Spike Lee marks two decades of film-making with his latest, a thriller with a high-voltage cast. Outspoken as always, the director talks to Michael Dwyer about life in post 9/11 America.
IT WAS 20 years ago this May. Spike Lee came to Cannes unknown and went home with the prestigious Prix de la Jeunesse for his incisive sex comedy, She's Gotta Have It. "Wow! I'm getting old," he says when I mention this. "It was a modest beginning, but there's more to do. I love what I'm doing." And Lee's not that old, having turned 49 last Monday.
Asked about the high points in his life over those 20 years, he says: "Professionally, just the body of work, and the knowledge that my company, 40 Acres and a Mule, was a launch pad for a lot of people before and behind the camera. Personally, it was meeting my wife and having kids. That supplants everything. I have two kids. My daughter, Satchel, is 11, and she wants to be an actress, singer and dancer. My son, Jackson, is eight years old, and wants to be a film-maker or a veterinarian. He likes soccer, just like me."
Lee is unusual among Americans in that he's an Arsenal supporter, so it seemed plausible when imbd.com listed Arsenal striker Thierry Henry among the cast for his new movie, the stylish, teasing thriller, Inside Man. "I don't know where that rumour started," Lee says. "I know what I would like to do with the person who started it because I'm being asked about it all the time. Thierry Henry is not in this film. He's a friend of mine, but it never came up."
The heavyweight cast of Inside Man does feature Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster, Clive Owen and Willem Dafoe. "All that credit must go to Russell Gewirtz," he says. "It's his first screenplay. It got slipped to me. Ron Howard was going to direct it and then Russell Crowe persuaded him to make Cinderella Man instead. So the Inside Man script was languishing and that's when I read it. It's a wonderful script and that's what attracted the talent to the movie.
"Jodie wanted to play a role that was different to anything she had done before. She said to me, 'Spike, I want to look very beautiful in the film. I want to get dressed up and look glamorous.' And it's my fourth film with Denzel. I love working with him and it was seven years since we did He Got Game, but it was like we hadn't missed a step. I hope it's not going to be another seven years before we do another movie together."
Lee's regular composer, Terence Blanchard, excels himself on the soundtrack of Inside Man, heightening the drama with a big, full dramatic score in the style of vintage Bernard Herrmann. "Terence gets better all the time," he says. "I hope he gets his due because he's been overlooked for far too long. No disrespect to the great John Williams, but he gets an Oscar nomination every year, and sometimes he gets two in the same year. He seems to get nominated automatically."
What does Lee think of this year's Oscar-winning song, It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp, and of the reports that Denzel Washington and Sidney Poitier dissuaded Hustle & Flow star Terrence Howard from performing it at the Oscars? "They did? I didn't hear that, but I know I told him that. I told his agent, 'You cannot let Terrence get on stage in front of the world and do that song'. I was amazed when the song won the Oscar. I did not think that was going to happen."
Lee has cast Howard as the lead in his next movie, a biopic of boxer Joe Louis, for which Hugh Jackman is attached to play Max Schmeling, the German boxer who was the first to defeat Louis in a fight. Louis went on to beat Jim Braddock, the boxer played by Russell Crowe in Cinderella Man, to take the world heavyweight title in 1937.
"This film will be an epic on the David Lean scale," Lee says proudly. "It will have Hitler, Goebbles, FDR, Sugar Ray Robinson, Lena Horne, everyone. It will be the biggest film I've ever worked on, bigger than Malcolm X. I'm confident that I will be able to raise all the money for it."
In Lee's powerfully abrasive 1989 racism drama Do the Right Thing, the conflict was between black and white protagonists. While Inside Man involves a funny sequence involving the Albanian consulate in New York - "I hope nobody takes offence because no offence was meant," Lee says - it is more pointed in its other racial references, as when police call a Sikh man an Arab and pull the turban off his head.
"Americans can't tell the difference. Anybody with something on his head is a terrorist. All those things reflect the post-9/11 world that we live in. America is a lot more complicated now than when I made Do the Right Thing. I'm doing a documentary now on Hurricane Katrina, and that's going to deal with another issue: class. America for a long time prided itself on being a classless society, but that's bullshit. That's a crock."
HBO is financing the documentary, When the Levees Broke, and will broadcast it on August 29th, the anniversary of the day the hurricane hit New Orleans.
"We feel it's going to be the definitive statement about a landmark moment in the history of the United States of America, and how this country turned its back on its citizens. It's evident to me that the people down there did not matter to the present administration - poor black people, poor white people, and they're not a concern on the agenda for that administration. Over four years of Bush has really changed things. It's been a nightmare. People don't look at America any longer the same way they used to do, as a beacon of democracy and all that stuff "
Lee is particularly incensed at the response from US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to the emergency. "While people were drowning in New Orleans, she was buying shoes on Madison Avenue, and then she went to Spamalot, the Monty Python show on Broadway. Her ass - excuse me - Miss Rice should have been down there in New Orleans and not on Broadway that weekend. It was coming up to the Labour Day weekend and a lot of people were on vacation, but they should have cut their vacation short.
"New Orleans is a great city, the most unique city in America. We just got back from shooting there at Mardi Gras. We've been making the film since September. I wanted to follow it up because a lot of people got the misinformation that it was Hurricane Katrina that brought the devastation. After Hurricane Katrina passed by, people came out of their houses and it was bright and sunny. The wind wasn't blowing.
"It seemed that New Orleans had dodged the bullet. There was wind damage and stuff, but then the levees broke. That was what brought the devastation and put 80 per cent of the city under water."
Although he has shot a great deal of footage already, and has access to a mass of archive material, Lee says: "We want to get some of the administration on camera to talk about it, although I just don't think Miss Rice is going to be interviewed by me."
