Page 2
Filming Flags of Our Fathers in Iceland: Director Clint Eastwood said he loved filming in Iceland. "When it was first suggested that we work in Iceland, I could not understand how it would work, but really there's a lot of similarities between Iceland in the summer and Iwo Jima in the winter time. Iwo is a geo-thermal island, a lot of volcanic activity, a lot of sulphur minerals coming out of fissures in the mountains and what have you. Iceland is not necessarily that way, but it does have some of that. It has tremendous black beaches, black sand beaches, which are very hard to duplicate. We looked at black sand beaches all over the world — next to the 4 Seasons in Hawaii (laughter) — comfortable places. It turned out the only way to do it was [in Iceland].
Certain parts of [Iwo Jima] are considered a shrine, and the Japanese don't have tourism there. Nobody can go there without the Japanese government's approval and the Japanese government feels it's a sacred place because there are still almost 12,000 of their men unaccounted for on that island. So we couldn't do the pyrotechnics that we would have to do to actually recreate the invasion, so we went to Iceland. Iceland was very cooperative, and then we came back and did the various cities here in the States.”
The Casting Process: “We’re using lesser-known actors because the average age of people sent to Iwo Jima was 19 years-old, except for some of the officers. I talked to one of the officers who was there the day before yesterday, he retired as a General but he was a Captain then and he was 24. So the oldest in our group, who was Mike Strank, was 26 years old, and the other Marines called him ‘The Old Man’. It’s hard to be called an old man at 26, but because of his leadership qualities, he was sort of viewed that way.
I think because of the age and we had to use young people, it lent itself to using lesser-known actors. And also if you have big name actors coming on the screen in a situation, sometimes it takes a while to adjust and see someone who’s well-known and then adjust to them as a character. It’s up to that actor to romance you over into thinking that he is that character. I remember years ago seeing Rio Bravo in a theater and they made the decision to cast Ward Bond as a wagon master and have him ride into town and go, ‘Wagon’s ho!’ and this was during the time that Wagon Train was on television and a very popular show. When he did that, the whole audience all came apart and it took another 15 minutes to get back into the movie. But just the presence of somebody that’s well known… People are going to the movies to see their favorite actor, in this case, that may be the case in this movie or any other movie, but this time you can kind of accept in a faster fashion the fact that these people are the characters."
The Choice of Adam Beach to Play Ira Hayes: "The story of Ira Hayes has been told before but Adam Beach is a North American Indian, so we don’t have a Caucasian playing it or somebody of occidental background. I had seen him do some other smaller roles, but he came and he did a reading on tape and it was very good. You could see a lot of possibilities there. I hired him and he turned out to be even better than I expected. Ira Hayes was a complex person, a person who did sharecropping, a kid from Arizona who went to the Marine Corps, suddenly he’s in the Marine Corps and he’s got a uniform and he meets a lot of friends. He found sort of a family in the Marine Corps. He liked it to the point where he wanted to stay there.”
Eastwood continued, “Everything in this picture is true. Sometimes that’s an advantage and sometimes it’s a disadvantage. But everything happened. He did threaten Gagnon that he’d kill him if he told them he was on the flag. He didn’t want to come back to the States after combat and do what they’re doing. He had a problem with alcoholism and everywhere they went, they were serving him drinks. That could be not conducive to a good situation for a person with his feelings, attraction to alcohol. The Keyes Beech character also had an attraction to alcohol and he was assigned to Ira Hayes, which made it worse because he was the liaison for the three boys. The other boys seemed to be able to handle it. But Rene Gagnon [played by Jesse Bradford] had problems on his own.”
