Clint Eastwood’s companion piece to Flags of our Fathers, now titled Red Sun, Black Sand, is finding itself having some logistical issues. The movie will tell the story of the battle for Iwo Jima from the Japanese point of view, a very intriguing concept – two films telling the same story from different sides. I hope that Eastwood uses some of the same actors in both to create a continuity.
The film starts shooting in March, but the distributors, Dreamworks and Warner Bros, are already wondering what the heck they’re going to do with the two films. Do they release them at once? Do they have some kind of staggered release? Look what happened when Guns N Roses released the Use Your Illusions albums – Axl Rose’s face turned to wax and he got horrible cornrows not soon after. Can we afford to have that happen to Eastwood?
Meanwhile, Clint hasn’t yet secured all the proper permissions to film on Iwo Jima. It’s hard to imagine that he’ll be stymied in the end, but the production is facing a serious deadline if it wants to get done in time to be released in conjunction with Flags.
There’s been no official casting announcements either, but Variety is reporting that Ken Watanabe – aka Hollywood’s Fave Azn – will be starring.