Xixax Film Forum

Film Discussion => The Vault => Topic started by: MacGuffin on January 09, 2006, 06:57:58 PM

Title: Letters From Iwo Jima
Post by: MacGuffin on January 09, 2006, 06:57:58 PM
Watanabe Rising for Red Sun
Samurai star may join Eastwood's Iwo Jima flick.

The release dates for Clint Eastwood's next two films are up in the air.  Eastwood is currently in post-production on Flags of Our Fathers, the story of group of American soldiers in the battle of Iwo Jima.  And he's in pre-production on a companion piece called Red Sun, Black Sand, which will tell the story of the battle from a Japanese perspective.

The films have been conceived as back-to-back releases, but Variety reports co-producing studios Warner Bros. and DreamWorks are having some difficulty working out an appropriate schedule for the projects. A Fall 2006 release has been rumored for Flags.

The trade adds that Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai, Batman Begins) is up for a role in Red Sand. The film's dialogue is expected to be primarily in Japanese with subtitles provided. Japanese-American screenwriter Iris Yamashita is writing the film in consultation with Flags screenwriter Paul Haggis.

Watanabe can currently be seen in Memoirs of a Geisha. He next stars in Chasing the Dragon.
Title: Re: Letters From Iwo Jima
Post by: MacGuffin on March 10, 2006, 04:52:50 PM
Ra's Seeing Red
Watanabe, Clint team-up.

Variety has confirmed that Japanese thesp Ken Watanabe (Ra's Al Ghul in Batman Begins) will star in director Clint Eastwood's next film, Red Sun, Black Sand. The film is said to be "the Japanese companion piece to his Iwo Jima drama Flags of Our Fathers." The Red Sun cast also includes Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase and Shido Nakamura.

Steven Spielberg is serving as a producer on both Red Sun and Flags. The trade says Red Sun will be shot entirely in Japanese. The title for the film in Japan will reportedly be Letters from Iwo Jima.

Variety claims "Red Sun revolves around the real-life Japanese General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, played by Watanabe, who battled American troops for 40 days on the small island of Iwo Jima."

Production is set to commence next week in Los Angeles, although some exteriors will be shot on Iwo Jima.
Title: Re: Letters From Iwo Jima
Post by: pete on March 12, 2006, 01:52:08 PM
if they're not speaking English, then why the hell do they cast Ken Wantanabe for?
ooh, Shido Nakamura is in it.  He was in Ping Pong.  Yay Ping Pong.
Title: Re: Letters From Iwo Jima
Post by: MacGuffin on March 12, 2006, 03:03:10 PM
Quote from: pete on March 12, 2006, 01:52:08 PM
if they're not speaking English, then why the hell do they cast Ken Wantanabe for?

Because Watanabe was born in Japan. And English is his second language; Last Samurai was the first film in which he spoke English.
Title: Re: Letters From Iwo Jima
Post by: pete on March 12, 2006, 05:25:52 PM
I know that silly, but there are quite a few actors who are better than or more charismatic than him, and they seemed to cast him in all these American movies because he could speak better English than all those better actors.
Title: Re: Letters From Iwo Jima
Post by: MacGuffin on June 01, 2006, 03:03:12 PM
Eastwood attacks Japan war myths
Two new movies based on a bloody 1945 battle are stirring up memories and forcing both sides to re-examine their history
Source: The Observer

More than 60 years after it became one of the bloodiest battlefields of the Second World War, Iwo Jima's tragic history retains the power to overwhelm.

As his plane prepared to land on the isolated Japanese island last month, the actor Ken Watanabe found he could not hold back the tears. Accompanying Watanabe, who shot to stardom playing a feudal warlord opposite Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, was another hard man of Hollywood whose time on Iwo Jima would lead to something of a professional epiphany.

When Clint Eastwood's two films about Iwo Jima, one of the darkest periods of the Pacific War, reach cinemas this year, audiences could be excused for forgetting the man behind them was once the trigger-happy Dirty Harry.

The 75-year-old director has promised Flags Of Our Fathers and Red Sun, Black Sand will attempt to show for the first time the suffering of both sides during 36 days of fighting in early 1945 that turned the island into a flattened wasteland.

On a recent trip to Japan, Eastwood said his time on Iwo Jima had forced him to re-evaluate the one-dimensional portrayal of America's former enemy in so many war films. 'There were good guys on one side. Life isn't like that,' he said.

He describes Red Sun, shot in Japanese and with a largely Japanese cast, as his attempt to understand the country's soldiers. 'I think those soldiers deserve a certain amount of respect,' he said. 'I feel terrible for both sides in that war and in all wars. A lot of innocent people get sacrificed. It's not about winning or losing, but mostly about the interrupted lives of young people. These men deserve to be seen, and heard from.'

