By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 15, 2006

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.

Something familiar about the guy in the chair. Hmm, what is it? Is it the lanky, slouchy spread of body draped helter-skelter across seat and back and arms? Is it the lack of pretense, so that even in a luxury suite of the Four Seasons on Doheny you feel as if you're talking tractor oil selection with a smart mechanic in Iowa? Is it the Sunday-go-to-meeting suit in a tone that might be called "bright gray," that recounts the town garb of Joe Kidd between gunfights? Is it the small, tight mouth, the leanness of cheek and jaw?

Well, all those things are indeed familiar. But it's something else. It's the eyes. Most of us have seen those eyes a hundred or so times: watchful, wary, smart but not intellectualized, a hunter's eyes, a soldier's eyes, a survivor's eyes. And a director's eyes.

Oh, hell, it's just Old Clint, as he calls himself.

Clint Eastwood, 76, all dressed up but ever laconic, ever inscrutable, ever interesting, sits before us without a movie-star-big-director affectation anywhere in sight, ready now to chat up his sensational movie "Flags of Our Fathers," opening nationwide Friday.

Eastwood -- God, what a career! -- has so much to boast about, to feel triumph and old-lion lazy majesty about, but is instead modest and charming, just a slight bit uneasy, not quite a party wit (the humor is sly and dry) and allows only that on this one, he worked pretty darned hard.

He's bemused by the lubricant of praise that opens the exchange, even if in this one rare instance the reporter actually means it. But there's no smugness, no sense of having beaten the world on its own terms, to now sit back and enjoy the accolade shower. No: Old Clint, reg'lar guy, squinty eyes, don't say much, could almost still be a man with no name all these years later.

And, again appropriate to his sense of quiet gentlemanliness, he's not using the film as a pulpit for any political grandstanding, any Big Statements he thinks he's entitled to make.

"It's just going to lay there," he says, of the movie's "message" to America's viewers. "You have to provide your own beliefs."

The movie, by far the biggest, grandest, most tragic, most complex of his career, is derived from the 2000 bestseller by James Bradley, which chronicled the story of 1/400th of a second in his father's life, when that fine man, John Bradley, a Navy corpsman inevitably nicknamed "Doc," serving with the Marines on Iwo Jima, helped shove a pole upright.

The pole planted, Bradley went on with more important duties, mainly tending to Marines hit in the devastating battle, which claimed more than 6,000 American and 21,000 Japanese lives. He did that duty for two more weeks until shell fragments tore up his leg and hip and he was invalided off the island for recovery.

It was only then that he realized that the 1/400th of a second had been recorded by an Associated Press news photographer named Joe Rosenthal who hadn't even been looking through his viewfinder. What resulted, however, was an almost perfect image of what Hemingway called grace under pressure: six men fused into one lyric whole, festooned with weapons, tired as hell yet wearing the nobility that battle for something bigger than self confers, struggling to get the damn pole into the damn hole. This image, of course, transcends grunting men, pole, fabric and breeze to become metaphor: It's an idealized image of a nation fighting to win a global war mainly on the grit of its youngsters, all of whom would rather be elsewhere, but by God, since they're here, they'll do the job. Unaccountably, the entwined bodies form a perfect expression of teamwork, valor, duty and disregard for self. Omitted detail: On the pole is an American flag and again by the kindness that God sometimes shows to photographers, that Star-Spangled Banner is caught at the exact half-furl as it unleashes itself into the stout North Pacific wind. It stands for victory, hard-won on blood and guts and the M1 Garand rifle, about to be achieved. Magic, almost unbearably beautiful, the photo is a piece of accidental art that even these many years and 5 billion or so kitschy reproductions -- on black velvet, say, or on lighters or pistol grips or mugs -- still moves profoundly.

Thus Bradley was pulled from the hospital and the other two surviving flag raisers from duty and turned overnight into heroes, or, far worse, celebrities. The fact that the other three had died, completely unaware of the fame that was about to descend upon that 1/400th second, haunted the survivors, as did the memories of the other 4,997 deaths, more or less, on an island less than five miles long that was mostly ash and rock. The book, and the movie from it even more pointedly, tell that story.

Eastwood, who was 14 in February of 1945, says: "I remember as a kid when the battle happened. I remember the picture. I thought it was a great shot. But I didn't analyze it. I was a kid."

Still, there was something about it: "What did strike me was that it wasn't a 'combat' photo -- there were hundreds of combat photos in the newspapers then. Rather, it emphasized the togetherness of the men."

It's a long-ago, faraway memory: He was a working-class kid in the San Francisco area, the son of a vagrant steelworker; from that hardscrabble beginning, he never envisioned what would become of him in the country Mike Strank, Harlon Block and Franklin Sousley died for.

"I remember; it was everywhere. And I remember the Seventh Bond Drive" -- the war bond fundraising drive of which survivors Bradley, Ira Hayes and Rene Gagnon were the focal point. He's not guileful enough to spin a yarn about what a little patriot he was in those days, remembering instead and truly, "Your parents give you a bond instead of a present for Christmas, and that's disappointing if you're a kid."

Years pass, television is invented, then revisionist European westerns, then right-wing cops, and on and on, and suddenly not young anymore, the movie star-director is recommended a book by a friend.

