Straight and to the point

In Spike Lee’s 1996 film Get On The Bus, a young firebrand student filmmaker (Hill Harper) joins an incongruous group of men journeying to the Million Man March on Washington. Within seconds, he’s dubbed ‘Spike Lee Junior’ by his bemused travelling companions. It might look vain coming from another director.

Spike Lee is not the first African-American auteur. Remarkably, Oscar Micheaux wrote, edited, financed, shot and distributed stories from the black community throughout the Depression Era. There have been occasional success stories since. Ossie Davis wrote and directed several films, including Cotton Comes To Harlem and Countdown at Kusini, the first American film shot entirely in Africa, using only black professionals. Gordon Parks scored success with Shaft and Shaft’s Big Score. Melvin Van Peebles would create a splash with his psychedelic black outlaw in 1971’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.
But if ethnic filmmakers have long formed a speck on the horizon, none have had the bruising cultural impact as Spike. Unlike his precursors, he’s a household name, a point stressed by his legal team in their challenge against the adult cable channel Spike TV two years ago. (Though conspiracy theories would have it that the entire case was a promotional tool cooked up between the two parties)
Celebrity status aside, it would be virtually impossible to overestimate his importance in the pantheon of Great American Directors. The New Black Hollywood elite would simply not exist without him. He has been instrumental in the careers of actors Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, Samuel L. Jackson and Wesley Snipes. He has nurtured young filmmaking talent such as John Singleton and Albert and Allen Hughes, recently founding the Forty Acres And A Mule Institute (named for his production company) at Brooklyn’s Long Island University. Mostly though, in the nicest possible way, Spike Lee has been a pain in the ass.
Combative, controversial, coruscating, for twenty years the films of this writer, director, producer and author have been pointedly, loudly sticking it to the man. With the exception of the predominantly white drama Summer Of Sam, his work has sought to portray the diversity of his community, forming a strident critique of racial stereotyping.
“Hollywood does make black films,” he tells me. “Makes the same ones over and over.”
Age has done little to quell his enthusiasm for the project. In 2000, Bamboozled, his 15 feature film, would crystallise his lifelong contempt for black representation in the media into a vicious satire whose targets, he claimed, included – ‘’Ving Rhames, Cuba Gooding Jr., Whoopi Goldberg, Diana Ross, Will Smith, President Clinton, Mother Teresa, malt liquor, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Johnnie Cochran, In Living Color, UPN, the WB, Quentin Tarantino, D.W. Griffith, the NAACP, athletes, rappers and myself.’’
Mr. Lee – never a great fan of the ‘comedy jiving’ in the TV show In Living Color – cast one of its creators and stars, Damon Wayans, as Bamboozled’s elitist protagonist, Pierre Delacroix, a Harvard-educated television writer. Pressured by his white boss to write a cutting-edge TV show, Delacroix finds inspiration in the coloured classics Amos ‘n’ Andy and The Jeffersons. His programme, Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show, set in a watermelon patch and starring “two real coons,” Mantan and Sleep ‘N Eat, is an overnight sensation.
“Yeah, I really liked Bamboozled,” laughs Lee. “It’s a shame no one else saw it. It was the hardest film to get made since She’s Gotta Have It, my first. As a project, it was brewing in my head – subconsciously at least – from the moment I started seeing African-Americans on screen. Maybe, if we’d a had a real star … instead of Damon Wayans.”
Ouch. Among Bamboozled’s main targets is gangsta rap, a subculture recast as modern day minstrelsy.
“That’s what they are,” he says. “With their shuffling and jiving. They’re doing a blackface routine all the time.”
Nor is he particularly enamoured with their use of the ‘n word’. Famously, he would take issue with Quentin Tarantino (who appeared in Spike’s Girl 6) and Samuel L. Jackson over the frequent use of the term in Jackie Brown. Even talking about it, Lee’s face scrunches with distaste.
