Red carpet interviews are not often memorable. Unless, that is, the journalist with the microphone has stopped Spike Lee. Whether he is dressed up in purple in tribute to Prince or in purple and gold to honour Kobe Bryant; whether his sneakers are more eye-popping than the frames of his glasses, it is what Lee actually says that usually makes the headlines. Fearless and quick-witted, the director dances through the Hollywood cavalcade, upsetting some and inspiring millions of others. And that’s without taking into account the genre-busting films he makes.
This week, America’s lord of movie misrule takes up an honoured position at the head of the Cannes film festival jury, steering that small panel of illustrious actors and directors who will decide on the winners at the end of a fortnight in the south of France, celebrating cinematic talent. He is the first person from the African diaspora to take up the president’s role.
It was not planned but it seems appropriate that Lee will preside over a festival set to go down in history for other reasons. Cancelled last year, the 2021 edition, the 74th in its history, is taking place much later in the year than usual, so the fabled Riviera will actually be hot. It should be sun shades, not umbrellas, that are held above the stars as they smile and wave their way up the steps of the Palais des Festival this time.
The weather and Covid-19 measures will be the most obvious new features on the Croisette, but much else will also be different. The aftermath of the #MeToo scandal and the inequities exposed by the pandemic mean that the usual parade of rich elderly men shepherding scantily-clad women draped in ludicrously expensive jewellery is not quite what the doctor ordered.
We do however need cheering up. And no one knows that better than Lee, who has been at the centre of New York’s coronavirus emergency. It was a metropolitan trauma, he has said, unlike any other. “Not even post-9/11. This a whole ’nother level. At one point, we were the epicentre. For that 19. For that ’rona. Sirens going off 24/7. It was bedlam.”
Lee’s most recent film is a documentary that traces New York’s story from the World Trade Center attacks up to today. But earlier in the year he was also winning plaudits, if not many Oscars, for his Vietnam war veteran saga Da Five Bloods. Lee marked the fact that it was not heavily nominated by the Academy by selling “We Wuz Robbed” posters on his website.
A more considered response to the regular lack of awards for black talent at the Oscars came in a New Yorker interview in March. “I’ve had a very rocky relationship with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but I think they’re doing genuine work to put stuff in order, to make their voting body reflect more what America is, and it’s something that I think they believe in. I also understand that it’s not going to happen overnight,” he said.
Lee did win an Oscar in 2019 for his adapted screenplay for BlacKkKlansman, and he was nominated as best director for the first time as well. The film, which tells the true story of police infiltration of the racist cult in the 1970s, also won him the Grand Prix at Cannes.
For Kwame Kwei-Armah, the British playwright and theatre director, Lee is simply the top man in the business. “For me, Spike Lee is the godfather: the godfather of black movie making. We talk about James Brown, well he is our James Brown, and he has lasted as long,” he said this weekend. The pair are co-writing a musical, Lee’s first, about how the drug Viagra was invented.
“Spike’s brilliance is not just the movies he has made, but most importantly the way he has innovated the form,” Kwei-Armah added. “Right at the beginning of his career, he is the guy that really brought the soundtrack into our consciousness in a new way. And he used the famous dolly shot. There is no bigger innovator of his kind.”
Although Lee has long been linked with Brooklyn as a film-maker, he was born in Atlanta, Georgia. Jacquelyn, Lee’s mother, who died when her son was 20, was the film lover in the family. His father, Bill, a jazz musician, grew up near Selma, so memories of slavery and lynchings were close at hand. Grandfather, father and son all studied at Morehouse College, the long established African American arts institution in Atlanta, Georgia. Lee’s father was a contemporary of Martin Luther King Jr, and politics was a hot topic at home.
“I’m 63, so I remember the night Dr King got assassinated,” Lee said when promoting Da Five Bloods. “I remember watching the news where over 100 cities in America were up in flames. That’s in the film.”
After Morehouse, Lee secured an internship at Columbia Pictures in Los Angeles where he saw the first screening of Apocalypse Now on Sunset Boulevard. He remains a devoted Francis Ford Coppola fan. When he started graduate film school back in New York in 1980, he was not the only gifted Lee in class. Oscar-winner-in-the-making Ang Lee also attended.
The students were all shown DW Griffith’s 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation, a film once used as a recruitment tool for the Klan, and the nascent black filmmaker was disturbed. In riposte, he made his first proper film, The Answer. Film school, Lee has since said, was simply about getting his hands on a camera. “We just wanted the equipment,” he has recalled. “We wanted to learn the basic stuff – how to read a light meter and this and that. But, as far as teach us how to make a movie, we would teach ourselves.”
First to make a big impact was the insistent She’s Gotta Have It in 1986, and then in the late 1980s Do the Right Thing made Lee internationally famous, with its urgent arguments and propelling Public Enemy soundtrack. It told a half-true story of racial conflict revolving around a pizza parlour and it was the movie Barack Obama took Michelle to on their first date.
Lee also starred in the film as Mookie, an irresponsible youth, and he outlined the character’s philosophy for the media: “Just live to the next day: he can’t see beyond the next day.” Some white audiences were troubled by Mookie’s destructive violence. For Lee, that reaction was the point. “He was a likable character. They feel betrayed when he throws the garbage can through the window,” he said at the time, adding that he does not advocate the things people do in his films.
After more than 40 films, the stand-outs include Malcolm X, Clockers and Miracle at St Anna, as well as the more commercial thriller The Inside Man. An ardent sports fan, Lee claims he always knew he would have to push it to build up a track record. “I knew it would be harder for me to be a black filmmaker. But I realised that you just have to be two or three-four times better. The same thing as any black athlete. They got to be better than the white boy to make the team.”
Yet he loves much of the classic white film canon, claiming John Huston’s 1948 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was a key influence on Da Five Bloods. Starring Humphrey Bogart, Huston’s drama tracks the breakdown of friendships between a group hunting for gold, as greed takes hold. In Lee’s hands, the friction among the group also involves politics. One of the characters is a supporter of Donald Trump, or as Lee always calls him, Agent Orange. Politics is also there in the mere telling of a black version of the Vietnam Vet story. “I mean, you don’t have to work very hard to draw the parallels between the Vietnam war and [hurricane] Katrina and the coronavirus,” Lee has said. “The people on the bottom, we’re gonna catch hell, no matter what it is: war, pandemic.”
In Lee’s view, this perspective on America is a “patriotic act of the utmost” since “you can’t get more patriotic than speaking truth to power about what is wrong with this country”. It is powerful stuff, but with the true Lee playfulness that Cannes is set to enjoy this week, the director also named the five guys in his cast after the original members of the Temptations.
