Spike Lee Just Made the Movie of the Year

Spike Lee lights a candle. He motions wordlessly to the spot on the red couch where he'd like me to sit. He lights a second candle. The two of us are inside an editing room in Lee's memorabilia-filled office in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. He has his reference materials on hand here: Joe Louis's boxing trunks, flattened and framed. Copies of the New York Post and the Daily News with headlines about Spike Lee and his adventures at Madison Square Garden, where he holds Knicks season tickets. Books about lynchings, about history, about people whose stories haven't yet been told—or told right—on-screen. In the quiet of the editing room he lights a third candle without speaking, then sits in an office chair set low to the ground, so that even at Lee's modest height his knees push up into the air. Knicks-orange glasses, Knicks-orange Nikes. “All right,” he says, sighing. “Let's go.”

Lee has directed nearly 30 films, including documentaries, in a little over 30 years. From the very beginning, he's also done a lot of this: trying to explain himself, or his movies, or the basic facts of American history, to some journalist sitting on a squeaky red couch on the other side of the room. “I've always considered this a part of the moviemaking process,” he says. “Because I understood, coming from independent filmmaking and being a black filmmaker, that the studios were not gonna spend millions and millions of dollars. They weren't gonna buy TV ads. So I had to be the person to bang the drum.” In Lee's early years as a filmmaker—beginning with his 1986 feature debut, She's Gotta Have It, through 1989's Do the Right Thing and 1992's Malcolm X—his movies had such clarity and force that the conversations around them often seemed redundant. Do the Right Thing is a masterpiece of nuance, ambiguity, style. Then someone would sit there and ask him what it meant. Like it wasn't all there already.

She's Gotta Have It established Lee as one of the most promising directors in America; the Nike commercials he starred in with Michael Jordan, starting in the late '80s, made him famous. He became an icon, someone whose opinion was sought after, or heard too often, or both. In this century, Lee's output has been more uneven. There have been some successes—2002's 25th Hour or 2006's Inside Man—but Lee is also aware of the perception that he increasingly struggles to get his films made, in part because fewer people come to see them. Lee had to go to Europe in search of funding for 2008's war film Miracle at St. Anna. He battled with the producers of 2013's Oldboy so much that he says now: “That was not the film that we wanted to make, that cut.” His romantic horror film from 2014, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, was funded via Kickstarter.

Lee is confident that history will vindicate this later period in his career: “A lot of my films people didn't get when they came out,” he says. “They didn't get 25th Hour. Now people love that film.” But it's also been a long time since a Spike Lee movie arrived in theaters with the energy and momentum that he used to routinely bring. Until now, that is.

In May, Lee premiered his newest film, BlacKkKlansman, at Cannes to ecstatic reviews. Cannes is a place of significance for Lee. Do the Right Thing premiered there in 1989, losing the Palme d'Or to Steven Soderbergh's sex lies and videotape. Lee was angry about that then, he says, and he's angry about it now: “Sally Field and the late, great Héctor Babenco, who directed one of my most favorite films, Pixote”—both on the jury that year, which was chaired by director Wim Wenders—“they told me that it was Wenders that did it. He was not letting it happen. He just lied again at Cannes this year and said jury presidents have no power. I woulda left the hatchet buried, but now he lied again.”

Klansman was Lee's first entry into the official program at Cannes since 2002. The film tells the true story of Ron Stallworth, the first black member of the Colorado Springs police department, who successfully infiltrated a local Ku Klux Klan chapter—by telephone—in the late 1970s. Stallworth is played by John David Washington, son of longtime Lee collaborator Denzel Washington. Adam Driver plays a white cop Stallworth enlists to meet with the Klan in person. Lee's Colorado Springs is overflowing with college protests, corrupt cops, gun-wielding racists, and languid creekside debates about blaxploitation flicks. The film is at once a comedy and a tragedy, half satire, half thriller, larger than life and yet deeply grounded in real events. In that sense, it's a Spike Lee film—his best in a long time, and maybe the single most effective piece of art about our current political moment anybody has made since we fully entered—or, rather, re-entered—hell in this country.

