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Clint Eastwood’s Take on Flags of Our Fathers: “I think it’s very emotional, the father/son relationship. The son finding out about his father and having maybe a moment with him while he’s still alive and then after he’s gone, just the memory of his father, finding out what an extraordinary person he was. John Bradley was extremely well decorated, well thought of. Of the three guys, he was the one that had the most recognition in combat. As a corpsman he did some extraordinary things, and to find that out about your father after he’s passed away, I think that’s emotional. I think it’s emotional at the end.
At the end we just try to show that these guys, really what sums it up is these guys are just a bunch of kids who were sent off to fight for their country. And if you watch the ending credits, we tried to show the real people and you realize that those 19-year-olds looked about 45 in a matter of a two week period, a three week period or something. It shows how much you can change a person and how appreciative they are to have made it through. This general I talked to the other day…he didn’t say much about it. He just said, ‘I’m one of the lucky ones.’ And we should be appreciative of them for doing it. If they didn’t do it, we would have had combat on our shores and combat on our shores is something no American would look forward to. But don’t give up because we have to always be vigilant because such a thing could happen.”
The Heart of Flags of Our Fathers: Eastwood says he told this story because it’s important for the public to understand what these men experienced. “I just wanted them to get to know these people, know what they went through. Maybe give the audience a feeling of what it was like in that time, what these people dedicated their lives or donated their lives for. The feeling of false celebrity, something that we’re seeing quite common these days. Just in general, just find out these kinds of people. There have been books written about it. Brokaw’s book of course, The Greatest Generation and a lot of people talk about the greatest generation so it was fun to just try to visualize the greatest generation. We live in a time now where it’s different. We have an all voluntary military. The country’s a lot more comfortable now as far as economically. Those times would come out of rough economic times. In fact right now we’re probably a lot more spoiled than we were then, so the idea, war is more of an inconvenience now where then it was an absolute necessity.”
America and World War II: “As far as World War II as compared to [Iraq], all wars have their problems. It was a different time in history, of course. We had been fighting in the European theatre, we were at war. But then when it came — when it was brought to us in Pearl Harbor - it became a reality that if we weren't careful, if we didn't fight this one out, we might be speaking another language today. So it was sort of simple.
Most of the young men and women who went to war — a lot of the women went to work in factories and had to give up their lives… Most of the men gave up their lives or gave up their everyday life to go, most of them were skinny kids out of the Depression. Most of the kids, the average age was 19 years old. You figured they were probably all born in 1928 or 27 or in the late ‘20s early ‘30s, and they were over there, but they all had the spirit. And it was important to tell this story for that reason. It told of a time in our history when there was a lot of spirit.
I think the icon itself of the flag-raising, a candid shot which was sort of a manufactured shot at the time - it didn't have any significance at the moment because it was a separate flag-raising but it was just a shot that was very rare. It's a work of art. It's a work of art because it's people not looking into the camera and smiling at their aunt in Des Moines. It shows the unity of people working towards a common cause. The hands reach out, sometimes just hands just being seen, and that itself showed a time when people felt they had to — we had to be victorious in this war.”
