Clint fires broadside at Spike Lee

Two weeks ago, Spike Lee attacked fellow film director Clint Eastwood for not including black soldiers in his two Second World War movies Flags of Our Fathers and Letter from Iwo Jima. Now Clint has hit back. Using the type of language last heard in his Dirty Harry films - "A guy like him should shut his mouth" – Eastwood points out that the few black GIs who took part in the battle were not involved in the famous raising of the stars and stripes, on which his films are based. "If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people'd go: 'This guy's lost his mind'."  

The perpetually agitated Lee, speaking at the Cannes Film Festival, had said: "Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not one Negro actor on the screen. There's no way I know why he did that... But I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It's not like he didn't know."

Defending the racial make-up in his films as historically accurate, Eastwood referred to another of his movies, Changeling, which was set in Los Angeles before the city had a large group of African-Americans. "What are you going to do, you going to tell a fuckin' story about that?” he said. "Make it look like a commercial for an equal opportunity player? I'm not in that game."

Eastwood's next project, The Human Factor, will be about Nelson Mandela. Asked if he would remain historically accurate with depictions of the former South African president, he said: "I'm not going to make Nelson Mandela a white guy." ·