Barry Pepper and Ryan Phillippe, playing a pair of GIs in the assault on Iwo Jima, went to war with Clint Eastwood in Flags of Our Fathers.
I was fascinated by what they told me about the 76-year-old director, who rarely talks about himself. It's surprisingly revealing. "Clint would never ever raise his voice beyond a monotone, almost a whisper," Barry told me. "But you could hear every word that he spoke because work would suddenly stop and everyone would be quiet just straining to hear him. Nobody wanted to miss his next move."
The moves were coming fast and furious, because Eastwood was forging through the epic battle scenes, filmed in Iceland, at his customary take-no-prisoners pace. "Eighty percent of what you see in the film was only one take," Ryan says. "It gets to a point where you get pissed off at yourself if you don't get it on the first take. If they have to go again, it becomes this macho thing where it's like you don't want to let everyone down — the mythology of one take created by Clint."
Pepper adds, "One day, in the middle of a big action sequence, a squib [a small explosive] blew up in my face and split my lip open. Clint came over, and I said, 'One of the medics wants me to go to the hospital for stitches, but I'm staying because I know that if I leave, you'll shoot this scene without me.' He laughed and told me, 'Don't worry, you'll live. It's a long way from your heart.' Then, he very quietly told me a story about being shot clean through his left side by a blank round during Unforgiven, and suddenly my lip didn't seem like such a big deal."
Eastwood went out of his way to make the experience of war real for his actors. "He decided that it would be best for us to be as confused, scared and disoriented as the troops were when they landed," Pepper says. "In one scene I had to throw a grenade into this Japanese bunker, and I knew there was going to be a huge explosion. I made the mistake of asking Clint about the plan: 'Where should I run to miss that big bang that's going to go off?' He said, 'We've come this far; let's not ruin it by thinking.'"

Source: http://www.yahoo.com
Posted by Jeanne Wolf


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