Clint Eastwood, Rallying 'Round 'Flags'

It gets yet more complicated: Of the three survivors, only Doc had what might be called a rewarding life. He became an undertaker and funeral home proprietor in Antigo, Wis., and learned early on to disconnect himself, as much as possible, from his experiences on the island. He never became a professional flag raiser; he never wore the uniform again, he never discussed the incident, indeed the whole war, with family, children or strangers (he did give one or two reluctant interviews later in life). His children didn't even realize he had won the Navy Cross until they found it in a box in the attic after his death.

Meanwhile, both Hayes, a Pima Indian, and Gagnon, a New Hampshire millworker of passive temperament, lived out generally futile lives. Hayes, famously, became an alcoholic, passed out one night on the reservation on Arizona 10 years after the war and died of exposure. Gagnon, who took his basically unearned fame too seriously, never really settled down and ended up a janitor, embittered by what he considered the broken promises made him during his celebrity.

It took the author and son James Bradley 10 years just to research the book, and the services of professional writer Ron Powers to shape it, and it just didn't lend itself to the film process -- as other screenwriters had discovered.

Eastwood had to persuade his former collaborator Paul Haggis to take on the job. Haggis, who won an Academy Award for his script for "Million Dollar Baby" and was preparing his directorial debut in "Crash," initially didn't want to do it.

"But he sort of played with it for a while. And one day, he called me and he said: 'I think I've got it. We have to do it nonlinearly. We'll tell it from the son's point of view as he investigates his father's experiences on Iwo Jima after his father's death.' "

Thus the movie shifts back and forth in time between three worlds. The first is the hellish, almost existential battle for the island, against a featureless landscape and an almost unseen enemy, where small units of men have explosively violent confrontations and then disappear from each other's vision, if they've seen each other at all. The second is the bond tour, where a military establishment unversed in the yet-to-be-defined concept of post-combat stress syndrome expects its three survivors to behave like perfect Boy Scouts even though they are but days removed from the fight and haunted by memories, as well as massive cases of survivor's guilt to be assuaged only by alcohol. And then there's a present, in which a fictional version of James Bradley travels around gathering info about the other two worlds.

Certainly, some things -- clarity, context -- are sacrificed in this process. Still, the movie really captures the feel of the battle, the pain of the survivors, the indifference of the government and the tragic misspending of two lives that should have been celebrated. It particularly makes you feel for the truly unfortunate Hayes, a three-invasion Marine from a culture that eschewed self-promotion, suddenly thrust into a very unwelcome limelight and made to feel inadequate (three invasions! anybody with three invasions in the Pacific is a god, not a failed celeb!) who hid from his pain in drink.

Next issue: Where to film?

"The Japanese were very gracious and even invited us to film on Iwo Jima itself" -- the island remains Japanese soil, a part of Tokyo Prefecture -- "and we visited the island, to get an emotional feel for it," Eastwood recalls. "But when they offered, I could see them flinch. And I knew we were going to set a lot of [pyrotechnic] stuff off and that they didn't really want us to film there."

Then the Icelandic Film Commission approached the production.

"When I saw it, I knew we could do the film there. It was the same volcanic landscape, the same black volcanic sand, the same emptiness. I knew we'd have to enhance Mount Suribachi [the volcano at the tip of the island where the flag was raised] but that was well within our capabilities."

Then he is asked a perhaps too pointy-headed question: Given the nature of the film, was it in some sense its autobiographical meanings that attracted you? That is, it's about some young men whose lives were defined by a photograph that really had nothing to do with their actual selves. Two of them are essentially destroyed by it. The third flourishes, though at some cost, by somehow closing it out of his life and building another life.