Eastwood had to mount a diplomatic offensive before filming could begin. Tokyo's ultra-conservative governor, Shintaro Ishihara, who administers the island, gave Eastwood permission to film only after he agreed he would 'absolutely not' trample on Japanese sensitivities.

Japanese Iwo Jima veterans who met Eastwood say they are confident the films will honour their fallen comrades. 'I asked him to make a human drama, not a war film,' said 83-year-old Kiyoshi Endo, of the Japanese Iwo Jima Veterans' Association. 'I wanted him to show how the soldiers felt when they were fighting and, having read the script, I think he has done that. Who won or lost is not the point.'

The US assault on Iwo Jima began on the morning of 19 February 1945. When fighting ended 36 days later, an estimated 7,000 US troops and more than 21,000 Japanese soldiers were dead. Fewer than 1,000 Japanese survived.

Koji Kitahara, 84, who served aboard a vessel protecting supply ships, said he hoped the film would capture the utter desperation of the Japanese troops. 'I remember countless soldiers in smaller boats coming out to my ship and begging us for food and water,' he said. 'All I could give them were a few cigarettes and some sweet bean jelly I had on me. I was haunted by their appearance and certain that they would die soon.'

While Eastwood promises to avoid the jingoism of John Wayne's 1949 film Sands of Iwo Jima, the first of his two films, Flags Of Our Fathers, promises to be more palatable to American audiences. Based on the 2000 bestselling book of the same name, it focuses on the six US soldiers captured in AP photographer Joe Rosenthal's iconic and controversial photograph, as they raised the Stars and Stripes at the summit of Mt Suribachi.

But if Iwo Jima was one of the US marines' hardest-won victories, it came at a price: nearly a third of all marines killed in the war died on the island.

These days Iwo Jima, 700 miles south of Tokyo, is populated by only a few hundred Japanese soldiers, the families of the dead having successfully lobbied against building on what they regard as sacred ground. For veterans like Kitahara, Red Sun's release in December promises to evoke painful memories. For younger Japanese, it will be their first exposure to one of the bloodiest episodes in their country's modern history.

Just as it was for Watanabe. 'As we went through this film, we realised that until now we haven't really looked at Japan's past. We kind of looked away from it,' he said. 'But we have to look at it and accept the fact that this is what our fathers and grandfathers have done. Accepting the reality is the first step.'
Title: Re: Letters From Iwo Jima
Post by: Pubrick on July 03, 2006, 12:08:17 PM
Quote from: MacGuffin on June 01, 2006, 03:03:12 PM
Watanabe said '... Accepting the reality is the first step.'
bowing to it politely is the second step.
Title: Re: Letters From Iwo Jima
Post by: MacGuffin on August 14, 2006, 01:20:59 PM
Source: Hollywood Elsewhere

We all need to bow our heads and observe a moment of silence for the dear & departed title of Clint Eastwood's second Iwo Jima movie, which up until recently was called Red Sun, Black Sand. It now has a much blander title -- Letters from Iwo Jima.

The title change is revealed on page 64 of this week's Entertainment Weekly (a "Fall Movie Preview" issue with Daniel Craig on the cover), and was confirmed this morning by a Paramount staff publicist.
Title: Re: Letters From Iwo Jima
Post by: modage on August 15, 2006, 09:44:22 AM
Japanese trailer for Letters From Iwo Jima/Flags Of Our Fathers: http://wwws.warnerbros.co.jp/iwojima-movies/trailer/

i think these are going to be great.
Title: Re: Letters From Iwo Jima
Post by: MacGuffin on September 25, 2006, 08:27:56 PM
Same Trailer (http://pdl.warnerbros.com/wbol/uk/movies/flagsofourfathers/flagsofourfathers_tlrf2_qt_500.mov) with English subtitles.
Title: Re: Letters From Iwo Jima
Post by: MacGuffin on November 16, 2006, 12:37:48 AM
Clint's 'Letters' coming early
December release puts pic in kudos contention
Source: Variety

Warner Bros. is moving up the release date of Clint Eastwood's Japanese-language "Letters From Iwo Jima" -- the companion pic to "Flags of Our Fathers" -- from Feb. 9 to Dec. 20.

New frame puts "Letters" up for awards consideration, with Warners planning to make the film available to critics groups and guilds in its limited run.

Pic will open in L.A. and New York, and possibly in San Francisco.