"I read it. It told the whole thing about that generation; I found it very emotional. Then I was struck by the million people in Times Square who came out to see the kids on their bond drive. What was it like for them to see that ? Maybe the beach at Iwo was less frightening than that."

Eastwood liked it so much he tried to buy it, but was too late. DreamWorks, the Steven Spielberg-David Geffen-Jeffrey Katzenberg company, had already obtained the rights.

"But the years passed and I didn't hear about it. You know, you hear when they're making a movie. But then I ran into Steven Spielberg backstage at the [2003] Academy Awards and the conversation came up. He said, 'Why don't you come on over and direct it?' "

Eastwood was 70; he'd never done a big-effects picture, a big-cast picture, a war picture.

"I accepted immediately," he says. "I like all kinds of pictures, big, small -- I just have to like the story. But I crescendoed into this one; it was the biggest thing I'd ever done."

Of course, the script was the next step, not easily accomplished. The book, after all, went into detail about each of the six flag raisers, and tracked their destinies on the island for the entire battle, not just the accidental fraction of a second atop a volcano that Rosenthal froze forever. At the same time, it folded that story into the larger story of the 35-day campaign (the flag-raising was photographed on the fifth day; a month of hell in that very small space and by far the majority of the casualties remained ahead). Then it stayed with Doc, Ira and Rene over the course of the bond tour and beyond, tracking their fates in postwar America.

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.

Could Doc Bradley not be Clint Eastwood himself? Could Doc the icon turned small-town undertaker be Clint the icon turned big-town director and auteur? Both were turned into icons almost accidentally -- in Eastwood's case, by the worldwide but completely unexpected success of "A Fistful of Dollars" in 1964 in a low-slung black hat, a serape, a cheroot and a gun. But somehow Eastwood realizes that his future isn't in that business. "If you're a celebrity," the star says, "the one thing you know is that it's not going to last." And though he prospers as an actor, he's clearly pining to get into something more substantial. And he becomes a director, and one might argue a much greater director than he ever was an actor.

Eastwood considers the parallel gravely and then says: "No. Next question."

But then he laughs at putting his inquisitor on, and deals with the issue.

"I didn't want it to be just an action picture. It's about people trying to get away from celebrity and it has lots of overtones for today and maybe for me. I was never comfortable as a celebrity; I was always one for turning away. I loved the acting but not the other stuff. I never spoke in front of an audience. I was never an extrovert. I was always more comfortable listening, so I can understand what it was like for those boys shoved into an unwilling celebrity. For the flag-raisers, it was an accident; and they were turned into celebrities. They must have thought, 'What the hell is this?' They felt everybody was gone, particularly Mike Strank, their sergeant, whom all loved and admired and is remembered by all those who knew him as 'a Marine's Marine.' In the one interview John Bradley gave, he was very reserved. He didn't want to put any importance to it. He always had that haunted thing; he didn't want to bring that to his children. He never seemed to want to go there. Sure, I like getting the tables up front, but in general I didn't enjoy the whole celebrity process. And maybe the reason I was driven to direct -- it was a way of being well-known, without your face being well-known."

Eastwood, in reading "Flags of Our Fathers," found the American-Japanese conflict so fascinating he decided to make a companion film, this time from the Japanese point of view.

He seems taken with Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the Japanese commanding officer on Iwo Jima, who, almost like a B-movie stereotype from the '40s, had studied at Harvard, spoke English and had traveled in America, which he enjoyed very much and which he did not want to fight. Still, it was Kuribayashi who designed the brilliant interlocking defensive measures that turned the battle into such a bloodbath, and it is also he who is considered by most historians the author of the best defense of an island against invasion during the war. At the same time, another amazing figure was Baron Takeichi Nish, commander of the island's complement of armored vehicles; he'd been a hero of the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics as an equestrian, and, as Eastwood points out, was a member of "the equestrian crowd, Doug Fairbanks, Mary Pickford." Neither officer survived the battle (of the 21,000 Japanese on the island, there were only about 200 survivors).

"Kuribayashi was amazing; in his letters home, he tells his family he's probably not coming back, but at the same time he's completely involved with his family, and is telling his kids to study hard and his wife to get the roof fixed."

Eastwood hired the Japanese American screenwriter Iris Yamashita to write the screenplay (she had assisted Haggis on "Flags") and actors Ken Watanabe as the general and Tsuyoshi Ihara as the baron. Called "Letters From Iwo Jima," it will be released in Washington next year (and in New York and Los Angeles in December, in time for Oscar consideration). Eastwood uses some of the same footage, though "Letters" was shot immediately after "Flags" on Iwo Jima itself and also in a silver mine at Barstow, Calif. -- where the tunnels stand in for the network of passages between the Japanese positions.

"In the Japanese film, you almost never see the Americans, just as in the American film, you almost never see the Japanese."

Asked if he meant it to be a "Japanese" film, Eastwood replies: "I did it the way I saw it. It's just storytelling, my take on the materials. Maybe Kurosawa would do it the same way."

Full circle: He is in debt to the great director Akira Kurosawa because Kurosawa made "Yojimbo," upon which "A Fistful of Dollars" was based -- or, rather, from which "A Fistful of Dollars" was stolen.

Now, finally, with both movies done, it's time for a rest, though scripts keep coming in.

With his trademark dry wit and eyes squinting, Clint Eastwood says: "I'm kind of hoping I don't find anything. Worst thing that could happen to me is that somebody would send me a script I love."