Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima portrays the battle from the Japanese perspective, exploring the soldiers’ humanity and sacrifice, with a unique narrative style.

Echoes of War

In 2004, Clint Eastwood was determined to adapt James Bradley and Ron Powers’ best-selling novel Memoirs of Our Fathers, published four years earlier and telling the story of three of the six soldiers who raised the flag in Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of Iwo Jima on February 23, 1945. At the Academy Awards ceremony, he approached Steven Spielberg, who owned the rights, to sell them to him. Spielberg refused to sell Eastwood the rights, but proposed a collaboration, with Spielberg as producer and Eastwood as director. This deal resulted in two films in 2006 alone, Memoirs of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Originally intended as a single feature, Eastwood decided to dedicate a second film entirely to the Japanese perception of the battle in the Pacific after discovering the 2002 book Picture Letters from the Commander In Chief, recounting the letters of General Tadamichi Kuribayashi. This aspect alone already gives the works a unique status in cinema. This is the first time that a filmmaker has covered the same conflict on both sides in several films. Finally, for Iwo Jima, Eastwood decided to give his work a higher level of realism by hiring an all-Japanese cast, with dialogue in Japanese only. Clint Eastwood tells us in the making of Letters from Iwo Jima :

“It was fascinating. I was just wondering who the tactiscient was on the other side, what their mentality was, what they had felt were. The Americans were sent to the Pacific knowing… hoping that were gonna come back […] In the case of the Japanese, they were told they weren’t coming back. It’s a different mentality. And so that made another film – it was another story that I didn’t want to cross-collateralize in Flags, so I decided to make another film about it.”[1]

The two films serve a common purpose when put together, a tale of heroism, sacrifice and hardship for both sides. That’s precisely why the two films are being released two months apart, with Memoirs of Our Fathers in October and Letters from Iwo Jima in December. For the latter film, Eastwood focuses on two characters, Imperial Japanese Army General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanebe) and the baker who was drafted into the war, Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya). The focus on the General allows us to observe how the island prepared for the arrival of the Americans with various defense strategies. With underground caves and cannons hidden in the mountains. This enabled the Japanese army to hold out for 36 days of fighting, instead of the 3 or 4 days planned by the American army.[2]

What makes Eastwood’s work so distinctive is also its narrative. For a war film, Iwo Jima takes a long time to show any fighting or action. Instead, the filmmaker centers on the relationships between soldiers and officers, and how each of them tries to adapt to an unwelcoming, hot island with often contaminated water. Saigo talks to his squadmates about the menial tasks they have to complete, and the futility of a battle they know they’ll never win. The process is the same for Kuribayashi and his subordinates, trying to protect an island despite the cruel lack of resources and support from the Japanese army, which lacks planes, boats and infantry, relocated to the metropolis. In a similar way to Spielberg’s Band of Brothers, Eastwood creates a bond between the viewer and the Japanese soldiers. The notion of allied and enemy camps thus becomes blurred, as Japanese soldiers face the same challenges as Americans, albeit indoctrinated by a culture of sacrifice for the Emperor. The focus is on the mental difficulties of war, rather than the war itself. In the many letters written by the soldiers to their families, the futility of war and the relationships forged between the soldiers are constantly recurring themes. When Lieutenant-Colonel Takeichi Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara) reads a letter from a captured American soldier, all the Japanese soldiers identify with the sentiments expressed, with their desire to return home to their families and put an end to the war.

Visually, Letters from Iwo Jima takes up the color tones used in Saving Private Ryan, adopting a harsh aesthetic, desaturated to the point of leaning towards black and white, with the exception of the explosions, where the red of the flames contrasts with even more violence. With the help of cinematographer Tom Stern, Eastwood insists on “conveying an ‘uncomfortable’ sense of war”[3]. to avoid any kind of beauty or glorification of war and its battles.

The end result is a film filled with sadness, pain and injustice for characters whose tragic end we know beforehand, a long preparation for certain death. On release, Eastwood’s two films failed to achieve the commercial success they had hoped for, with Memoirs of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima both grossing less than Eastwood’s Space Cowboys, released in 2000. Iwo Jima’s commercial failure in the U.S. (with box-office earnings of just $14 million) is easily explained by its all-Japanese dialogue and violent depiction of the American army.  However, Iwo Jima was an impressive commercial success in Japan, where the film took in the majority of its international box-office revenue of $55 million against a budget of $20 million. Reviews were also glowing, with the press highlighting the director’s humanism and the dignity with which he filmed these soldiers. The film was nominated for Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay, and won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.

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[1] Clint Eastwood interview in Red Sun, Black Sand: The Making of Letters from Iwo Jima, bonus documentary material on Letters from Iwo Jima DVD.

[2] https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/battle-of-iwo-jima

[3] STERRITT David, The Cinema of Clint Eastwood : Chronicles of America, Wallflower Press, 2014, p. 198.