Clint Eastwood names his most overlooked movie: “I wish more people had seen it”
Clint Eastwood has made many, many movies throughout his incredible career, which has been going strong for more than seven decades. He’s best known for his westerns and action movies, both as an actor and a director, but over the years, he’s also lent his talents to genres as diverse as romance, musicals, thrillers, and mysteries. Of all the films he’s got his fingerprints on, though, only one overlooked effort popped into his head when asked which film he’d recommend fans watch if they missed it the first time around.
The early 2000s were transformative for Eastwood, particularly his directing career. After a couple of middling efforts—Space Cowboys in 2000 and Blood Work in 2002—the seasoned helmer made two of his most acclaimed and successful movies. With 2003’s Mystic River and 2004’s Million Dollar Baby, Eastwood levelled up and gave the world two handsomely made prestige pictures that were beloved by audiences and critics alike.
Eastwood was rewarded with ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ nominations for Mystic River, the first time the Academy had been interested in his work since 1992’s classic western Unforgiven. While he didn’t win either award, he was back on that Oscar stage a year later with Million Dollar Baby, and this time he took home both trophies. Suddenly, Eastwood was in the strongest position he’d enjoyed in decades, and he decided to embrace ambition for his next project – two war movies filmed back to back, exploring the wildly differing perspectives of both sides of a conflict.
Eastwood ultimately released Flags of Our Fathers on October 20th, 2006, and Letters from Iwo Jima on December 20th. The first film was America’s side of the historic Battle of Iwo Jima, while the second told the tale from the viewpoint of Japanese soldiers. To his credit, Eastwood didn’t alter Letters from Iwo Jima in any way to make it more palatable to a US audience. The film featured no recognisable US stars in the cast, with the most famous actor being Ken Watanabe, who Americans would have only known from The Last Samurai and Batman Begins. The film was almost entirely in the Japanese language, too, as befit the setting.
Naturally, Eastwood had a sneaking suspicion that this choice might torpedo the box office chances of Letters from Iwo Jima in the US, but he didn’t care. He wanted his unique two-film experiment to be as authentic as possible, and he wouldn’t be swayed from this opinion. In the end, though, both movies underperformed at the box office, with Flags of Our Fathers making less than its budget and receiving so-so reviews.
However, Letters from Iwo Jima performed much better, primarily because its budget was a fraction of Flags of Our Fathers. It only made $3million more than Flags, but Eastwood was validated by the critical response, which praised him for making such an authentically Japanese film. In fact, the film appeared on multiple ‘Best of the Year’ lists and was extremely beloved in Japan, whose critics praised Eastwood for avoiding the usual stereotypes that come with Japanese characters in Hollywood
Still, despite the film’s success in these metrics, Eastwood couldn’t help being rankled that it only made $13m in the US. He knew that meant a comparatively small portion of Americans had seen the movie, and he knew it deserved a better fate. “In Japan, it did sensationally,” Eastwood told GQ in 2011. “But I wish more people had seen it here, just for the understanding of how war affects other societies. There is a constant heroism in being sent someplace and told you’re never coming back, which is how the Japanese soldier was sent to war. You couldn’t sell that to too many Americans.”
“I had no delusions that the film was going to be any more successful than it was,” the seasoned filmmaker confessed. However, he lamented the changing tastes of cinema audiences – almost a decade before the likes of Martin Scorsese would follow suit – by grumbling, “I would just love audiences to embrace more things than just comics.”
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Clint Eastwood Newsletter
All the latest stories about Clint Eastwood from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.