Right before Clint Eastwood started shooting "Flags of Our Fathers," a drama about the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945 and the famous Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of six soldiers raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi, he attended a 60th anniversary commemoration in San Francisco, and talked to surviving veterans. When he finished his film, which opens nationwide Friday, he showed it to some of those who had shared their Iwo Jima experiences with him and his crew.

One was retired Marine Maj. Gen. Fred Haynes, who had fought there as a 24-year-old captain. After the film, he told Eastwood how impressed he was at how the film used old combat footage to make it more realistic.

"I told him that we hadn't used any newsreel footage, that we had shot all that ourselves with the actors," Eastwood says. "And I told him it was the highest compliment anyone had ever given me."

Eastwood has won Academy Awards as a director ("Million Dollar Baby" and "Unforgiven"), he's an American Film Institute honoree, a three-time winner of the Cannes Film Festival's highest jury prize and recipient of countless other accolades. But his sincere reaction to Haynes' response, he says, came from the two goals he had in making "Flags of Our Fathers."

"I've made a few war movies, and I've acted in a lot more, and it was really important to me to make the most realistic picture I could of what happened on that island, in one of the most significant and grueling battles ever fought for the United States.

"And the second thing was, I wanted to do justice to those guys who fought it, for the courage of guys like Gen. Haynes and the sacrifice of all those that didn't make it."

Almost 7,000 American soldiers were killed in a battle that lasted little more than a month. More than 20,000 Japanese troops died.

"It's almost impossible to comprehend," he says.

If "Flags" is to the Pacific theater of war what Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" was to the European campaign, it's not altogether coincidental. Eastwood, who served in the Army during the Korean War, says he reads a lot of books about World War II but was especially moved by the James Bradley book on which his film is based, "because it resonated on so many levels."

"Well, everybody has seen Joe Rosenthal's photograph, but not a lot of people know the story about how it was made, and how it was exploited by the Defense Department," says Eastwood.

"They needed to sell a lot of bonds to keep the war going, and so they sent the three guys in the picture who survived the battle on this big publicity tour as national heroes. And one of them was John (Doc) Bradley, a Navy corpsman. After he came back and started a family, he never talked about the war. His son James knew he was in the photograph, but that was all.

"So when Doc died, James set out to find out what happened to his dad at Iwo Jima, and that led to him eventually writing the book. So it's also this story of a man connecting with his father after his death."

Eastwood inquired about the rights, only to learn they had been purchased by Spielberg's DreamWorks; Spielberg had briefly considered directing the film himself. Eastwood, who had directed an episode of Spielberg's "Amazing Stories" TV series, mentioned to Spielberg how much he liked the book, and two years later got a call.

Eastwood had wanted all the soldiers to be played by actors the same age: "What always floors people is that the average age of these guys was 19. You look at the World War II films made when I was coming up, they starred Randolph Scott, John Wayne, Robert Taylor — all these guys were in their late 30s and 40s. The oldest guy in the photograph, Mike Strank, the sergeant, he was 26. All the guys in his unit called him the Old Man."

Realizing the three principles had emotionally difficult roles to play, Eastwood cast Phillippe, 32, as 21-year-old Bradley; Adam Beach, 33, as 22-year-old Ira Hayes, the alcoholic American Indian who inspired a famous ballad; and Jesse Bradford, 27, as 19-year-old Rene Gagnon.

Eastwood, an incredible 76, says he is "starting to feel a little mortal." Along with his longtime friends, his mother, Francesca, also died this year at 97. And he says he was going to call Iwo Jima photographer Rosenthal to arrange to show him "Flags" when he "picked up the paper to see his obituary" in August.

'LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA' STEPS INTO ENEMY SHOES

During the making of "Flags of Our Fathers," Clint Eastwood began to think a lot about the Japanese soldiers who fought at Iwo Jima, "realizing all these men had girlfriends and mothers just like our boys did."

He started thinking about making a companion movie that would look at Iwo Jima from the Japanese perspective. Because "Flags"' screenwriter Paul Haggis was much in demand after Oscar wins for "Million Dollar Baby" and "Crash," Eastwood asked if he knew a young writer who might be interested in writing the script and who Haggis could mentor.

Haggis introduced him to Japanese-American writer Iris Yamashita, whom Eastwood hired to pen what would become "Letters From Iwo Jima," a drama about Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi as he is seen through the eyes of the young Japanese soldiers under his command.

When "Flags" wrapped, Eastwood immediately started "Letters," which will have its premiere in Tokyo in December and be released in the United States next year. To Eastwood's knowledge, it's the first film made by an American to examine the war from a Japanese perspective.

"We were all set up and everybody was ready to go, so we just did it," he says.

— Terry Lawson