Spike Lee, right, and wife Tanya attend the New York Premiere of 'She Hate Me' on July 20. (Evan Agostini/Getty Images)
Don't scoff. Check the evidence: They're both single-minded, jazz-loving, Brooklyn-born filmmakers, known by their first names, who crank out an average of about one film a year. They're equally adept at comedy and drama, frequently lean on their own regular repertoire of actors, occasionally appear in their own films, and are often courtside at New York Knicks games. Perhaps more to the point, they've both traced an unfortunate career path from critical praise and middling commercial success to a place where their films are regularly ignored by audiences and dismissed by critics as irrelevant or unfunny.
It would seem that, except for their ages (Woody: 68; Spike: 47), there's only one big difference between the two men. (That skin colour thing? C'mon, any biologist will tell you that race is a rounding error in the mathematics of genes.) The big wedge is this: As the world knows, Woody in conversation is endlessly introspective, leaning on his fully stocked store of neuroses for material both on and off camera.
And Spike? Well, here he sits in a near-empty Café Luxembourg on the Upper West Side on a weekday morning, obligatorily spooning through a bowl of oatmeal. He's dressed in a peach polo shirt and khaki slacks for an interview scheduled in an hour with the four ladies on The View, and he appears to be squirreling his energy for that encounter. But try putting a few questions to him about his personality and its relation to his new serio-comedy, She Hate Me, which opens Friday.
The film features Anthony Mackie as John Henry Armstrong, a Harvard-educated biotech executive who, having lost his job after blowing the whistle on corporate misdeeds at his firm, impregnates 19 lesbians for cash. (Don't blame him: It's his ex-fiancée's idea; she and her lover are his first clients.)
Initially cavalier about the moral implications of the venture, Armstrong eventually recognizes his responsibilities as a father.
So ask Spike whether audiences should be surprised that the same filmmaker who gave us the immortal comic cry of selfish sexual desperation -- 'Please baby please baby please baby baby baby, please!" -- in his feature debut, 1986's She's Gotta' Have It, is now wading into the sticky moral mud puddle of procreation issues. "Yeah, I'm versatile," he says with a shrug.
Take another shot. Does the span between the two main male characters of She's Gotta' Have It and She Hate Me -- from adolescence to maturity, generally speaking -- reflect his own personal growth arc? "A question like that, I really just leave up to other people to answer that. It's just: I'm growin', getting' older. Livin'," says Lee. "I don't think I can be more specific than that. Just growing. And I got a lot more growing to do."
To be sure (again, note the similarity with his filmic brother Woody), Spike Lee's films have always come with an underpinning of morality. Indeed, if it weren't for the fact that he already used Do the Right Thing for the title of his 1989 breakthrough, most of his films could carry that subtitle, including his latest.
In fact, She Hate Me tries to assert parallels between individual morality (or lack thereof), corporate morality (and lack thereof), and the moral breakdown of the government, as personified by George W. Bush, whose smug mug appears in the credit sequence on a $3 bill.
"I think that people could look at this film and identify with the character of John Henry Armstrong, and I say that because everyone, no matter who you are, is going to be put in a position where your ethics, scruples, morals, might have to be compromised to advantage your career," says Lee. "And I think people basically also know the difference between right and wrong, and sometimes we all, myself included, make the wrong decisions and end up regretting that decision that we made, but you have to learn from that."
(You could try probing for an example of where Lee made the wrong decision, but you probably already know how that line of query is going to go.) "I've always liked films where a character is torn between making a difficult choice. Just look at what Marlon Brando did as Terry Malloy [in On the Waterfront], with a great script by Budd Schulberg. You look at another great script, Ace in the Hole by Billy Wilder," continues Lee. "I like films where you have characters who are dealing with these internal struggles, whether they're going to do the right thing or not, and knowing that if they do it, there's a great cost to pay."
When he began his career, Lee proclaimed that he wanted to put the full range of African-American experience on screen. "I think there's many representations of African-American culture that you're not really getting in Hollywood film," he says. "In Hollywood film, they really are restricted to rappers, drug dealers, crack heads and clowns, I mean that's really the realm of the African-American experience for me in Hollywood films."
But if that's true today (a debatable point, in a context where Will Smith and Denzel Washington are some of the biggest stars, and Halle Berry is chosen over lily white Ashley Judd for the role of Catwoman), the evidence suggests Lee's alternative images don't have as much appeal as they used to. He no longer has a production deal with any studio (his past affiliations include Universal, Sony and Disney/Touchstone), which makes it a chore to raise capital for projects. His most commercially successful film, Malcolm X, is 13 years behind him.
"Yeah, it's a concern," he admits, "because the box office is where everything's predicated on, when you get money for a film." Does he wonder about his instincts? "No," he insists. "Nooo. Not gonna' do that. When any artist starts to question themselves, or any athlete starts to question, you lose your confidence, and once you lose your confidence then you become paralyzed. Overanalyzing. So I go with my gut instinct."
Besides, commercial success isn't his only goal. Lee is especially proud of the fact that he's been able to offer young and inexperienced filmmakers a platform to launch their careers: Ernest Dickerson and Malik Sayeed began as his cinematographers, Barry Alexander Brown and Sam Pollard are regular editors, and Terence Blanchard, whose first score was for Jungle Fever, has now composed music for 11 Spike Lee films. Lee habitually uses collective terms, speaking of what "we set out to do," or "the conversation we want to spark," to underscore his conviction that films are co-operative missions.
There is one film he's dying to make, a project he's been shopping around for years that he co-scripted with Budd Schulberg, the screenwriter who named names before the McCarthy hearings in the fifties and subsequently dropped out of sight. It's about the fight between the American and German pugilists Joe Louis and Max Schmeling. (They actually fought twice: Schmeling pummelled Louis in 1936; the favour was returned in 1938.) "It's my dream project," Lee says lethargically, his hooded eyes betraying no excitement over the idea. "It would be my opus. Our opus, Budd and I. It's an American story. It's really a world story. It's about a time when the world was in balance between fascism and democracy, and we've got it broken down with these two boxers: Joe Louis and Max Schmeling fought in the fight of the century. Both fighters were representing two ideologies, even though Schmeling wasn't a Nazi, he was still the poster boy for the Nazis. So it's a great story."
Lee's assistant waves from the corner of the restaurant to indicate that he really must be going; he doesn't want to keep the View ladies waiting.
Lee's assistant waves from the corner of the restaurant to indicate that he really must be off; he doesn't want to keep the ladies on The View waiting. He finishes his sentence, then bolts from his seat and asks the waiter if his assistant got the cheque. I explain that The Globe and Mail is only too happy to pop for his oatmeal. "No, no, no, we're gonna' get it," he says and disappears into the restaurant, looking for his assistant. Twenty seconds later they stroll by outside, waving a cheery goodbye through the large picture window.
The waiter approaches with the cheque. It is unpaid.
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