Very few actors have the ability to jump behind the camera they’re being filmed on and direct a scene, with only the likes of Ron Howard, George Clooney, and Clint Eastwood being able to master the tricky technical and creative feat. While the latter is best known for being the nameless hero of the American West, he has also helmed some of modern cinema’s greatest triumphs, including Mystic River and American Sniper.
Ever since his debut as a filmmaker in 1971 with the movie Play Misty For Me, Eastwood has gone on to earn 11 Academy Award nominations and four wins in total, taking home statuettes for ‘Best Picture’ wins for 1993’s Unforgiven and 2005’s Million Dollar Baby. Yet, neither of these movies is appreciated by the director himself as being the very best of his career.
In conversation with NHK, Eastwood was asked what movie he was proudest of making as a filmmaker, with the actor and director giving a surprising response that sidelines some of his most championed movies. “I tell you one that really was a long shot, and it was in making a film Flags of Our Fathers some years ago. I got the idea to do The Letters from Iwo Jima, and I thought, ‘That’s so hard to do because it’s hard to find out much information on it’”.
Certainly one of Eastwood’s most ambitious and triumphant pieces of cinema, The Letters from Iwo Jima told the story of the iconic battle between the USA and Imperial Japan during WWII. Released the very same year as his companion film Flags of Our Fathers, which depicts the same battle from the US viewpoint, The Letters from Iwo Jima was filmed entirely in Japanese and focused on the perspective of the ‘enemy’.
“I went to Japan and talked to the governor of the prefecture in charge of Iwo Jima, and I told him that this is a story that has to be told from a Japanese point of view,” Eastwood said of his creative process. “And I think there’s an awful lot of relatives and people left over from that era who would love to imagine what it must be like to be in that situation”.
Continuing, he added: “I was fortunate to find a writer here in America. She was of Japanese descent but didn’t really speak the language. She was born in America. But she researched it really well and went into it and came up with a really good script. So that had a great satisfaction because I still think it’s one of the better films I’ve done”.
The writer in question was Iris Yamashita, who, despite being nominated for an Oscar for her remarkable original screenplay, hasn’t worked in the film industry since. Remaining one of Eastwood’s strongest movies, The Letters from Iwo Jima starred the likes of Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya and Tsuyoshi Ihara, among others.