You won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film with Letters From Iwo Jima... You must be pretty pleased?
I'm thrilled but now that I'm a foreign director I've got to learn some languages!
Did you enjoy posing for all those winning photos?
I don't pose - what am I? Paris Hilton?
So, it's worked out well, but what possessed you to make a second movie about the battle for Iwo Jima?
As I prepared for Flags Of Our Fathers, the more curious I became about this man everybody said was the smartest officer on Iwo Jima, General Kuribayashi. I found a book about his experiences in 1928 and 1930 when he was a young captain and envoy in Boston and Canada. In his letters home he had the same concerns every father has - apologising for leaving work on the kitchen unfinished, correcting his children's grammar. He'd draw pictures to send to his daughter and son. I found someone [Iris Yamashita] to flesh out a story from the Japanese point of view and that script was handed to me the day I started work on Flags Of Our Fathers.
Was it hard to portray the Japanese as sympathetic after Flags?
We depict atrocities on both sides, as they were all brought up with propaganda films that depicted the enemy as monsters. The Japanese showed women jumping off cliffs rather than face the cruelty of the Americans. So I tried to get beyond the propaganda and get into the human aspect. One soldier was an Olympic athlete who won a gold medal in an equestrian event in the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles. Another, who won the silver in a swimming event, was also on the island.
Letter writing is obviously an aspect of the film - do you write them yourself?
I'm a little spoilt I have to admit. I dictate letters and say, "Take a letter and make sure you spell it right!" But I do write occasionally. Usually I pull out the old cell phone and call to say hello because I don't do email. I should learn it but I'm a little retarded in that sense!
Didn't you survive a plane crash in your military career?
Yeah. I was hopping a ride from Seattle to Alameda and ended up in the ocean off Northern California. The Navy asked me to stand by for a hearing about the plane going down. It got shelved, but it kept me from being shipped overseas, which meant I didn't go to [the Korean] war. Who knows how that would have changed my life?
Do you see yourself doing another foreign film?
I guess now I have to. I'll be doing a Hungarian film next or maybe Lithuanian! Everything is decided on the story so I don't care what language or where it is, I will go to any lengths to do it if the story is right.
Sounds like you're becoming a workaholic in your old age...
I've been trying to take a vacation since Mystic River, but Million Dollar Baby came along and then Steven Spielberg asked me to do Flags Of Our Fathers and you don't say no to Steven. Then while we were doing that, the idea came to do Letters. So now I'm going to sit back and relax and see if I can get that golf ball closer to the hole!