“This guy should shut up” Without Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood and this famous director would never have gotten back together!

News culture “This guy should shut up” Without Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood and this famous director would never have gotten back together!

Clash of the Titans

Not everything is rosy in Hollywood, far from it. Proof of this is with a conflict so virulent between Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood that Steven Spielberg had to intervene to calm these two sacred monsters of cinema. In 2008, during a press conference for the premiere of his film Miracle in Santa Anna in Cannes, it was Spike Lee who launched hostilities by taking Clint Eastwood to task and his films Memories of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Known for his activism and his support for the African-American cause, Spike Lee had rightly deplored the absence of black actors in Clint Eastwood’s feature films.

Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima for over four hours in total and there were no black actors on screen. If you journalists had any dicks, you’d ask him why. I have no idea why he did this, but I know that it was brought to his attention and that he could have corrected it. It’s not like he doesn’t know.

A scathing response

After being informed of his colleague’s statement, Clint Eastwood did not hesitate and decided to respond to him in The Guardian.

When I did Bird, he complained, “Why would a white guy do that?” Because I’m the only guy who’s done it, that’s why. He could have done it before, he chose to do something else.

The story of the film is Flag of Our Fathers, the story of the famous image of the flag raising and (black troops) not participating in it. If I go ahead and include an African-American actor in this image, people will say to me: “This guy is lost, that’s not the truth.” (…) And when I make a film that is 90% black, like Bird, I hire 90% black people. This guy should just shut up.”

This guy is not my father, and we are not on a plantation. He’s a great director. He makes his films, I make mine (…) but a comment like “This guy should just shut up”, let’s go. He looks like an angry old man. I’m not inventing anything, I know the history, I’ve studied it. And I know the history of Hollywood and its omission of the million African American men and women who contributed to World War II. It wasn’t just John Wayne, man.

Before the two men went too far, it was ultimately Steven Spielberg who decided to intervene and play the role of mediator to calm these tensions. Spielberg’s comments have never been made public, but we know that it is the filmmaker who managed to appease his colleagues thanks to the book American Rebel: The Life of Clint Eastwood by Marc Eliot. Ultimately, the two legends never returned to this episode and decided to move forward separately, for the better.