood’s films with 2008’s Miracle at St. Anna. Lee maintains that it was never meant to be a rebuttal of any kind, which is possibly true, as one could see the director eventually getting around to the subject matter to help better represent Black soldiers. Lee would return to war – this time using the Vietnam War as a plot device – with 2020’s Da 5 Bloods.