The script came to Lee via Jordan Peele, who then helped develop the project for Focus Features. It's the first movie Lee has done with a major studio in more than a decade. In the Sunday silence of his office—muffled, languorous, a little anxious—I ask him if Peele ever told him why, exactly, he thought Lee might be a good fit for the project.

“Oh, he said…” Lee looks at me again, like he's trying to ascertain if he was really just asked the question he was asked. “He chose the right motherfucker for the job! That's why!” Lee is laughing now, it's so obvious.

“Be honest here, my brother. No one should have to think long and hard why Jordan Peele asked me to do this. He's seen my body of work. It's simple. He's seen my body of work! I knew he had a list. I don't know who else was on the list. But I did not find it strange that Oh, my God! Jordan Peele is asking me to do this?! I mean, I knew why he wanted to.” Another incredulous look.

“Because he knew I can do this shit. Simple.”

Lee spent some of May and most of June shooting the second season of his television adaptation of She's Gotta Have It, and today he and his cast are in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, filming at the third annual Prince Born Day Purple People Party, hosted by…Spike Lee. Still great by the way, the original She's Gotta Have It. Shot in black and white, it tells the story of Nola Darling, a Fort Greene artist who is dating three men, one of whom—Mars Blackmon, a bike messenger who repeats almost everything he says twice—was played by a young, extremely charismatic Spike Lee. The new version, which Lee is making for Netflix, has the same set of characters, but it also broadens Nola's world, making time for her female friendships, her career as an artist—at the end of the first episode, she wheat-pastes a poster onto the front gate of Spike Lee's office—and the complicated evolution of Fort Greene itself, with its rising rents and constant construction.

Lee sits alone on a low concrete bench as the block party begins to ramp up, annotating a script with a red pen, in full Prince regalia: Mismatched Prince sneakers, one white, one black. Yellow T-shirt with Prince's face on the back. Purple fanny pack on a gold chain. Prince-purple glasses. Some percentage of the people assembling around him are paid actors and background extras. The rest of the people here are just Prince fans hoping to dance to “1999.” When Lee directed Do the Right Thing in this neighborhood, nearly 30 years ago, he was criticized by some for sanitizing it: cleaning up the brownstones, buffing away graffiti. But Spike Lee's Brooklyn—polyglot, primary-colored, full of music, always on the verge of gentrification, obsessed with the oeuvre of Spike Lee—and real-life Brooklyn have more or less converged these days, and it can be hard to tell which is which once the cameras come out.

Lee turns a page of the script and writes NO MUSIC in big red capital letters at the top of the next one. He stands up. Time has bent the director into a slight C shape. It does not appear to have improved his patience. His assistant director, Randy Fletcher, approaches, bearing a question about whether a particular cast member is done for the day. “Nobody is wrapped until I fucking say it,” Lee says.

He communicates with his crew mostly by pointing at someone, loudly and irritably saying their name, and then rapidly turning his finger in a circle: Hurry up. Production assistants mutter angrily when his back is turned. Lee works quickly: a scene here, right on the street, with his four main actresses, and then another, just a hundred yards down on the opposite side, where Mars Blackmon, played by the actor Anthony Ramos, is hawking mixtapes, and so on, this big amoeba of people drifting around Bed-Stuy, with a solitary Lee at the center of it.

“I've always been a hard worker,” Lee says to me later. “And I get it from people like James Brown, the hardest-working man in show business. James Brown, Prince, Michael—those guys worked on their craft. They weren't half-stepping.” That's the lineage Lee claims for himself. “The baton,” he says. Lee still rises early, often at 5 A.M. He works six or seven days a week. He's got a house on Martha's Vineyard on the 18th hole of a golf course he's never actually been on—“I don't play golf. Hell no”—except to greet Barack Obama when he plays through.

