The Eastern Edge

Found this in the news today and chopped up a few stories for a summery:

Clint Eastwood on the war films he grew up watching; "One side was good and one side was the villain. Well, we know that war just isn’t like that."
Eastwood hopes to correct that perception with his most ambitious project to date — two films that deal with the bloody battle on Iwo Jima. The first, "Flags of Our Fathers," shows the U.S. point of view, while the second film, "Letters From Iwo Jima" (to be released overseas as "Red Sun, Black Sand"), tells the story from the Japanese side of the battle.

The Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945 left 21,000 Japanese and 6,800 U.S. soldiers dead in one month. It produced one of the most symbolic images of the war, a photograph of six U.S. military personnel raising a U.S. flag on the island’s high point of Mount Suribachi. The photo, by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, was the subject of controversy after it emerged that it might not have been taken under fire as previously reported but may have been posed.
The two films are based on the book "Flags of Our Fathers" by James Bradley and Ron Powers. It chronicles one man’s attempt to piece together his father’s role in raising the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima.
Eastwood said he read the book about two years ago and was immediately intrigued. "I tried to buy the film rights but they were owned by Steven Spielberg. Then about 18 months ago, he asked me to take it over," he said. "I read as many books as I could on the subject and started to get interested in the unique defensive strategy employed by Lt-Gen Tadamichi Kuribayashi. I wanted to know more him and his men, and the more I read, the more similarities I could see among young people on both sides, whose lives were interrupted by -– and in many cases, terminated by the war. That’s why I wanted to tell both sides of the story."

"Some 12,000 Japanese soldiers from that conflict remain unaccounted for," said Eastwood. "These men deserve to be seen and heard from in history. They gave their lives for what they thought was to defend their country or at least to delay the invasion of mainland Japan. They deserve respect just as the American forces do."

"Letters" will be all in Japanese and with a Japanese cast, chief among them Ken Watanabe, 46, as Kuribayashi.

"Flags of Our Fathers" will be released first, in October, and "Letters From Iwo Jima" in December.