It all started last month, at the 61st edition of the Cannes Film Festival, when Spike Lee criticized Clint Eastwood in an interview for not doing justice to African-American soldiers and excluding them from his critically acclaimed films “Flag of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.”

Days later, Clint Eastwood’s response was just as harsh. “A guy like that should shut his face.” Of course, compared to Lee’s provocative insinuation that if reporters “had any balls” they would question Eastwood’s omission of African-Americans in his films, the older director’s reply is almost nice.

Lee accused Eastwood of including “not one Negro actor on the screen,” despite having the two films run “for more than four hours total” and concluded that, “in his version of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist.”

To which Eastwood responded that he had been historically accurate and that African-American soldiers did not raise the flag. “The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn’t do that,” he told The Guardian. “It’s not accurate.

“Has he [Lee] ever studied history?” the 78-year-old added. “If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, they’d say, ‘This guy’s lost his mind.’”

Eastwood also defended himself by saying that in “Bird,” his 1998 film about jazz musician Charlie “Bird” Parker, he did not hesitate to have a 90 percent African-American cast.

And the “Dirty Harry” star added the flammable “[he] should shut his face.”

Lee struck right back: “[Eastwood] is not my father and we’re not on a plantation, either. I’m not making this up. I know history.”

He proceeded to comment that Eastwood is “a great director.”

“He makes his films, I make my films,” Lee said, adding that Eastwood’s remarks make him sound like an “angry old man” and to say he did not wish to continue the feud, and wishing all “peace and love.”

While Lee is upset that Hollywood has a history of omitting “the one million African-American men and women who contributed to World War II,” he has made justice himself.

As it happens, he was in Cannes to promote “'Miracle at St. Anna,” a World War II film that focuses on a black US army division.