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Originally Posted by Melanie68
I think the trailer was very epic. I really like the idea of both viewpoints (is this the first time it's been done?)
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It was attempted in 1970 in Tora! Tora! Tora!, but that was about Pearl Harbor. Richard Fleischer directed the American portions of that film, and two Japanese filmmakers (including Kinji Fukasaku, director of Battle Royale) did the Japanese sequences. That film used Japanese actors, Japanese dialogue, and had subtitles for the Japanese portions...so it was ahead of its time in a sense. I don't think something like this has ever been done as two completely separate films though, and never about Iwo Jima.
Interesting side story, the legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa agreed to shoot the Japanese sequences for Tora! Tora! Tora!, but he understood that his counterpart for the American sequences would be David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Bridge on the River Kwai, etc.), someone that he saw as being "in his caliber". When it turned out that this wasn't the case, he intentionally became impossible to work with, and was either booted off the film or he left (no one knows which is really the truth).
Among his offenses, he actually insisted that entire shelves of books in one scene be replaced with books that were actually published prior to the historical date in which the scene was taking place, even though the names of the books themselves couldn't be seen. He did that stuff in Japan too. For his film Throne of Blood (an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth), he discovered that the set builders were using nails in the contruction and since there were no nails in the period the film was depicting, he insisted that the set be destroyed and rebuilt authentically (even though the nails couldn't be seen).
