When Clint Eastwood heads back to the South Pacific (or at least to Iceland, which is apparently standing in for the slightly more temperate region) for his WWII movie Flags of Our Fathers, he’ll have a couple more dogfaces to command.
Blue-eyed actor Neal McDonough will grab his M1 Garand for Eastwood’s directing effort, having already received substantial training during HBO’s Band of Brothers series. And according to Coming Soon, Jamie Bell (Billy Elliott) is also now part of the rifle squad (Bell already went back one war earlier in the UK trench-terror movie Deathwatch). The story follows those Easy Company soldiers made famous by that flag-raising photo from Mount Suribachi in the battle of Iwo Jima, and is based on a book by James Bradley, the son of one of those six soldiers immortalized in the picture.
At 19, Bell (who stars in this weekend’s suburban satire The Chumscrubber) is probably closest in age to the actual soldiers who fought at Iwo Jima – other actors already on board include Paul Walker, Adam Beach, Jesse Bradford and Ryan Phillippe, all of whom are probably now getting whipped into shape by Dale Dye. The Dreamworks/Warner Bros. flick is penned by Clint’s Million Dollar Baby scribe Paul Haggis, and Steven Spielberg is also producing, because he loves making war (even though it’s hell).
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