Art is subjective, but that does not make it immune to criticism. That very thought, though, placed actors Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee at odds nearly two decades ago.
The public quarrel resurfaced when author Shawn Levy released “Clint: The Man and The Movies” on July 1.
The biography looks back at the career and personal life of the four-time Oscar winner. In the book, Levy writes about Lee calling out Eastwood’s lack of Black castings in the 2006 World War II films “Letters From Iwo Jima” and “Flags of Our Fathers” depicting the U.S. Marines in the Battle of Iwo Jima.
“There was not one Black soldier in both of those films,” remarked Lee during a 2008 Cannes Film Festival press conference. That same year, he released “Miracle at St. Anna,” a movie about an all-Black Army unit in Italy during WWII.
“Many veterans, African Americans who survived that war, are upset at Clint Eastwood. In his vision of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist. Simple as that,” the Morehouse College alum said.
“The Bridges of Madison County” actor took issue with the critique. “Has he ever studied the history?” Eastwood said to The Guardian in 2008. “I’m playing it the way I read it historically, and that’s the way it is… A guy like him should shut his face.”
Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006) sparked a notable feud with Spike Lee, who criticized the absence of Black Marines amid Eastwood’s focus on the Iwo Jima flag-raising. While Flags underperformed, it challenged one-sided war narratives, igniting cultural discourse. pic.twitter.com/D3tzDXiSUa
— Nyra Kraal (@NyraKraal) May 17, 2025
Lee hit back in an ABC News interview. “First of all, the man is not my father, and we’re not on a plantation either,” he began. The “Do the Right Thing” writer-director noted, “A comment like, ‘A guy like that should shut his face’—come on, Clint, come on. He sounds like an angry old man right there.”
The New York Knicks super fan addressed the matter again in 2012 during an appearance on “Sway’s Universe.” When asked about the status of his and Eastwood’s relationship, he responded, “We never had a relationship.”
He also doubled down on his comments. “If you blinked, you’d miss the one Black person that was in it. … We are never portrayed as fighting for this country. We have died fighting for this country, and Hollywood, for the most part, has ignored that,” he explained.
A reaction to the resurfaced feud read, “Forced diversity is insulting… Instead of Blackwashing history, maybe Hollywood can create movies about African history and African myths.” Elsewhere online, someone else wrote, “Why do so many white people have so much … energy toward Spike Lee?”
A third said, “I completely agree with Spike Lee onc Clint Eastwood not having Black Soldiers doing heroic things in his 2 War Films.”
Lee said he buried the hatchet after voicing his grievances, and that rumors Steven Spielberg helped the men reach a truce were untrue.
