The Instant Expert's Guide to Spike Lee

There are hundreds of film-makers to choose from on Cinema Paradiso, but where to start? The Instant Expert series examines the careers of the greatest directors in screen history by providing biographical background and analysis of 10 key works. The latest entry in the series focuses on Spike Lee, who has been challenging audience preconceptions for over three decades.

When Spike Lee was selected for Time magazine's 2019 list of the 100 most influential people on the planet, fellow African-American film-maker Jordan Peele was asked to write his citation. The director of Get Out (2017) described Lee as 'a visionary, a trailblazer, a provocateur and a true American original', who has 'made more than two dozen films across nearly every genre, and all of them have been completely different'. While lauding Lee's versatility and durability, Peele also noted his almost clairvoyant sense of timing and his distinctive ability to have his finger on the pulse of modern America while also transcending history. It's a remarkable gift. But it hasn't always been appreciated as it perhaps should.

From Atlanta to Brooklyn

Born Shelton Jackson Lee on 20 March 1957, Spike Lee got his nickname from his teacher mother, Jacquelyn, because the oldest of five siblings was 'a tough baby'. Father Bill was a jazz musician, who played the upright bass and featured on records by such major artists as Duke Ellington, Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan. When Spike was still young, the Lees relocated to Chicago before moving to the Crown Heights district of Brooklyn. They soon switched to Cobble Hill, where they were quickly accepted, despite being the only black family in an Italian-American neighbourhood. Although his mother took him to see plays on Broadway and his father smuggled him into gigs and the Newport Jazz Festival, the young Spike was more interested in sport than the arts and he remains a staunch supporter of the New York Knicks and Yankees, as well as Arsenal.

In time, the family moved to Fort Greene, which remains home to Lee's production company, 40 Acres and a Mule. Now in his early 90s, Bill Lee also lives nearby. But, while he wrote music for five of his son's early films, they have essentially been estranged for many years. The problems started when Jacquelyn died of cancer in 1977 and Bill married a white woman, Susan Kaplan, with a speed that Spike considered unseemly. However, they fell out in the early 1990s after Bill felt his son had criticised his relationship in Jungle Fever (1991) and Spike was disconcerted by his father's arrest for possessing a small bag of heroin.

After graduating from John Dewey High School in Brooklyn in 1975, Spike spent the summer shooting street scenes with his new Super-8 camera. He enrolled at Morehouse College in Atlanta, where his father had been a classmate of Martin Luther King, Jr. While studying mass communications, Lee took a film course under Herb Eichelberger at Clark College and made his first short, Last Hustle in Brooklyn (1977), a mockumentary about the summer blackout. He returned north to earn a masters in film and television at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

Also at NYU at this time were Ang Lee, Jim Jarmusch and Ernest Dickerson, who palled up with Spike on the first day and took such exception to a screening of DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) that dwelt solely on its technique without addressing its pernicious content that they made a short entitled, The Answer, about a black screenwriter who reneges on a deal to work on a remake of the silent melodrama and is attacked by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Tutors were so shocked by the sight of a burning cross in one sequence that some called for Lee to be expelled for being overly ambitious and aggressive. It's more likely that the content of the film rather than Lee's attitude provoked the outcry, but he was retained and went on to win a Student Academy Award for the comic crime caper, Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983). And, let's not forget that Nate Parker would go on to produce his own riposte to Griffith in The Birth of a Nation (2016).

Putting Spike in Context and Making Waves

Lee was not alone in challenging the bigotry of The Birth of a Nation. In 1920, the self-taught Oscar Micheaux had made Within Our Gates to examine the status of America's black population half a century after the Civil War. The story of a mixed-race teacher, her soldier fiancé and a brutish rival, this is the earliest surviving film by an African-American director and can be found on the BFI's marvellous collection, Pioneers of African-American Cinema. This set also introduces the work of such key black film-makers as Richard Maurice (Eleven PM, 1928), James and Eloyce Gist (Hell-Bound Train, 1930) and Spencer Williams (The Blood of Jesus, 1941 & Dirty Gertie From Harlem USA, 1946).

