Earlier this year, Spike
Lee had a lifetime moment, when he picked up his first ever Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, for BlacKkKlansman. Lee last picked up nominations for Best Original Screenplay for Do the Right Thing and Best Documentary for 4 Little Girls but did not win either award. In November 2015, he was given the Academy Honorary Award for his contributions to filmmaking, while in 2019, he also picked up his first Best Picture and Best Director nominations for Blackkklansman.
Now, at the Vivid Sydney 2019 festival, which begins today and is on until June 15, Lee is set to join a public discussion, while reflecting on his own career. Lee, who is widely hailed as “Hollywood’s political conscience”, will be speaking about matters of racism, politics and films. We caught up with the ace director for a chat, days before his appearance at the Vivid Sydney 2019 festival. Excerpts from the interview:
You won an Oscar earlier this year, for Best Adapted Screenplay for your film, BlacKkKlansman. This was your first Academy Award, while you also picked up nominations for Best Picture and Best Director. Congratulations overall! How does it feel to be an Oscar-nominated director? We all saw your reaction post the nominations. Tell us more about it...
That was a combination of my exuberance of the sixth and final nomination, Best Picture. So it was building up... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and what you see (referring to the viral video of his reaction), that was number 6. And we went crazy. I’m thrilled for my long time editor, Barry Brown, who never got nominated; for both my longtime music composer Terence Blanchard, and (actor) Adam Driver, never nominated before. So yeah, it was a community thrill.
You’ve been making phenomenal movies from back in the day, from the late-1980s, and you’ve finally been recognised and have been honoured with an Oscar nomination for your direction.Do you think it was about time?
Well, I feel great, and I also feel it’s about time. I want to state that it is April Reign’s campaign, #OscarsSoWhite, combined with Cheryl Boone Isaacs, two African American women. Cheryl Boon Isaacs was the president of the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts, and Sciences, so behind #OscarsSoWhite she went to the board of governors and said, “Look, this is a bad look, we have to diversify the voting membership.”
So, every person of colour who’s got a nomination or an Oscar can thank the both of them, because that changed everything.
Now there’s a lot of diversity, we’ve got If Beale Street Could Talk, Black Panther and a lot others who are finally getting recognised. Is this change ‘real’?
Here’s the tricky thing. In order for this to continue and not be a trend, diversity has to go echelon, of the gatekeepers (heads of studios), because they’re the people who decide what we’re making and
what we’re not making. They decide every quarter, in quarterly meetings... what we’re making and what we’re not, and unless we’re in the room, it’s going to be iffy.
One of my favourite musicals of all time was Hamilton, and they have a song. You got to be in the room to make it happen.
How did Blackkklansman happen for you? What was the turning point that made you pick this film over something else?
Jordan Peele, my brother, of Get Out fame, called me up out of the blue, he said, “Spike”. He wanted me to consider doing a film, so he gave me a six-word pitch: “Black man infiltrates Ku Klux Klan”. Six words. That’s going to be one of the greatest six-word pitches of all time. So, I said, “Is this a David Chappelle skit?” and he said, “No, his name is Ron Stallworth, and this is a true story. He wrote a book. We have a script. Would you be interested?” I said, yes.
Your film was powerful. It was so powerful that when the credits started rolling, nobody moved. Did you feel that in the responses from people?
I have felt it, I am on Instagram man. I got several people telling me that they were one or two black people in the theatre. And then, after the film, when the lights finally go up, people who loved the film... they were hugging them. They were hugging the black folks in the theatre saying, “I am sorry. I apologise. I apologise.”
I have never heard anything like that before in my life. What we tried to do was, even though it takes place in the 1970s, I still wanted it to be contemporary.
So, there are many things that my co-writer Kevin Willmott and I — we put in... so, to people, it would click like, this stuff is still happening today. And then, there’s the ending. That really hammers home where we are in this world today.
Why would you say that a story about the 1970s and the Klan, and a black man on the police force, comments on what is happening today in America?
One of the mistakes people are making, I feel, is that they
are saying, this is just an American phenomenon — the rise of the right. This is happening globally, and with this kind of guy in the White House, he has made it okay for these white supremacists to come out in the open... They are coming out under the rocks, and he has legitimised them, and I wouldn’t even call it a dog whistle, he is like a bullhorn.
Do you think Donald Trump is advocating this phenomenon? What according to you, should he have done differently?
We have a guy in the White House… it was a defining moment, it was not just for Americans, but for the world and that guy was given a chance to say we’re about love and not hate. And that guy did not denounce the plan. It was too fine a moment, where he could have said to the world, not the United States, that we were better than that.
If given an opportunity to sit down with Trump, would you?
No, I don’t use his name either. He’s Agent Orange.
Spike Lee is expected to be in conversation with Rhoda Roberts, head of Indigenous Programming at Sydney Opera House, on “issues of race in the media and Hollywood”. On May 29, Andrew Bukenya and his band will be reinterpreting the music from Lee’s films at Vivid After Hours. More details online.