The Power of an Image Drives Film by Eastwood

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 20 — Oscar season is only just getting under way, but on credentials alone a presumptive front-runner would have to be Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers,” the World War II epic about the men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, which began screening for selected journalists this week in New York.

Mr. Eastwood’s last two movies, after all, were “Mystic River,” which picked up best picture and best directing nominations in 2004, and “Million Dollar Baby,” which won in both categories in 2005. Paul Haggis, who wrote the shooting script for “Flags of Our Fathers,” also wrote “Million Dollar Baby” and was a co-writer of the Oscar-winning screenplay for last year’s best picture, “Crash.” To top it off, the movie’s producers include Steven Spielberg, whose battlefield decorations include Oscars for “Saving Private Ryan” and Emmys for the mini-series “Band of Brothers.”

Whether “Flags” ultimately connects will be up to the audience and Oscar voters. But it is already emerging as a candidate for best back story.

A big, booming spectacle that sprawls across oceans and generations, “Flags of Our Fathers,” which opens on Oct. 20, was anything but a simple undertaking. With much of film following the surviving flag raisers as they crisscross the country in the spring and summer of 1945 pitching war bonds for a government in desperate financial straits, it is neither a pure war movie nor, given its sweeping and harrowing combat sequences, merely a wartime drama. It examines the power of a single image to affect not only public opinion but also the outcome of a war, — whether in 1945, in Vietnam or more recently.

Above all it is a study of the callous ways in which heroes are created for public consumption, used and discarded, all with the news media’s willing cooperation. And it is imbued with enough of a critique of American politicians and military brass to invite suspicions that Hollywood is appropriating the iconography of World War II to score contemporary political points. Yet just when it verges on indicting the people responsible for exploiting the troops, the movie comes round to their point of view.

What is more, in a rare and audacious feat of moviemaking and distribution, “Flags” was produced back-to-back with a companion film, “Letters From Iwo Jima,” also directed by Mr. Eastwood, that is told entirely from the Japanese perspective, and in Japanese. The two movies will be released, a few months apart, by two competing studios and the remnant of a third: Paramount, because it bought DreamWorks SKG last year, is releasing “Flags” domestically, while Warner Brothers is to release “Letters” in North America and both films overseas.

Mr. Eastwood actually tried to option “Flags of Our Fathers” after the widely read book by James Bradley and Ron Powers was published in May 2000. But Mr. Spielberg had snatched up the movie rights that summer, and in early 2001 he assigned its adaptation to the screenwriter William Broyles Jr., a former marine who also adapted “Jarhead.” The two spent more than two years collaborating on four drafts, Mr. Broyles said, before Mr. Spielberg, still unsatisfied, put the project aside in 2003.

The following February, on the night of the 2004 Academy Awards, Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Spielberg fell into a conversation at the Governors Ball afterward, and Mr. Eastwood came into work the next morning saying that Mr. Spielberg had invited him to take over the project, said Rob Lorenz, a producer at Malpaso, Mr. Eastwood’s production comany.

Mr. Eastwood was then in preproduction on “Million Dollar Baby,” and he asked Mr. Haggis to tackle “Flags of Our Fathers” in his down time, Mr. Lorenz said. Mr. Haggis said he hit upon a way to tell three stories: of the months of training leading up to the invasion and battle for Iwo Jima; of the stateside bond drive and its life-altering effects on the surviving flag-raisers; and of James Bradley’s discovery of his late father’s well-concealed past as one of the three most famous heroes of World War II.

“I wanted to talk about the toll it takes on a man, on a person, when they’re labeled a hero, and how that can destroy a person,” Mr. Haggis said in a recent interview. “Especially now, when we seem to have a need for heroes, and we seem to be creating heroes and villains of our own men and women.”

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Mr. Haggis turned in a first draft in late October 2004, and with scant revisions, Mr. Eastwood shot that script. But Mr. Eastwood, who read everything he could about the battle, grew eager to tell more about Iwo Jima. “He wanted to show both sides, thus the Japanese perspective,” Mr. Haggis said.

When Mr. Eastwood learned of Lieut. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the Japanese commander whose letters home revealed a man certain he would die before ever seeing his family again, he proposed making a second film. Mr. Spielberg and executives at Warner Brothers, Mr. Eastwood’s studio, quickly gave their support.

Mr. Eastwood, who declined to comment for this article, at first even wanted to shoot both films at once, Mr. Lorenz said, but timing and other practical concerns made that impossible. Yet the producers did achieve some small economies of scale. “Flags of Our Fathers,” which cost $90 million to make, was shot mainly in Iceland in 2005, where the black-sand beaches are an adequate substitute for those of Iwo Jima. And “Letters From Iwo Jima,” a much more modest film at $20 million, will include some of the invasion scenes staged for “Flags.”

While much of “Letters” was filmed in Southern California, Mr. Eastwood arranged a scouting trip to Iwo Jima in April 2005. The island was too remote to allow for a full-scale production. But he received permission to return this past April with a small camera crew and Ken Watanabe, the actor portraying General Kuribayashi in “Letters,” to film at the foot of Mount Suribachi, Mr. Lorenz said.

Mr. Haggis said that he and Mr. Eastwood had treaded quite carefully in making this war movie, given the continuing war in Iraq. “I was most concerned that the movie would be seen as somehow justifying this war,” Mr. Haggis said.

He said Mr. Eastwood wanted to avoid romanticizing World War II as so many older movies have. One result of that was the decision to cast younger actors, few of them household names. “What Clint wanted to explore was the fact that these kids were 18, 19 years old, and having to make terrible decisions. And that even in good wars, the horrors one had to witness, and one had to perpetrate, would just stick with you forever.”

For the same reason, Mr. Haggis said, the combat in “Flags of Our Fathers” is particularly grisly, with many scattering limbs, spilling intestines, Japanese soldiers blowing themselves up rather than surrendering, and a flying severed head.

That brutality was largely concealed from the American public then, just as it is now, he said. “We don’t see the bodies. It’s sanitized.”

Mr. Lorenz cautioned against viewing the film through a political, let alone a partisan, lens. “I don’t think we were trying to make any sort of political statement, or had any sort of agenda,” he said. “I do think it so happens that it’s a movie that the country can use right now.”

Mr. Broyles said he saw plenty of resonance between the story and current events, up to a point. “Look at Jessica Lynch,” he said. “What really happened to her didn’t fit the story line. There are lots of stories that don’t make the press, but the kids out there are real heroes.” He added, “The important thing is to present it in the truth of what happened in 1945, without winking about what’s happening in 2006, and people can draw their own conclusions about what’s parallel.”

Mr. Haggis said he had made certain in his script to subvert any one-dimensional depiction of the politicians and generals as unfairly exploiting the returning marines. So in a crucial scene, a politician tells the surviving flag-raisers that their crass re-enactments of the flag-raising, however unfaithful to the memories of their fallen comrades, were vital in rallying the nation at a moment when the government was nearly broke.

The rest is history: President Harry S. Truman challenged them to raise $14 billion in two months. They raked in nearly double that.