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''Flags of Our Fathers'': Clint's next Oscar winner? | 141714__bradford_l
FLAG BEARER Bradford as Marine Pfc. Gagnon

Because he's long been based at Warner Bros., the movie was set up as a joint DreamWorks/Warner effort, with Warner helping finance it and getting overseas distribution. (The two companies are also sharing the cost of Letters.) Though he'd never been the obsessed WWII buff that Spielberg and Tom Hanks are, Eastwood plunged into the history of Iwo Jima. He interviewed lots of veterans. He persuaded Paul Haggis, who'd just written Million Dollar Baby and finished shooting Crash, to work out the script. Haggis came up with a complex, time-fractured scheme that weaves flashbacks within flashbacks.

Armed with a budget of $90 million, Eastwood's team at Malpaso Productions set about planning the hell-on-earth battle scenes. After eight months of negotiations involving the governor of Tokyo, and requiring a huge cleanup of Iwo's neglected, debris-strewn beaches, they wrangled permission to shoot for a single day on Iwo Jima itself. But most fight scenes had to be filmed somewhere else, since the island is considered sacred war-memorial ground. They found a substitute in, of all places, Iceland. As earth-science buff Bradford explains, ''It's all geology, man. Pacific islands are essentially volcanic eruptions in the middle of the ocean. That's what Iceland is.''

The faux-Iwo portion of the shoot lasted five wearying weeks in August and September of 2005 — about as long as the actual battle. Beach scenes would later be doctored with extensive CG to show Mount Suribachi in the background, and the overall look of the film would be pushed into a nearly monochromatic range, the better to emphasize the inky blacks Eastwood loves in movie images. (Sprays of blood from bullet hits were separately turned more crimson to make them stand out.) It grew cold by the end of the battle work, but Eastwood, by all accounts, delighted in being there. He threw himself into filming with what his cast describes as amazing vigor. ''In your 70s, you're not supposed to be jumping boat to boat while the boats are moving, carrying a frigging camera and following actors,'' says Beach, 33. ''He was jumping over these moving ships on the ocean. If he fell, he probably would have drowned. The guy is just amazing.''

On land, as he tore around the black sands in an all-terrain vehicle between takes, Eastwood constantly improvised camera setups — something Spielberg also likes to do. According to Eastwood's longtime director of photography, Tom Stern, ''In our milieu, storyboards and shot lists are for sissies.'' Eastwood doesn't like too much preparation, says Stern, because ''you can fall into what Clint calls 'the paralysis of analysis.''' Phillippe estimates that 80 percent of the shots in the movie are first takes. ''Which is staggering,'' he muses, ''if you know anything about film production.''


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