Eastwood Defends His Films

Clint Eastwood has fired back at claims made by Spike Lee that he does not feature enough black actors in his movies, BBC News reports.

Eastwood - who has reportedly told Lee to "shut his face" - defends that his first concern when making a movie is accuracy. Using his 2006 film, Flags of Our Fathers, as an example, Eastwood defends: "If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, they'd say 'this guy's lost his mind.'"



However, fellow director Spike Lee challenged reporters at Cannes to ask Eastwood why he fails to put more black actors in his films, citing that there were none in either of his movies about Iwo Jima. "That was his version. The Negro version did not exist," complained Lee.

But to Eastwood, historical facts are paramount. "I'm not in that game. I'm playing it the way I read it historically, and that's the way it is," he says. He uses his 1998 film, Bird, based on jazz musician Charlie Parker, as a time where he blended both history and black actors in films. "When I do a picture and it's 90 percent black, like Bird, I use 90 percent black people."

Eastwood notes that his next project, The Human Factor, will certainly feature black actors. "I'm not going to make Nelson Mandela a white guy," he jokingly promises.