IN HIS OWN WORDS ON INSPIRATIONS “One of the first [films I saw] was Bye Bye Birdie at Radio City Music Hall. It’s funny, that opening scene of Do the Right Thing, in which Rosie Perez dances to ‘Fight the Power’, that came, I realised later on, from the opening of Bye Bye Birdie and Ann Margret singing about Birdie being drafted.” ON WHAT DISTINGUISHES A SPIKE LEE JOINT? “It’s hard for me to describe. I think it’s just really all the ingredients that I put into my film. Whatever film it is, whatever subject matter it is. Whether it’s a documentary or a narrative film. The connective tissue is that it’s coming through me, but all the stories I feel are different. They’re connected but they’re different. Fingers on a hand. Toes on a foot.” ON DOUBTING YOUR OWN ABILITIES “There is no way I could be in the position I am now, if I had doubt. That came from my
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parents and grandparents – even if they had thought it, they never once said: ‘You can’t do that.’ They said: ‘We support you, but you gotta work hard.’ You had to bust your ass.” ON THE OPEN-ENDED NATURE OF HIS FILMS “More often than not, I let the audience do some work.” “As a writer, I want everybody to get a chance to voice their opinions. If each character thinks that they’re telling the truth, then it’s valid. Then at the end of the film, I leave it up to the audience to decide who did the right thing.” ON THE IMPORTANCE OF DIVERSITY “Many people had passed on [She’s Gotta Have It, the television series]. The reason it got made was because Netflix has three black women executives – Pauline Fischer, Tara Duncan and Layne Eskridge – who knew the cultural significance of Nola Darling and Mars Blackmon. Other people didn’t get it…
T H E 2018 D A V I D L E A N L E C T U R E