Despite having two of the biggest talent agencies in his corner, Lee struggled to find work in the film industry and, in 1984, he abandoned a script about his experiences as a bike messenger in New York. He focused instead on She's Gotta Have It (1986), the story of an independent Brooklyn woman, Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), who refuses to play the dating game according to the rules laid down by macho society. As he did in many of his early films, Lee took an acting role and he would reprise the character of Mars Blackmon in eight commercials alongside basketball legend Michael Jordan for Nike's Air Jordan line of trainers. While appearing on Who Do You Think You Are? (2010), Lee revealed that his maternal grandmother, Zimmie, had suggested the name Mars and he discovered that it had belonged to his great-great-grandfather.

Having named his production company 40 Acres and Mule after the broken promise made to freed slaves during America's postbellum Reconstruction, Lee received assistance from Zimmie, the Black Filmmakers Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts to raise the budget of $175,000 that allowed him to shoot in monochrome for 12 days. His debut opened in a single cinema, but word of mouth and the Prix du Film Jeunesse at Cannes helped it earn around $8 million and showed aspiring African-American film-makers what could be achieved with a little money and a lot of determination and talent. Moreover, it led to Lee being dubbed 'the black Woody Allen', a title he disliked and quickly sought to ditch. However, he bitterly regretted the tone of the infamous rape scene and has consciously striven to avoid repeating the mistake in the TV version of She's Gotta Have It (2017-), which sees Nola being played by DeWanda Wise.

There was a hint of Morehouse about Mission College, which provided the setting for Lee's second feature, School Daze (1988), which put a musical spin on the Animal House format. Laurence Fishburne stars as a politically conscious student, who is bothered that cousin Spike Lee wants to join the Gamma Phi Gamma fraternity run by Giancarlo Esposito. His problems are exacerbated, however, when he falls for Tisha Campbell, who heads the Gamma Ray sorority. Famously ending with Fishburne urging the audience to 'Wake Up!', this is one of Lee's most underrated films. His love of Vincente Minnelli is evident in the musical numbers, which Lee has recently announced he hopes to transfer to the Broadway stage.

Music would also play a key role in Mo' Better Blues (1990), which drew on his father's career in a bid to challenge the perception given in Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight (1986) and Clint Eastwood's Bird (1988) that all black jazz musicians are addicts with a self-destructive streak. Denzel Washington headlines as a trumpeter whose indulgent attitudes towards saxophonist Wesley Snipes and gambling manager Spike Lee backfire on him as damagingly as his two-timing of girlfriends Cynda Williams and Joie Lee (who is the director's sister).

Making Headlines

Lee became accustomed to backlashes during this phase of his career, as both Do the Right Thing (1989) and Jungle Fever (1991) created a furore in the media. Inspired by a fatal 1986 incident at a pizzeria in the Howard Beach district of Queens, the former remains Lee's finest achievement. He moved the action to Bedford-Stuyvesant and took the key role of Mookie, who works as a delivery boy for Sal's Famous, which is run by a proud Italian-American (Danny Aiello) and his sons (Richard Edson and John Turturro). It's a hot summer and tensions begin to rise with the temperature, as Buggin Out (Giancarlo Esposito) questions why there are no black faces on Sal's wall of fame and the sound of Public Enemy's 'Fight the Power' on a beatbox belonging to Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) begins to get on some people's nerves.

Having spruced up the neighbourhood for the shoot, Lee was criticised for making no mention of the area's drug problems. But it was the combustibility of the action after Sal produces a baseball bat and Mookie responds with a trash can that fanned the flames in the press. Much attention was also paid to the contrasting quotes with which the picture ends: 'The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.' (Martin Luther King) and 'I am not against using violence in self-defence. I don't even call it violence when it's self-defence, I call it intelligence.' (Malcolm X). In his Village Voice review, Stanley Crouch accused Lee of peddling 'Afro-Fascist Chic'. Yet, as is revealed in Richard Tanne's Southside With You (2016), this was the film that Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson went to see on their first date.

