Spike’s telling it his way, whether you like it or not
Tymon Smith comes face-to-face with one of America’s most creative storytellers
ON a stage at the Sandton Convention Centre on Wednesday — while advertising types, marketers and digital practitioners had paid R1 700 to try to convince themselves that they were the storytelling descendants of Sophocles — one of the world’s most distinctive and recognisable storytellers sat in a back room sipping tea.
At 58, Spike Lee’s beard may be grey but his distinctive hooded eyes still have the same impervious look seen in the cover photo of his 2005 authorised biography That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It.
Wearing a peace-sign necklace, a cap promoting his latest film Chiraq and gold Nikes, Lee still has the skinny legs he had when playing Mars Blackmon in his debut film — She’s Gotta Have It — 30 years ago. This was a character he reprised for a series of adverts for the shoe company featuring a then upand-coming young basketball star named Michael Jordan.
In a three-decade career, Lee has become one of the most creative characters of American cinema and has never been scared of telling people what he thinks. It is a trait that has perhaps made it difficult for Lee to work within the confines of the Hollywood system and earned him the not always welcome reputation of being the angriest black man in the room.
Since coming to Soweto to shoot Nelson Mandela for the final scene of Malcolm X in 1991, Lee has visited South Africa numerous times. There was a time when you could almost guarantee no matter what the latest “Spike Lee Joint” was, it would be coming to our movie screens. ISSUES THAT WON’T GO AWAY: Spike Lee in 1989’s ‘Do the Right Thing’, his most critically acclaimed film
In recent years, however, in spite of the success of the politically toned-down but expertly crafted heist film, Inside Man (his most commercially successful project), Lee’s recent films have not been guaranteed distribution. His last film, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, was funded through a crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter and distributed online through the video streaming site Vimeo. Chiraq (pronounced “shy rack”, as he tells me twice during the interview) is the first film produced by Amazon studios and will be shown in theatres and on Amazon’s on-demand service.
Have digital platforms provided an opportunity to get his films to audiences with less interference from industry gatekeepers and executives? “As an artist you gotta try to get your stuff out any way possible and the various digital platforms have made this easier,” replies Lee, not the most forthcoming of interviewees.
Chiraq has seen Lee in the news quite a lot recently, not so much for the film’s content but for its name, a colloquial reference to Chicago’s violent South Side that combines the names of Chicago and Iraq.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who Lee must have had plenty of dealings with when he was still President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, came out against the film, claiming that the title would, as Lee says with a chuckle, “have a negative impact on tourism and economic development. I told him that, like the critics of Do the Right Thing, he too would be on the wrong side of history.”
Last year was the 25th anniversary of Do the Right Thing, Lee’s most critically acclaimed film, the story of one very hot day in the life of a Brooklyn block that ends with the death of a character called Radio Raheem at the hands of a New York City cop.
At the time Lee hoped that the film would raise awareness about racial tension in the city and help to end the reign of the then mayor Ed Koch, who many blamed for fanning the flames of racial intolerance in the city.
With the death of Eric Gardner, the riots in Ferguson and the increasing incidents of police killing of black Americans, I ask Lee if he is disappointed that the issues he dealt with in 1989 still have to be resolved in today’s America.
He nods and says, “What people don’t remember is that in Do the Right Thingwhen Raheem is choked by a New York City police officer, that was based on a real incident of a graffiti artist named Michael Stewart who died in a chokehold. But to see Eric Gardner, 27 years later, die the same way, was real disturbing and in fact I put something on my social media where we intercut those two chokeholds.”
Lee is an avid tweeter and has used the platform recently to point out that irrespective of the title of his new film, the issue that it deals with, gun violence and murder in Chicago, has not gone away and people continue to die in the city in disproportionate numbers.
Later when Lee takes to the stage to deliver the keynote address at this year’s Digital Edge conference, the highlight of his speech is a selection of clips from Chiraq .
Displaying his love of musicals, he transposed Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata to the South Side. It’s a stylish, vibrant and smart piece of politically tinged entertainment that sees the women of the world taking a decision to withhold sex until the men stop killing one other. “No Peace! No Pussy!” is the chant they take up in a montage showing protests from Australia to Denmark and India.
After the stylish but mannered symbolism of Da Sweet Blood of Jesus and his 2013 reinterpretation of the Korean
Any time I choose a film it’s because that’s the story I want to tell at that particular time As an artist you gotta get your stuff out any way possible and digital platforms have made this easier
film Oldboy, Chiraq looks like a welcome return for the angry Spike Lee of years gone by, a forceful demonstration of his belief “that art can impact life for better or for worse”.
“Any time I choose a film it’s because that’s the story I want to tell at that particular time,” he says.
Whether Rahm Emanuel will be convinced remains to be seen, but Lee is doing what he always has, telling it his way, whether anyone else likes it or not.
TEA TIME: Spike Lee takes a break from the Digital Edge conference in Joburg