For the final shot of the day, Lee walks out onto the stage and addresses the crowd—the civilian crowd, the one he's not paying, the ones who just showed up to dance to Prince songs. “Sorry for the delay,” he says, “but we're filming an episode of She's Gotta Have It.” He asks if the crowd might participate in this next shot and tells his DJ to start playing “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Lee stands onstage, in front of thousands of people: conducting them, doing a little side-to-side step, urging them to sing when the chorus comes around. He's hosting, he's directing, he's grooving to Prince. He allows himself a half smile, his first of the day.

He hoists the microphone and puts his finger to his ear for one last bit of direction: “You gotta sing! Sing the song!”

BlacKkKlansman begins, without explanation, with a scene from Gone with the Wind: Vivian Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara, making her way through the carnage in the aftermath of the Battle of Atlanta, as the camera pulls back to fit a Confederate flag in the frame. Lee is a student of film history. He's also a scorekeeper, and a score settler. “I saw Gone with the Wind on a class trip,” Lee says. “So when Malcolm X came out, I was like, ‘Fuck that. I had to see Gone with the Wind. Go see Malcolm X now.’ ”

Lee's cinema is full of cinema. He first conceived of She's Gotta Have It as an homage to Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon—three men's differing perspectives on an unknowable woman. In Inside Man, the pizza-delivery guy is played by the same actor who played the pizza-delivery guy in Dog Day Afternoon. The logo on the box says “Sal's Famous Pizzeria,” which is the restaurant in Do the Right Thing.

As a filmmaker, Lee is an enthusiast: His movies are kinetic, hovering just over human life in all its exuberant, contradictory messiness. But as a teacher and a historian—Lee has been a professor at N.Y.U. for 25 years—he is constantly trying to correct the record. Increasingly, as Lee himself has become part of film history, the two projects collide. In the first episode of the new She's Gotta Have It, Nola Darling gives a speech about how Denzel Washington was robbed of the Oscar he deserved for Malcolm X. Lee was given an honorary award by the Academy in 2015. But he's never won: “To be honest, after Do the Right Thing, I said, ‘That's it.’ You know? That's not to say I wasn't happy to get the honorary award, but as far as Oscars, my thing has always been my body of work. What film won best film of 1989?”

Driving Miss Daisy.

“Driving Miss motherfucking Daisy. Who's watching that film now?”

Lee opens BlacKkKlansman with Gone with the Wind to make a point about the dark mythology that lurks at the heart of American movies. “But here's the thing,” he says. He sits up in his chair. “It's not Gone with the Wind. It's growing up and watching motherfucking cowboy movies where Native Americans look like savages. I'm gonna say what I've said before: These bullshit John Ford, John Wayne movies are lies. They're lying on the humanity of Native Americans.”

In another early scene in Klansman, Kwame Ture, the activist formerly known as Stokely Carmichael, comes to speak at the Black Student Union in Colorado Springs. Ture talks about Tarzan: growing up and watching the original 1930s films, in which Tarzan beats up the black natives, and rooting against the natives. Lee points out that movies have always been a powerful agent of indoctrination. “That's been the history,” he says. “Not the whole history, but a large part of the history of Hollywood—to dehumanize people, whether we're black, Hispanic, gay, whatever.”

In his first year of graduate school at N.Y.U., Lee says, his professors screened The Birth of a Nation: “All you're taught is that D. W. Griffith is considered the so-called father of cinema.” But Birth of a Nation also led to the revitalization of the Klan, which at the time was dormant. “The film was shown in the White House,” Lee says. “Woodrow Wilson says, ‘It's like writing history with lightning.’ ”

In BlacKkKlansman, there is a sequence in which Klan members jubilantly watch Birth of a Nation. Lee juxtaposes this scene with one in which Harry Belafonte narrates the true story of a 17-year-old boy named Jesse Washington, who was lynched in Waco, Texas, in 1916, the year after Birth of a Nation was released. Belafonte plays a friend of Washington's who witnessed his brutal death, which became known as the Waco Horror, and who has come to Colorado Springs to educate the students about the kind of history not taught in their school. Near the end of the film, a climactic shot of Klansmen burning a cross leads into documentary footage from the white-supremacist marches in Charlottesville last year.

