Clint Eastwood on Spike Lee-“A guy like him should shut his face.”

I love Clint Eastwood as actor and director….but also for how he doesn’t have to play nice when he doesn’t feel like it. Read a great interview with him here. Eastwood talks about controversy surrounding his movies as well as politics.

Spike Lee, director and professional whiner, ripped Eastwood for not having enough black soldiers in Eastwood’s movie, “Flags of Our Fathers.” Of course, the armed forces were far more segregated in WWII and there weren’t any black soldiers in the group that actually raised the flag at Iwo Jima

Eastwood has no time for Lee’s gripes. “He was complaining when I did Bird [the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker]. Why would a white guy be doing that? I was the only guy who made it, that’s why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead he was making something else.” As for Flags of Our Fathers, he says, yes, there was a small detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima as a part of a munitions company, “but they didn’t raise the flag. The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn’t do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people’d go, ‘This guy’s lost his mind.’ I mean, it’s not accurate.”

And on politics…

But though he has been associated in the public mind with Republican viewpoints, he’s something of an individualist. “I don’t pay attention to either side,” he claims. “I mean, I’ve always been a libertarian. Leave everybody alone. Let everybody else do what they want. Just stay out of everybody else’s hair. So I believe in that value of smaller government. Give politicians power and all of a sudden they’ll misuse it on ya.”