Questions about "Letters from Iwo Jima"

[George Robinson]

Dear fellow listmembers --

This may be slightly far afield. In a recent interview, Clint Eastwood 
told the Guardian's Philip French that much of the film's dialogue is in 
an old dialect. Asked about his problems vis-a-vis a Japanese cast and 
crew, he likened it to Sergio Leone's situation when they worked together.
He tells French:

"The thing we had to overcome here, which Sergio didn't have to 
overcome, is we had to tell the story in the dialect of 65 years ago, 
which is a different Japanese dialect than they use now and a lot of 
different vocabulary. We had a few older Japanese actors, who knew of 
the older style and so we were aware of that. . . . When we recorded the 
kids - because that was a real instance where [a group of children] made 
this live radio broadcast and sung a song for the men on Iwo Jima - we 
had to make sure that they learnt the dialect. It was tricky because it 
had never been recorded. It had only been sent out over the airwaves at 
that time."

So, two questions. One, the obvious one, is what exactly is he referring to?
The second is the logical follow-up: is the film subtitled in Japan?

George Robinson

Visit my blog at:
www.cine-journal.blogspot.com



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