USA: Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg premiere their film "Flags of Our Fathers" in Los Angeles

The Clint Eastwood-directed, Paul Haggis-scripted, and Steven Spielberg-produced "Flags of Our Fathers " brought out an all star line up out for the premiere in Los Angeles, California on Monday (October 9). The film is based on the New York Times 2000 best seller by James Bradley who tries to reconstruct the events of his father John's involvement as one of the six soldiers who raised the flag in Iwo Jima during World War Two. "While my father was alive he would not talk about the flag raising or Iwo Jima after he died we found some boxes and I found some hints about his past. I followed those hints made a few telephone calls and here we are," James Bradley told Reuters. More than 22,000 Japanese soldiers and nearly 26,000 Americans fell in the battle, the largest sea armada invasion ever assembled and the costliest war ever fought by the US Marines. The encounter would lead to a turning point in the war because control of the island of Iwo Jima (Japanese territory) allowed Allied forces to launch B-29 bomber raids into the heart of Japan with the eventual dropping of the Atomic Bomb that would end WWII. The battle would produce one of World War II's most enduring images a photograph of five Marines and a Navy Corpsman raising an American flag on the top of Mount Suribachi, the island's commanding high point. "It was a good book but it was so big so I sulked and I complained and I tried everything I could to get out of it but it was Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg so you can't turn those guys down right? So it took about three months to figure out how to write it and when I did I said oh yeah," said Academy Award Winner Paul Haggis who co wrote- Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" and "Crash". The layered story also reveals the emotional journey of the surviving flag raisers after they came home to America and tried to forget what they had seen and experienced on the island of Iwo Jima. They had no interest in being held up as heroes but instead preferred to stay on the front with their brothers in arms who were fighting and dying without fanfare or glory. "In the times they had to come back and they just had to adjust. A lot of people adjust about talking about things and a lot of people just close. John Bradley was just the kind of guy that closed up. I have talked to many Iwo vets and it is only in recent years that they have come forward and have found a catharsis of talking about it most of them went home and just shut their brain off," Academy Award winner Eastwood told Reuters. The film stars Adam Beach as Ira Hayes, Jesse Bradford as Rene Gagnon, and Ryan Phillipe as John Bradley the three of the six soldiers that survived and returned home to raise funds for the war effort. Barry Pepper stars as Sergeant Mike Strank, Paul Walker stars as Hank Hansen, and Jamie Bell stars as Ralph Ignatowski who were all killed during battle. "When he hires you know he is putting his trust in you he is letting you know that you are a thinking mature actor who can deal with any kind of situation he throws at you and for that reason we were forced to do a lot of bonding together you know to get that sense of we had been in tours of duty together before," Bell said about working with Eastwood. Like the book, the heart of the movie centres around the tragic life stories of the six men who raised the American flag February 1, 1945 on Mount Suribachi. "I had originally bought the book because I felt that photograph, that Joe Rosenthal still photograph which was one of the most iconic images in all of American history next to some of the Lincoln portraits, that photograph really launch an amazing campaign that dislocates three survivors of the Iwo Jima flag raising and put them on a public relations tour that was in many ways harder then fighting along side their buddies on the island of Iwo Jima," Spielberg said.

ITN Source | October 13, 2006

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