Letters From Iwo Jima

[MacGuffin]

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.

[MacGuffin]

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.

[pete]

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.

[MacGuffin]

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.

[pete]

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.

[MacGuffin]

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.'

[Pubrick]

Watanabe said '... Accepting the reality is the first step.'

bowing to it politely is the second step.

[MacGuffin]

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.

[modage]

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.

[MacGuffin]

with English subtitles.

[MacGuffin]

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.)

[Ghostboy]

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.

[Gold Trumpet]

God dammnit, I'm looking forward to this movie. I didn't need to know about that scene.

[Gold Trumpet]

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.

[Pubrick]

The arrogance of this board is still present.

i hope you're including yourself in that generalization.