LATEST: CLINT EASTWOOD has told SPIKE LEE to "shut his face" after the African-American filmmaker complained about the lack of black actors in Eastwood's films.
Eastwood has rejected the Malcolm X director's complaint that he had failed to include a single black soldier in his 2006 films Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, about the 1945 battle for the Japanese island.
Rationalising his choice, the actor-turned-director explains the African-American troops who were at battle didn't take part in raising the flag.
He tells Britain's The Guardian newspaper, "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 go: 'This guy's lost his mind'. I mean, it's not accurate."
Referring to Lee, Eastwood adds: "A guy like him should shut his face."
Lee's comments came during a press conference at the Cannes International Film Festival last month (May08), where he was promoting his own war film, Miracle at St Anna, a war drama about the all-black 92nd Buffalo Division, which fought against the Germans in World War II.
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