When it came to the Academy Awards, Aiello lost out for Best Supporting Actor to Denzel Washington for Edward Zwick's Glory, while Lee was pipped to Best Original Screenplay by Tom Schulman for Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society. What annoyed him, however, was that Best Picture went to Fred Schepisi's Driving Miss Daisy, which many felt pandered to the white liberal conscience rather than addressing the core issue of racial prejudice. The same could not be said for the dozen-plus features directed by African-Americans that were released in 1991 on the back of Lee's success. Among those available to rent from Cinema Paradiso are Mario Van Peebles's New Jack City, Joseph P. Vasquez's Hangin' With the Homeboys, Bill Duke's A Rage in Harlem and John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood.

Lee's contribution to the list was Jungle Fever, which was dedicated to Yusuf Hawkins, who had been murdered in the Italian-American neighbourhood of Bensonhurst in 1989. Blessed with a soundtrack by Stevie Wonder and dwelling on the adulterous relationship between architect Flipper Purify (Wesley Snipes) and his Italian-American secretary, Angie Tucci (Annabella Sciorra), the story prompted Bill Lee to accuse his son of using the film to criticise his own marriage. However, the more intriguing aspects of the scenario centres on the interracial romance between soda jerk Paulie Carbone (John Turturro) and Orin Goode (Tyra Ferrell) and the tensions between the Good Reverend Doctor Purify (Ossie Davis) and his son, Gator, which saw Samuel L. Jackson draw on his own experiences of conquering a crack habit.

There was no room for Jackson in Lee's next project, Malcolm X (1992), which was being prepared by Norman Jewison before Lee convinced him that a white director lacked 'the deep understanding of the black psyche'. Inspired by The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the project had been in development hell since 1968, when producer Martin Worth had asked James Baldwin to produce a screenplay. He was joined by Arnold Perl, who had directed the Oscar-nominated documentary, Malcolm X: His Own Story As It Really Happened (1972). At various times, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy were linked with the picture before Lee took over and so reworked the Baldwin-Perl script that the former's family asked for his name to be removed from the credits.

Warner Bros and Lee similarly disagreed over the scope and budget of the picture, which counted Malcolm's widow, Betty Shabazz, among its consultants. When the studio suggested that New Jersey could stand in for Mecca, prominent African-Americans like Oprah Winfrey, Prince, Janet Jackson, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan made donations to enable Lee to send a second unit crew to film inside the Haram Sharif. Jewison had cast Denzel Washington in the title role and his powerhouse performance earned him the Best Actor prize at the Berlin Film Festival. However, he lost out to Al Pacino in Martin Brest's Scent of a Woman at the Oscars and Lee proclaimed that he had 'been robbed'. Not everyone agreed about the fidelity of the portrayal or the accuracy of the facts, but Martin Scorsese described it as 'beautiful'.

New Jack of All Trades

Having helped transform the landscape of American independent film-making, Lee began to suffer a series of critical and commercial setbacks. Set in 1973, the gleefully episodic Crooklyn (1994) is laced with autobiographical grace notes, as the characters played by Alfre Woodard and Delroy Lindo are a teacher and a struggling musician. In addition to co-scripting with siblings Joie and Cinqué, Lee also plays a glue sniffer named Snuffy. But, despite this being his most personal picture, it received a lukewarm reception. Lee's adaptation of Richard Price's Clockers (1995) did scarcely better business, despite the authenticity of the Brooklyn setting and the excellence of the performances of Delroy Lindo as a ruthless drug baron and Mekhi Phifer as a dealer being tailed by homicide detectives Harvey Keitel and John Turturro.

