Saying "a guy like (Lee) him should shut his face… has he ever studied history?" in the Britain's The Guardian, the five times Oscar winner – Clint Eastwood fired back at Spike Lee, who criticized him for not depicting any black actors in his two World War II movies, "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima."
 
It started on May 20, while Lee held a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, after the premiere of a trailer for his new film "Miracle at St. Anna," a World War II epic about an all-black infantry division that fought in Italy. Lee wondered why black soldiers weren't a part of Eastwood's 2006 drama "Flags of Our Fathers," which detailed the 1945 battle for Iwo Jima and its aftermath.

"There were many African-Americans who survived that war and who were upset at Clint.... That was his version: the negro soldier did not exist. I have a different version,” Lee said. "It's not like [Eastwood] could say he didn't know. It was a conscious decision not to have any black people," Lee alleged.

Firing back at Spike Lee, Eastwood said, "Has he ever studied the history? Why would a white guy be doing that?”
Speaking about black troops on Iwo Jima, Eastwood said, "But they didn't raise the flag. The story [was] ... the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn't do that. If I put an African-American actor in there, people'd go, ‘This guy's lost his mind.' I mean, it's not accurate.”

"What are you going to do . . . make it look like a commercial for an equal opportunity player? I'm not in that game," Eastwood growled. "I'm playing it the way I read it historically, and that's the way it is. When I do a picture and it's 90% black, like ‘Bird,' I use 90% black people.”

Eastwood, who won Best Director and Best Picture Oscars for both "Unforgiven" and "Million Dollar Baby," said Lee shouldn't expect to see any black faces in "The Changeling," either, since his upcoming film is set in Los Angeles in the '30s before the black influx to that city.

78-year-old director, actor, producer, and composer, Eastwood, who was in the Cannes for the screening of "Changeling," his upcoming Depression-set drama starring Angelina Jolie as a mother seeking her lost child, said all that in the interview published in the Guardian Friday. Lee has not responded yet.