BlacKkKlansman is superlative entertainment. It finds that exhilarating space between comedy and horror. (Lee names Dr. Strangelove, Network, and even Stalag 17 as tonal reference points: “It's been done before. It's not new. It's hard to do.”) But it's also meant to be an answer of sorts to what's come before: history written in lightning.

The last time I see Lee is the day after the block party. When I ask him how it went, he says he was mostly just relieved people came. “This is a fear I always have,” he says. “This comes from my father: No one's gonna show up.”

Lee's father, Bill Lee. A great artist in his own right. In the '60s, he was one of the most sought-after session musicians on earth. “He was on a Bob Dylan album,” Lee says. “My father's on ‘Puff the motherfucking Dragon’ with Peter, Paul and Mary. Judy Collins. Gordon Lightfoot. Joan Baez. He was the man. And when Bob Dylan's set went electric, everybody followed him, and so there's people who want to use my father, but they say, ‘You have to play electric bass.’ And he wouldn't do it.”

Crooklyn, Lee's seventh film, is a lightly fictionalized version of this story: Delroy Lindo plays a jazz musician and father of five with a good heart and a bad habit of bouncing checks. The film is full of love—the script was originally written by Lee's younger siblings, Joie and Cinqué—and exasperation. The mother in Crooklyn is a relentless disciplinarian, but she's also the provider. This too is based on real life. Lee's mother, who died around the time he turned 20, had to support the family after his father stopped working: “When my father was the top bassist, when he was the go-to guy, my mother didn't have to work. She was shopping at Bloomingdale's, Lord & Taylor. And then my father wouldn't play electric bass, so my mother had to work. So she started teaching at Saint Ann's. You know, he believed in his music. He wasn't gonna sell out. He had principles. That's great. That's one thing. On the other hand, he had five kids.”

And you were one of them.

“I was the eldest. And we were starving. 'Cause he was not gonna play electric bass.”

How do you feel about that now?

“I can't be mad at my father, because many people are miserable now because their parents killed their dream. And my mother, my father, my grandmother, no one in my family ever said, There's no black directors.”

Have you ever had to make a decision like the one your father did?

“Because of my father, I never bought into that whole narrative of the pure artist who's broke. I saw firsthand. Uh-uh.” In Crooklyn, there is a painful scene in which Delroy Lindo's character plays a concert to an almost empty house. It's another autobiographical moment: “I wanted people to come see my father, but these motherfuckers don't give a fuck about my father. They don't know who he is!”

So from the very beginning of his career, Lee has seized every opportunity to make a case for his own work. He likes to cite Kurosawa, who made films into his 80s. He figures he's got 20 more years at least. “I've done films that didn't click with the audience, but people discovered them years later and love 'em,” Lee says. “Crooklyn. People love Crooklyn more than Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X. It wasn't like that when it came out. I think what people don't understand is, for a film to become a hit—and let's leave Star Wars and Marvel comic books out, but other stuff—unless things line up perfectly, it might not happen. Making a good film is a crapshoot. You roll the dice.”

Anyway, BlacKkKlansman was a straight-up sensation at Cannes. Lee knows that already. Six-minute standing ovation. Press conference in which he excoriated Donald Trump, nearly broke down in tears out of sheer anger: “I don't care what the critics say or anybody else, but we are on the right side of history with this film,” he said. Won the second-place prize there, the Grand Prix.

It's true that even now, every time Lee does a film, he can't help but think about his father. “I hope somebody comes,” Lee says. For a second he looks anxious, transported into the past. But then he smiles. “They're coming to this one, though! They're coming to BlacKkKlansman.”

Zach Baron is GQ' s staff writer.

This story originally appeared in the August 2018 issue with the title "Spike Lee Just Made the Movie of the Year."