Lee resists the temptation to lapse into the gangsta guerilla style that had become popular following Ernest R. Dickerson's Juice (1992) and Albert and Allen Hughes's Menace II Society (1993), and he moved further away from the style with Girl 6 (1996), a return to She's Gotta Have It territory that features a knockout performance from Theresa Randle as a struggling actress who finds work as a phone sex operator. Switching tack again, Lee followed Ossie Davis, Charles S. Dutton and Andre Braugher from Los Angeles to Washington as they seek to participate in Louis Farrakhan's 1995 Million Man March in Get on the Bus (1996).

He sprung another surprise with He Got Game (1998), which saw Lee reunite with Denzel Washington in the story of a man in prison for the manslaughter of his wife who is offered the chance of a reduced sentence if he can persuade his estranged son (Ray Allen) to accept a place at Big State University because he is a stellar basketball prospect and the governor wants him on his alma mater's team. While trying to reconnect with Allen, Washington forges a link with prostitute Milla Jovovich, who keeps being beaten by her pimp. The violence is more murderous in Summer of Sam (1999), which harks back to 1977 to examine how the reign of terror of serial killer David Berkowitz impacts upon the Bronx neighbourhood where Adrien Brody is ostracised for turning punk and Mira Sorvino is trying to reconcile herself to husband John Leguizamo's philandering.

Around this period, Lee took his first detour into documentary making. He started strongly with 4 Little Girls (1997), which recalled how the Ku Klux Klan detonated bombs at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on 15 September 1963 and killed four black girls aged between 11-14. Even more impressive was When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006), an epic four-hour account of the devastation wrought upon New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina on 29 August 2005. Five years after the calamity, Lee returned to assess how the city and its people were adjusting to the trauma in the equally monumental If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise (2010).

Among Lee's other actualities are The Original Kings of Comedy (2000), the sporting profiles such as Kobe Doin' Work (2009), and the Michael Jackson duo of Bad 25 (2012) and Michael Jackson's Journey From Motown to Off the Wall (2016). He has also contributed shorts to such anthology projects as Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (2002). In addition to his Nike ads, Lee has also made many commercials and music videos, while also helming the 2004 teleplay, Sucker Free City (2004), about black, white and Asian gangs in San Francisco, and the pilot of Shark (2006), which stars James Woods as a maverick attorney.

Cinema Paradiso also offers a judicious selection of the films on which Lee has served as a producer, including cousin Malcolm D. Lee's The Best Man (1999), Gina Prince-Blythewood's Love & Basketball (2000), Lee Davis's 3 A.M. (2001) and Alan Elliott and Sydney Pollack's Amazing Grace (2018), a restored record of Aretha Franklin's remarkable gospel concerts at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles in January 1972.

Spike By Name

In 2000, Lee returned to the Golden Age of Hollywood to satirise America in Bamboozled. At its heart was Damon Wayans, as a black TV writer who is asked by the network to script Mantan: The New Millennial Minstrel Show, which recycled the names of 1930s actor Mantan Moreland and Willie 'Sleep'n'Eat' Best for the characters played by Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson. The fact that the show featuring African-Americans in blackface becomes a ratings winner is head-shakingly amusing. But not everyone felt that Lee had hit the target, with Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx claiming, 'he's just become the angry guy, the angry black man'.

African-American academic Stanley Crouch was even more scathing in branding Lee a 'propagandist'. Lee has never been one to back down from such confrontations and called out Quentin Tarantino over his use of language in Jackie Brown (1997) and Django Unchained (2012), while he castigated Clint Eastwood for including no black soldiers in either Flags of Our Fathers or Letters From Iwo Jima (both 2006). By all accounts, Steven Spielberg acted as peacemaker before Lee produced his own Second World War story, Miracle At St Anna (2008), which included a broadcast by Axis Sally (Alexandra Maria Lara), in which she asked the 92nd Division Buffalo Soldiers, 'Why die for a nation that doesn’t want you? A nation that treats you like a slave!'

