SPIKE Lee's eighth feature film in nine years, Clockers, differs from Lee's earlier work in that it is his first project as a director for hire. Unlike the strongly personal movies with which he made his name, Clockers did not emanate from Lee himself it is based on a novel by a white author (Richard Price), and originally it was to be directed by Martin Scorsese, with Robert De Niro in the leading role.
When Scorsese secured the studio backing to make his Las Vegas epic, Casino, he passed on filming Clockers, taking De Niro with him. Instead, Scorsese co produced Clockers and suggested to Universal Pictures that Spike Lee take over as director and Harvey Keitel replace De Niro. Richard Price had done nine drafts of the screenplay at that point, but when Lee took over from Scorsese, he substantially reworked the script and now shares the screen writing credit with Price.
"I wanted to do it from a different point of view," Lee said when we talked after the movie's London Film Festival screening. That is an understatement, given that Lee has moulded Price's material so radically that it is stamped by the hallmarks of Lee's earlier movies. The result is a movie which, even though it did not originate with Lee, is as vibrant and passionate as anything he has made.
Clockers takes its title from the slang term for the lowest level of drug dealer, the type who are on the streets around the clock. Harvey Keitel plays Rocco Klein, a cynical homicide detective investigating the murder of a Brooklyn drug dealer. There are two suspects in the case a hostile young clocker (played by very impressive newcomer Mekhi Phifer) and his hard working, older brother (Isaiah Washington), who confesses to the crime. Overshadowing both their lives is the hard edged, middle aged cocaine dealer, played by Delroy Lindo in a virtuoso performance.
Working from another writer's source material for the first time, Spike Lee inevitably shifts the emphasis from the white cop to the young blacks caught in a spiral of crime. Although the movie vehemently emphasises its anti drugs message, it is the least heavy handed of Lee's movies and the visual style is, similarly, less ostentatious. It is Lee's finest achievement since Do The Right Thing, and arguably his most accomplished film to date.
I was hesitant about accepting this film," Lee explains. It's by no means the first film on this subject matter. We're more like 15th or 16th down the line and I think people are getting fatigued by it. So I wanted an optimistic ending for a change. At the same time I wanted a strong anti gun, anti violence stance. We didn't want to straddle that fence. Too many films exploit that, and it's even worse when it's cartoon violence like Schwarzenegger or flip Ward.
"Our movie's opening shows what a nine millimetre bullet does to the skull. You don't laugh at that the way you do when people die in Die Hard. This movie deals with the whole polite ration of violence and guns in our society, how movies, television, radio, music videos, gangsta rap, malt liquor ads how this whole culture promotes carrying Uzis and nine millimetres."
In another conscious decision to separate Clockers from the recent drugs in the hood cycle, Lee insisted that his movie not be dominated by rap music instead, the soundtrack features material from the nonconfrontational likes of Seal, Des'ree, Branford Marsalis and even Bruce Hornsby, who duets with Chaka Khan. I like rap," says Lee. "but I don't like gangsta rap. I wasn't raised in a household where women were bitches and hos. It's really sad now in the United States to get a platinum disc, you've got to have killed or raped somebody then you're hardcore and you sell five million copies."
As he approaches his first decade as a film maker, Spike Lee reflects on the progress of black cinema since his low budget, black and white sex comedy, She's Gotta Have It, became one of the hot discoveries of the 1986 Cannes Film Festival.
"I think black cinema has made a lot of ground," he says, "when you consider that when I started there was just Michael Schultz. Then came Robert Townsend with Hollywood Shuffle and the door became ajar and more and more people came into the business. But black cinema has a long way to go, especially in terms of black women directors there have only been two."
It was in 1978, when he was 21, that Spike Lee realised cinema was his vocation. Born in Atlanta and brought up in Brooklyn, Lee enrolled at New York University's film school, and having graduated with the award winning short film Joe's Bed Stuy Barbershop We Cut Heads he turned his attention to feature films with the witty, disarming and revealing She's Gotta Have It, in which three different men, one of them played by Lee, reflect on their relationship with the same woman, Nola Darling, played by Tracy Camilla Johns.
Wished many of the characteristics of what constitutes a Spike Lee joint as his familiar authorial credit puts it. First and most important, it is specifically concerned with the black experience and with black issues in America.
Then it is direct and provocative. Like its predecessors, the blaxploitation movies of the early 1970s, it uses music to invigorating effect. And with Nola Darling it launches Lee's preoccupation with characters' names which are odd, cute or emblematic, and sometimes all of those things at once.
Lee's subsequent films became significantly more serious in theme, regularly courting controversy and relishing all of it as he tackled urban racism (in Do The Right Thing), inter racial relationships and sexual mythology (Jungle Fever) and the history of the black movement in the US (the overblown Malcolm X).
Shooting videos for an MOR veteran like Bruce Hornsby, and using Hornsby on the Clockers soundtrack, may suggest that Spike Lee has mellowed a little in recent years, and Lee himself says that his life hash changed since he married and became a father. Nevertheless, he remains as opinionated and outspoken as ever, as is evident from his response when the subject of the Nation of Islam movement is raised.
"I don't see it as a Nazi movement as portrayed in the media," he says. "The reason I didn't support the Million Man March was that I had knee surgery two days earlier, so I watched it on TV in bed. It was a beautiful, powerful thing and the media put all the pressure on Minister Farrakhan. If Colin Powell had called that," march, nobody would have turned up. If Jesse Jackson had called it, a few might, have turned up. Yet Farrakhan got two million people not 400,000 to 500,000 as the media claimed."
Side by side with his prolific film making output, Lee has proved himself a shrewd businessman, building an industry around himself and his 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks company through his, Brooklyn store which retails books, records, T shirts and various ephemera associated with his movies, and through his's even more prolific output as a director of, commercials (most notably for Nike's Airs Jordan line and for Levi's 501s) and of music videos (for, among others, Miles Davis, Branford Marsalis, Anita Baker Public Enemy and Arrested Development).
The Artist Formerly Known As Prince has written and performed the score for Spike Lee's next feature film, Girl 6. "I have a big role in the film," Lee says. It's written by an African American playwright, Susie Lloyd Parks, and it's a comedy along the lines of She's Gotta Have It. It has Theresa Randle (from Malcolm X) as a struggling actress in New York, who wants to get to LA and be discovered. To get the money for her trip, she works in phone sex. And I've got a lot of people to turn up in the movie, like Madonna, Quentin Tarantino, Halle Berry and Ron Silver. Girl 6 opens in the US next month and is due here in mid May.