“It would be very hard for a white person to do a critical essay on how black people use the word nigger,” he explains. “One could do an essay on the use of violence and violent language and misogyny in gangster rap and pimp rap and the problems regarding its use would become apparent. But hey, just don’t use the word around me.”
But surely, I suggest, there have been instances where the language of oppression has been reclaimed, an obvious example being the use of the word ‘queer’ to describe radical gay culture.
“That’s true,” he nods. “And if gay people feel comfortable being called queer then that is their right. But there are still many African-Americans who feel that word is a slur and degrading. And I’m one of them.”
Shelton Jackson Lee was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1957, just before the dawning of the civil rights era. As a young child, his family would move to Brooklyn, an area that still frames most of his work as a filmmaker. His engagement with black culture was established early on. His mother Jacquelyne, a teacher, would foster a love of African-American literature and art, while his father Bill, a jazz musician, would introduce young Spike (his mother’s prophetic nickname) to black jazz and folk.
Short and asthmatic, his high-school days were marred by an inability to attract a girlfriend of any sort. (He is currently married with two children following high profile romances with Halle Berry and Veronica Webb.) When he graduated, he chose to attend his father and grandfather’s all-black alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he majored in mass communications.
It was here that he would find his calling. Following the unexpected death of his mother from liver cancer in 1977, Lee took refuge in the cinema, becoming a fan of Bernardo Bertolucci, Martin Scorsese and Akira Kurasawa in particular.
“Film happened to me in the summer of ‘77,” he recalls. “It had never entered my head before, but I knew then I wanted to make movies. Except with stories detailing black experience.”
Pursuing his newfound ambition, he enrolled in the Tisch School of Arts graduate film programme at NYU. Fittingly, his first student project was The Answer, a ten-minute reworking and rebuttal of D.W. Griffith’s silent, white supremacist classic The Birth Of A Nation.
“What films are recognised as the greatest works in American cinema?” asks Mr. Lee. “The Birth Of A Nation, Gone With The Wind. How do those films portray African-Americans? Hattie McDaniel (Gone With The Wind’s bustling maid) had the quote ‘better to play a maid than be one’. That’s true. But we’re still living with these hurtful, stereotypical images.”
In 1983, his 45-minute film Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop; We Cut Heads won him the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Student Academy Award. (Excepting nominations for Four Little Girls in the documentary category and Do The Right Thing for Best Original Screenplay, the Academy have pointedly snubbed him ever since.)
Unsurprisingly, Hollywood doors did not immediately open for the young provocateur.
“When I started out there was Michael Schultz and that was it,” he recalls. “Then there was my film and Robert Townsend’s film Hollywood Shuffle, so that brought the total up to three black filmmakers. Things are different now but they’re not. There are more than three now but the powers that be still determine what films get made and who gets to make them. They don’t want people with questions and agendas getting in there.”
Hardly deterred, he would independently raise the $175,000 budget for She’s Gotta Have It, a sparky gender battle comedy centred on Nola Darling and her relationships with three suitors. My kinda girl.
“Oh, you like that character? Well, I would present to you that there are many people who don’t like the images of women in my films. There are two camps and the one you are in is the smaller camp. But writing women has become much easier since I became a husband. My wife reads my stuff and she lets me know or she lets me have it.”
She’s Gotta Have It quickly crossed over from black theatres into arthouse cinemas, taking $9 million, thus securing the interest of Island Pictures in Lee’s next picture, School Daze. Based on his time at Morehouse, the film’s depiction of black on black racism on campus would inspire uncomfortable mutterings about airing dirty linen.
1989’s Do The Right Thing, the director’s international breakthrough hit, would prove more contentious still. A thrilling account of racial tensions between Italian and African-Americans in Brooklyn on the hottest day of the year, the film ends by ambiguously juxtaposing the Martin Luther King quote ‘the old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind’ with Malcolm X’s statement – “I am not against violence in self-defence – I don’t even call it violence when it’s self-defence. I call it intelligence.”