Eastwood approached Warners about the date change for "Letters" after consulting with Steven Spielberg, who brought in Eastwood to direct "Flags" for DreamWorks.

Spielberg is a producer on both pics.

DreamWorks partnered with Warners on "Flags." The two studios partnered again when Eastwood decided he wanted to shoot a companion picture telling the story of the battle of Iwo Jima from the Japanese perspective.

The new Dec. 20 date was locked in early Wednesday evening, as Eastwood was in Japan to promote "Letters," which hadn't been set to open until Feb. 9.

Paramount is distributing "Flags" in the U.S., where it has grossed $31 million at the box office. Warners is distributing the film overseas, where it has taken in more than $13.3 million.

Warners has worldwide distrib rights to "Letters."

Timing on the late-year announcement is unusual, but not unprecedented.

In October 2004, WB announced it would release Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" in December, which caused some last-minute scrambling to book screens and work up a campaign for the film's bow, in addition to its kudos strategy. The film won four Oscars, including best picture.

Other directors have had two films competing for kudos attention in the same year, including Steven Soderbergh with "Erin Brockovich" and "Traffic." (He was Oscar nommed for both, winning for the latter.)

But nobody has two companion pieces in the same year; Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trio were released a year apart.

A big awards question is whether the two films will compete for attention; whether there is room for both in major Oscar categories; or whether kudos voters will view Eastwood's twin pics as two sides of the same coin and honor both by voting for one. (Some theorized that the Oscar wins for the third "LOTR" was in effect recognition of the entire trilogy.)
Title: Re: Letters From Iwo Jima
Post by: Ghostboy on December 07, 2006, 04:27:52 PM
SPOILERS IF YOU DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT JAPANESE CULTURE / MILITARY TACTICS

I still haven't seen Flags Of Our Fathers, but I think I will now, because I liked this one enough. It's pretty good. It's probably going to win Best Picture, mostly because of the mass sucicide scene, which is really quite harrowing and will turn audiences into emotional scarred puppets for the rest of the film.
Title: Re: Letters From Iwo Jima
Post by: Gold Trumpet on December 07, 2006, 04:59:13 PM
God dammnit, I'm looking forward to this movie. I didn't need to know about that scene.
Title: Re: Letters From Iwo Jima
Post by: Gold Trumpet on December 10, 2006, 08:28:59 PM
Quote from: Ghostboy on December 07, 2006, 04:27:52 PM
SPOILERS IF YOU DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT JAPANESE CULTURE / MILITARY TACTICS

The arrogance of this board is still present. Yes, I know about the military tactics of the Japanese army in WW2, but I didn't know to what explicit length Eastwood was going to document this. I guess he really does try to gut check the audience with such a scene. I was thinking he was going to be more low key.
Title: Re: Letters From Iwo Jima
Post by: Pubrick on December 11, 2006, 12:24:07 AM
Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on December 10, 2006, 08:28:59 PM
The arrogance of this board is still present.
i hope you're including yourself in that generalization.
Title: Re: Letters From Iwo Jima
Post by: Pozer on December 11, 2006, 11:54:43 AM
Quote from: Ghostboy on December 07, 2006, 04:27:52 PM
SPOILERS IF YOU DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT JAPANESE CULTURE / MILITARY TACTICS

I still haven't seen Flags Of Our Fathers, but I think I will now, because I liked this one enough. It's pretty good. It's probably going to win Best Picture, mostly because of the mass sucicide scene, which is really quite harrowing and will turn audiences into emotional scarred puppets for the rest of the film.
suci cide sounds like something i ordered off of a sushi menu over the weekend  :yabbse-wink:     
Title: Re: Letters From Iwo Jima
Post by: MacGuffin on December 13, 2006, 11:33:43 AM
'DEEPER AND DARKER' DEFINES HIS NEW VISION
Clint Eastwood cuts to the core in two wartime films.
Source: Los Angeles Times

ABOUT halfway through Clint Eastwood's new film, "Letters From Iwo Jima," Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) is shown receiving a handgun as a gift at a prewar American dinner party. It's the kind of scene that in any other filmmaker's hands would become a splashy set piece: a parade of vintage cars, scores of women in fancy dresses, a big crane shot of a magnificent hotel, elaborate trays of passed hors d'oeuvres.

But Eastwood doesn't think like any other filmmaker so when he went to shoot the sequence, he ditched those bells and whistles — and in just half a day of filming captured the simple shots he needed." That sequence is just a memory in Kuribayashi's mind," Eastwood says in his darkened Warner Bros. office. "So if I did it with a big establishing shot, the scene and the picture become about the dinner party — you want to show the building, what kind of atmosphere there is inside and outside — and it's a big deal. There is nothing wrong with that. But in this movie, it didn't seem necessary."

