Ken Watanabe was wary and unsure when he first heard news that Clint Eastwood wanted to make “Letters From Iwo Jima.”
A companion piece to the American director’s “Flags of Our Fathers”–about the World War II battle for the tiny isle 500 miles south of Japan–“Letters” would offer the flip side. It would show the defenders’ perspective, the story of the 22,000 Japanese who dug in and fought–almost all to the death (only 1,083 survived)–against the historic onslaught of Marines.
“At the time, I thought it should be a Japanese project, with a Japanese director and a Japanese producer and a Japanese studio,” Watanabe said over the phone from Tokyo.
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“But I got a call from Clint, and then I met with him. I told him that I was really concerned about why he wanted to make this movie, and how can he make a Japanese film?”
Eastwood made his case, explaining that he saw “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters From Iwo Jima” as companion pieces, the halves that make the whole, and that telling just one side of the story–the Americans’–would leave it incomplete.
“Flags of Our Fathers,” which opened in October, described the epic invasion of Iwo Jima by U.S. forces. It also dealt with the subsequent public-relations campaign in which the Marines who raised the American flag on the island’s Mt. Suribachi were paraded around the U.S. in an effort to raise millions in war bonds.
“Clint said that unless he made ‘Letters’ he wouldn’t be telling the whole story,” Watanabe said. “What became clear to me was that Clint had a strong will to cross the boundaries of culture and language and make the best film possible, the most truthful film possible. … All Clint wanted to do was present the reality of war, the truth of what happened, and to let the audiences decide.”
In “Letters,” Watanabe stars as Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the officer who oversaw the fortification of the island and led his men in the 36-day battle in the early weeks of 1945, fully aware that his mission was doomed.
Like “Flags,” “Letters” was shot mainly on the volcanic terrain of Iceland, and on soundstages in Hollywood. The U.S. Navy armada that stands offshore, bombarding the island and the Japanese, was mostly the work of computer renderers.
“When I first saw the final film, with the computer graphics and the sound and everything, I was so surprised. Wow!”
Watanabe and his fellow actors– including the pop star Kazunari Ninomiya–reshaped and improvised much of their dialogue on the set.
“Clint allowed me to make dialogue in Japanese, and I just got together with the interpreter and other cast, and before each sequence we would have the complete dialogue in Japanese,” said Watanabe, who is best known to American audiences for his roles in “The Last Samurai” and “Memoirs of a Geisha.” “Clint could focus on the performances, the actors’ feelings, and not worry about the specific words.”