A while back I reported on Spike Lee criticizing Clint Eastwood for not using enough black actors in his WWII movies.  In a recent interview with The Guardian, Eastwood showed that the best part of getting older is not having to take anyone’s shit.

"Has he ever studied the history?"  As for Flags of Our Fathers, he says, yes, there was a small detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima as a part of a munitions company, "but they didn’t raise the flag. The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn’t do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people’d go, ‘This guy’s lost his mind.’ I mean, it’s not accurate."

Apparently, this wasn’t the first time Eastwood’s taken crap from Spike Lee.

"He was complaining when I did Bird [the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker]. ‘Why would a white guy be doing that?’ I was the only guy who made it, that’s why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead he was making something else."
Lee shouldn’t be demanding African-Americans in Eastwood’s next picture, either. Changeling is set in Los Angeles during the Depression, before the city’s make-up was changed by the large black influx. "What are you going to do, you gonna tell a fuckin’ story about that?" he growls. "Make it look like a commercial for an equal opportunity player? I’m not in that game. I’m playing it the way I read it historically, and that’s the way it is. When I do a picture and it’s 90% black, like Bird, I use 90% black people."
…"A guy like him should shut his face." [Guardian via RopeofSilicon]

I’m taking Eastwood’s side on this one.  I don’t know much about the history, I just like it when people are vulgar and curmudgeonly.