The film was released after an upswing in Lee's critical fortunes. He was essentially a director for hire on 25th Hour (2002), an adaptation of David Benioff's novel about a drug dealer (Edward Norton) spending his last night in New York before embarking upon a seven-year prison sentence. While the core action centred on his relationships with father Brian Cox, girlfriend Rosario Dixon and best buddies Philip Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper, it was the way in which Lee integrated the attack on the Twin Towers that took the picture to a new level, after 9/11 had taken place during pre-production.

He missed his step with She Hate Me (2004), a treatise on whistleblowing and the workplace prejudice that becomes leeringly smug (viz the use of animated interludes) when ostracised biotec executive Anthony Mackie sets up a lucrative business to impregnate wealthy lesbians. However, Lee returned to firmer ground with Inside Man (2006), a project he had inherited from Ron Howard and which reunited him for the fourth time with Denzel Washington. He is on fine form as a hostage negotiator dealing with robber Clive Owen, while trying to prevent Manhattan wheeler-dealer Jodie Foster from complicating matters by helping Wall Street bank president Christopher Plummer protect a secret in his safe.

Either side of the little-seen Red Hook Summer (2012) and Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014), Lee took on another commercial venture in remaking Park Chan-wook's 2003 Korean noir, Oldboy (2013). Steven Spielberg and Will Smith had been attached to the project, which Christian Bale, Colin Firth and Clive Owen passed on before Josh Brolin signed up to play the alcoholic advertising executive who sets out to investigate when he is suddenly released 20 years after being abducted and held in solitary confinement. When the producers cut 35 minutes, however, Lee replaced his trademark credit, 'A Spike Lee Joint', with 'A Spike Lee Film' to register his disapproval.

However, he returned to more personal projects with Chi-Raq (2015), which brought Aristophanes to Southside Chicago to show how the escalation of the turf war between the Spartans and the Trojans prompts Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) to lead a sex strike to force gang leaders Demetrius (Nick Cannon) and Cyclops (Wesley Snipes) into laying down their arms. Criticised in some quarters for trivialising America's gun problem, this was the first original feature to be released by Amazon Studios. A few months later, Lee accepted an honorary Academy Award and delivered an 18-minute speech, in which he slated the American film industry by averring 'It's easier to be President of the United States as a black person than be the head of the studio or head of a network.'

Ironically, Lee finally received his first Oscar nomination for Best Director with his next picture. Stepping in after Jordan Peele felt that he would be better suited to handle BlacKkKlansman (2018), Lee won the Grand Prix at Cannes for his retelling of how Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), the first African-American detective in the Colorado Springs Police Department, managed to infiltrate the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan after being mistaken for a white man on the telephone. Using Jewish colleague Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) as his stand-in, Stallworth earned the trust of Grand Wizard David Duke (Topher Grace), who decides to officiate at his induction into the KKK.

Although he won the award for Best Adapted Screenplay, Lee lost out in the Best Director category to Alfonso Cuarón for Roma. He was disappointed to see longtime collaborator Terence Blanchard miss out on Best Score to Ludwig Göransson for his contribution to Ryan Coogler's Black Panther. However, his mood dipped as the night went on. Despite the excellence of Washington (who had previously appeared alongside father Denzel as a seven year-old in Malcolm X), he had failed to land a nomination. But Lee was frustrated when Driver was pipped to Best Supporting Actor by Mahershala Ali for his performance as Don Shirley in Peter Farrelly's road movie, Green Book.

Moreover, Lee tried to leave the auditorium when the same film took Best Picture. He later contented himself with declaring that 'the ref made a bad call' and, in recalling how he had previously been beaten by Driving Miss Daisy, he quipped, 'Every time someone's driving somebody, I lose.' However, the film put Lee back in the spotlight and it will be intriguing to see how he fares with Da 5 Bloods which follows four African-American veterans back to Vietnam to locate the remains of their fallen commander and a possible stash of buried treasure.