What was necessary was delivering a compelling narrative about the largely untold drama of Iwo Jima's defense, a heroic 1945 stand in which almost every one of the 20,000 Japanese soldiers in the fight died. And it was to be made almost entirely in Japanese, filmed right on the heels of "Flags of Our Fathers," Eastwood's other Iwo Jima movie, with a modest $20-million budget and just five weeks of photography.

It all sounds beyond reach, but Eastwood has proved repeatedly that he's not much for limits.

In just the last three years, Eastwood has turned out four ambitious movies: "Mystic River," which won acting Oscars for Sean Penn and Tim Robbins; "Million Dollar Baby," the winner of four Academy Awards, including best picture; the Oct. 20 release "Flags of Our Fathers"; and "Letters From Iwo Jima," which opens in the U.S. on Dec. 20. ("Letters" opened last week in Japan.)

'Everything is different'

HIS wrinkles may be deeper and his hair a mess, but in conversation Eastwood, 76, is sharper than filmmakers half his age. And rather than reminisce about the good old days, the bomber-jacket-clad Eastwood seems more energetic talking about his future as a filmmaker. Over the course of an hour, he becomes most animated when discussing the thrill he feels shooting on a new set that he hasn't scouted or rehearsed on; at other times, he complains about how the countless rewrites most studio executives demand take the life out of screenplays. Rather than coming across as a curmudgeon, he sounds simply like an artist.

"Yes, it is strange," Eastwood says of having two movies released within two months of each other, each potentially competing against the other for ticket sales and awards. "But I've never made a Japanese film either. So everything is different."

Like an academic curious to test an idea, "Letters" was sparked by an Eastwood question: Why did the Americans struggle for a month during World War II to take an island that had been predicted to fall in just hours?

"When I was doing 'Flags,' I just got interested in what made this defense so difficult to bust through. One of our generals, Holland Smith, said the smartest general on the island was Kuribayashi. So I wondered, 'Who is this guy?' " Eastwood says. He read what limited Japanese history was available and was particularly moved by Kuribayashi's collection of missives to his family, "Illustrated Letters From a Commanding Officer Who Died Honorably."

"You find out what kind of guy he was, and you find out in his letters that he was like any other father. He was concerned about his kids' health and welfare. That's what got me interested in the story: It's a father in any nationality, in any language, in any war, concerned about his family."

It was an interesting dramatic parallel to "Flags" too: While the American soldiers struggle in that film with the emotional aftermath of battle, the Japanese military in "Letters" faces the certainty of imminent death. So Eastwood told "Flags" producer Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Paul Haggis (who also wrote "Million Dollar Baby") he was considering making not one but two films about Iwo Jima. They knew better than to laugh, as did executives at Warner Bros., which had only reluctantly backed "Mystic River" and "Million Dollar Baby."

"They have said I was out of my mind so many times in the past that maybe they thought, 'You know, maybe we ought to go with him on this trip,' " Eastwood says.

Moonlighting

HAGGIS came up with the framings of the "Letters" story and recruited screenwriter Iris Yamashita to write the script. While he was making "Flags," Eastwood would tinker with the screenplay. "On the weekends, on an evening, if I had a moment and just wanted to get away from what I was doing, I'd read it," Eastwood says. And even as cameras were rolling on "Flags," Eastwood would occasionally grab a few shots for "Letters." "I'd just tell my script supervisor, 'This is for the other project.' "

Eastwood moved quickly. While sound effects were being finished on "Flags," he went out and in only five weeks (half the production schedule for "Flags") filmed "Letters."

Once considered for an early 2007 release, the film was edited and scored ahead of schedule; Warner Bros. moved it into 2006 for awards eligibility.

"If I have any virtue — and I don't have many — it's that I'm very decisive," Eastwood says. "Rightly or wrongly, whether it's a good decision or a bad one, I'll make it rather quickly. And that's probably an asset in making films."

Another asset is having a point of view: Not just because it's in Japanese, "Letters" unfolds like a Akira Kurosawa film. There's a patience, and intimacy, that "Flags" doesn't have.

As the dinner party scene shows, there's little window dressing. For those and other reasons, more than a handful of people are likely to say it's actually a more accomplished, and emotionally resonant, movie.

"Better is in the eyes of the beholder," Eastwood says diplomatically. "But I try to be different, and every project has its own life. I just try to fit into that life, and I try to guide that life into whatever my feelings are in that moment.

