Spike Lee hits back at Clint Eastwood

The feud between film directors Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood – as reported on The First Post, Lee has criticised Eastwood for wilfully not putting any black soldiers in his two Second World War films, Flags of Our Fathers (pictured) and Letter from Iwo Jima – shows no signs of abating. Last week, Eastwood, responding to Lee's jibes, told him to "shut his face". He said the reason no black GIs appear is because none were there when the stars and stripes flag was raised over the battlefield, which was the subject of the first film.

However, this has only served to anger Lee, who has reminded Eastwood that he is not "on a plantation", a reference to the time when a white man could tell a black slave what to do. "First of all, the man is not my father and we're not on a plantation either. He's a great director. He makes his films, I make my films ... And a comment like 'A guy like that should shut his face' - come on Clint, come on."

Eastwood also accused Lee of historical ignorance and implied that he wanted films to be made on an equal opportunities basis. To make his point, Eastwood made a quip about his next film, The Human Factor, set in post-independence South Africa, saying: "I'm not going to make Nelson Mandela a white guy."

This has hit Lee hard. "I never said he should show one of the other guys holding up the flag as black. I said that African-Americans played a significant part in Iwo Jima. For him to insinuate that I'm rewriting history and have one of the four guys with the flag be black... no one said that. It's just that there's not one black in either film. And because I know my history, that's why I made that observation."

He added: "I'm not making this up. I know history. I'm a student of history. And I know the history of Hollywood and its omission of the one million African-American men and women who contributed to the Second World War. Not everything was John Wayne, baby." Over to you, Clint.