Roger Ebert described it as “The most honest, complex and unblinking film ever made on the subject of racism.” Other critics predicted riots in the streets. It was the first of a million bad raps. The Jewish jazz club owners in Mo’Better Blues brought cries of anti-semitism. Lesbians were appalled by She Hate Me in 2004. Denzel fans got shirty over the love scene (only his second such act onscreen following 1999’s Mississippi Masala) in He Got Game featuring their hero and Milla Jovovich’s hooker. Spike’s latest film, The Inside Man, features a scene depicting the Albanian consulate seeking payment from New York police for aiding them in language translation. It’s no big deal, but you can’t see it playing well in Tiriana.
Some have cried hypocrite, seeing Lee as a remnant of Black Nationalism. (‘We can’t be racist,’ he says in Do The Right Thing, ‘white folks invented that shit’) but the constant, dialectical traffic in his films thrives on such material and much of the criticism, ironically confuses Lee’s flair for ethnic rapping with racism. Even his black characters are subject to humorous treatment and none of them could be mistaken for old-time golly entertainers like Stepin Fetchit or Bill Bogangles.
Spike himself just shakes his head.
“Can’t please all of the people…”
Having spent two decades spent forensically examining themes such as interracial romance (Jungle Fever) and unfair representation, Spike’s new film seems, at first glance, like an odd choice. The Inside Man is a heist movie, replete with extravagant thrills and a full star contingent, including Denzel, Jodie Foster, Clive Owen, Christopher Plummer and Willem Dafoe.
It does not, however, as widely reported, feature Thierry Henry, the Arsenal striker and friend of the director.
“I’m telling you, I don’t know where that came from,” sighs Spike. “Yes, I support Arsenal. Yes, he is my friend. But we never even discussed it as a possibility.”
Directing from a screenplay by newcomer Russell Gewirtz, Mr. Lee has fashioned a lively firecracker with echoes of Sidney Lumet’s streetwise seventies films.
“Absolutely Sidney Lumet,” says Spike. “Before we started shooting, I sat down to study Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon to get the look right. Those are remarkable films. I think he’s one of the great American directors and I don’t think he receives enough credit for it.”
While the history of radical or distinctive filmmaking talents drafted in as directors for hire is long and ignoble (could you see Robert Altman’s stamp on a single frame in The Gingerbread Man?), The Inside Man is unmistakably a Spike Lee joint.
Post 9/11 police procedure, antsy exchanges about racially loaded language and an impressively vast and diverse cast all feature, as do Spike Lee regulars Kim Director (Bamboozled, Summer Of Sam, She Hate Me) and Denzel Washington (the actor’s fourth collaboration with Lee, following Mo’Better Blues, He Got Game and Malcolm X).
“Yeah, there’s some of the old crowd in there and I know Jodie because she and my brother have been good friends since they went to Yale together. There are many talented people out there but they only do one thing well. So I like people who give me something different, who are not playing the same role in different films. I like to try improvisation with certain actors if I can. We like spontaneity; sometimes sticking to exactly what is written you know can be boring a little bit. Clive Owen was pretty good at thinking on his toes.”
If the thought of a taut thriller about a ‘perfect bank robbery’ where all is not as it seems leaves you cold (what’s wrong with you?) and you’re aching for the agitprop of old, fear not. Spike’s next project, tentatively titled When The Levee Breaks, is a documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
“I don’t know so much about Europe but in the States in the past audiences would run at the mention of documentary. That is not the case any more. March Of The Penguins made crazy money so at least American audiences won’t sprint in the opposite direction.”
He has already indicated to CNN that he will not discount theories supposing that the authorities were involved with the actual flooding.
“The current administration is evil,” he says. “Period. You can’t put anything past them.”
So where will the finger of blame be pointing?
“Well, I’m working on it at the minute. It’s a four-hour project for HBO. How many fingers you got?”
I’m leaving when he asks after Ireland’s burgeoning ethnic population.
“So you got black people now. How’s that working out?”
Erm, it’s not quite the model melting pot just yet.
“Don’t you worry. Dublin will be all the better for it.”
Well, if Spike Lee says so…