"One movie is much more difficult than the other," Eastwood says of "Flags," because of its shifting time sequences. "Because 'Letters' was somewhat more linear, it was a little easier in some ways, even though we were shooting in a different language and with a different culture. I know some people will like it better because it's linear, I guess, or because it's deeper and darker."

For now, Eastwood will take some time off. "I don't know if I'm retired as an actor, but I am, probably, unless a great role comes along," he says. "But how many great roles are there for guys my age? So I will probably stay behind the camera."

And continue to surprise everybody along the way.
Title: Re: Letters From Iwo Jima
Post by: MacGuffin on December 15, 2006, 09:55:02 PM
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fus.movies1.yimg.com%2Fmovies.yahoo.com%2Fimages%2Fhv%2Fphoto%2Fmovie_pix%2Fwarner_brothers%2Fletters_from_iwo_jima%2Flettersfromiwojima_posterbig.jpg&hash=9d1868852ee460e9af29087f65ad799341bd5672)


Trailer here. (http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/lettersfromiwojima/trailer1r/)
Title: Re: Letters From Iwo Jima
Post by: MacGuffin on January 17, 2007, 02:37:43 PM
Language of 'Letters' no barrier
Source: Los Angeles Times

If your first produced screenplay became what many consider a sure-thing best picture Oscar nominee directed by the legendary Clint Eastwood, you'd practically be taking out billboards on Sunset to crow about your achievement, wouldn't you? It's, uh, kind of a big deal. But Iris Yamashita is so laid-back and unassuming it's hard to reconcile that this young woman is the screenwriter of "Letters From Iwo Jima," the grueling, psychologically poetic war film that has suddenly received a barrage of kudos (and, as of Monday, a Golden Globe for best foreign-language film).

While planning last year's "Flags of Our Fathers," a brutal depiction of the attack on Iwo Jima and its aftermath, Eastwood discovered a collection of letters written by the Japanese commander on the island (played in the film by Ken Watanabe), and became fascinated by the idea of doing a companion film that showed the Japanese perspective of the 1945 battle.

Eastwood brought the project to his best picture-winning "Million Dollar Baby" screenwriter, Paul Haggis, who was too buried in post-production on "Crash" to write it but who took it upon himself to find another screenwriter. Yamashita's agent at Creative Artists Agency got wind of the open assignment and sent Haggis (also a CAA client) some of her scripts.

"They were very different, very well researched and had a distinct sense of time and place," Haggis says via e-mail from New Mexico, where he's shooting his follow up to "Crash," "In the Valley of Elah," a drama about the suspicious disappearance of an Iraq war soldier.

At the time, Yamashita, who declines to reveal her age, was working full time as a Web programmer and had yet to sell a spec or get a paid assignment. But during their second meeting, Haggis suddenly decided that she was right for the gig and told Yamashita, "OK, now you can quit your job."

Though she kept reporting to work ("I waited until there was actually a contract," she says), she delved into additional research immediately, and soon after getting Haggis' support, Yamashita had her first sit-down with him, Eastwood and producer Rob Lorenz.

"I was very in awe," she says of meeting the iconic Eastwood. "He was very laid-back and down to earth and that made me feel a lot more comfortable."

Yamashita says that Eastwood remained a committed booster throughout her drafts. "The goal basically was just to show the horrors of war."

The battle for Iwo Jima so decimated the Japanese that there was almost no firsthand material available about the Japanese side of the fight (only about 1,100 survived from the original 22,000), so she ended up getting most of the feel from memoirs written by Japanese soldiers about other battles.

For the flashback sequences, Yamashita synthesized material from many sources to portray the fear, militarism and forced nationalism rampant in Japan during that era.

It was an atmosphere her parents, who were young children growing up in the Tokyo area during World War II, knew well. Yamashita's father's eldest brother fought and nearly died of dysentery, and her mother's house in the city was burned down. Her father later came to America on a Fulbright scholarship; Yamashita was born in Missouri and spent a year studying at the University of Tokyo after earning a master's in mechanical engineering from UC Berkeley.

When Yamashita went back to Japan last month, it was as a minor celebrity. At the Tokyo premiere of "Iwo Jima," 6,500 people were on hand to mob the film's stars at the famous Budokan arena. Such was the excitement level that Eastwood, Lorenz and Yamashita had to be escorted down their hotel's staff elevator to the underground garage, where they were quickly ushered into a contingent of highly secure vans.

"What was that Clint Eastwood movie where the security guards were running with the president's cars?" Yamashita asks as she tries to characterize the mayhem.

" 'In the Line of Fire'?"

"Yeah, exactly. There were those people running next to the van," she says, and laughs. "That was an experience I know I'll never have again."