Joint Ventures

With a diverse filmmaking career, spanning more than 30 years, Spike Lee is one of cinema’s most unique and influential voices. Kaleem Aftab reveals why...

THE EARLY YEARS

It was at the Cannes Film Festival, where his debut film She’s Gotta Have It premiered in 1986, that ‘A Spike Lee Joint’ first entered the cinematic vernacular. The colloquial use of the term joint instead of film in the credits immediately set the filmmaker apart from his peers and announced in a simple, yet effective way that the New Yorker’s films would be imbued with a sense of history, social realism and blackness. Joint has long been used as a term, especially in song, to refer to prisons, speakeasy bars, and marijuana, and Spike embraced the edginess of the word. It established him as both provocateur and connector; he would bring the full variety and hues of African-American life to cinema and jettison many of the stereotypes of black people that had hitherto been perpetuated and reinforced by an American cinema scene historically dominated by white males.

His early films – She’s Gotta Have It, School Daze (1988), Do the Right Thing (1989), Mo’ Better Blues (1990), Jungle Fever (1991) – put middle-class black America on screen for the first time. His protagonists were artists, students, musicians, architects as well as the unemployed and drug addicts. These films were set in the real world and given an immediacy by their desire to talk about current political events, from police brutality and wrongful arrests to race riots. His films met these issues head on, flipping the perspective so we heard from the oppressed rather than the oppressor. These five films, written and directed by Lee, ensured he was the most talked about director on the planet.

DOCUMENTING HISTORY

To many, Spike Lee is an even greater documentarian than he is a narrative filmmaker. His choice of documentary subjects and the sensitivity and tenderness with which he treats his subjects are like a window to his soul. They are indicative of the lessons he learned in his early childhood (when he was still known as Shelton Jackson Lee) from his mother, a teacher, and his father, a jazz musician, as well as just by living in the then largely black middle-class neighbourhood of Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

His documentaries are about political history, 4 Little Girls (1997); environmental catastrophes, When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) and its follow-up, If God is Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise (2010); American sports stars, Jim Brown: All American (2002) and Kobe Doin’ Work (2009); musicians, Bad 25 (2012) on Michael Jackson; comedians, The Original Kings of Comedy (200) and the filming of stage plays, A Huey P. Newton Story (2001), John Leguizamo: Freak (1998), Passing Strange (2009) and Rodney King (2017), to name but a few.

His work as a documentarian has also seeped into his fictional narratives: he began his seminal Malcolm X (1992) with footage of the Rodney King beating, used archive material in his exploration of the black image Bamboozled (2000) and, most recently, the inclusion of Charlottesville riot footage into the extraordinary BlacKkKlansman (2018). His documentary films are compliments and complements to his fictional narratives, notably showing a refusal to accept the stated position as sacrosanct, a desire to turn over rocks and a compassion for the powerless.

JOHN DAVID WASHINGTON

"Spike Lee has a very unique way of recruiting and pitching stuff. It was a phone call, very brief, 'I got a book for you. Read it.' I was blown away, obviously, just by the fact this really happened..I mean, this is a guy I've idolized since I was a kid. He gave people of colour, men and women, a voice, a platform, and he chose me. I was beyond excited and just couldn't wait to get to work.'

[From BlacKkKlansman production notes, 2018]

Washington made his acting debut in Malcolm X (1992) and was one of the leads in BlacKkKlansman (2018)

RUTH E CARTER

"Spike was very open and generous. Yet, he was equally as quick to inform you of a misstep with a loud laugh and shout, 'TEAR IT UP'...He was the epitomy of a New Yorker to me. He read the Post and The Village Voice. He went to plays and knew all kinds of new artists. He would include you and made you feel like he was taking good care of you.'

[From Ruth E Carter's 2017 blog about School Daze]

Carter was nominated for an Academy Award for her costume design on Malcolm X (1992), her first of two Oscar nods. She is a regular collaborator with Lee, working on 12 of his films to date

BEHIND THE SCENES

Lee has made many great contributions to cinema, but perhaps the one least mentioned is the pantheon of cast and crew he has given a break in filmmaking. As the director, Lee has always been the first among equals, but from the get-go he has also been aware of the importance of giving others a chance to shine, especially those who have traditionally been impeded in career progression. Lee continues to push his production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, to incubate new talent, and he complements this nurturing by teaching film at his former alma mater, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he is currently a professor, guiding a new generation of filmmakers to take risks and make film in their own fashion.

Taking Lee’s work with cinematographers as an example, the director’s first half dozen films were made in collaboration with director of photography Ernest Dickerson, with whom he attended film school. A flourishing partnership full of Dutch angles, vibrant colours and the development of Lee’s signature dolly shot, Dickerson would go on to be a director of some note himself. For Crooklyn (1994), Lee partnered with Arthur Jafa, whose incredible work with black imagery was recently showcased by the Serpentine Gallery. Clockers (1995) was the big break in the career of Malik Sayeed, while Kerwin DeVonish, the film’s the camera loader, worked his way up to be head of department by the time of Lee’s 2002 drama Red Hook Summer.

More recently, the early careers of Daniel Paterson (Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, 2014) and Chayse Irwin (BlacKkKlansman) have benefitted from Lee’s penchant for spotting and nurturing new talent. It would be remiss to talk about his work in the camera department without mention of Lee’s collaborations with Ellen Kuras and Matthew Libatique, too.

A quick look at the credits of Lee’s early work also highlights the starting points of various other key collaborators (and future award nominees and winners), from costume designer Ruth E Carter to editor Barry Alexander Brown – both of whom have worked on many of Lee’s films.

DEE REES

"[Spike Lee]'s been a mentor. Growing up, he was one of the first black directors I became aware of, because he was so visible in front of the camera. On Inside Man, I was interning for the script supervisor, which was great because you're right by the camera. You get to see him talk to the actors, you get to see him talk to the camera department, lens notes, distance, all that. From that I got a good sense of process, and having a good sense of family on set."

[From CinemaBlend interview, 2011]

Rees is the director of Mudbound (2017) and Pariah (2011). She was a second-year film student at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 2005 when she first met Lee, who is the school's artistic director

NO MATTER THE BUDGET

‘One for them and one for me’ is a mantra of Lee’s friend and fellow New Yorker, Martin Scorsese. Although well-known for his independent movies, Lee’s work is also punctuated by studio-backed films. And, as with every great auteur, no matter how his films have been made Lee’s work always carry his unmistakable signature.

The first sign that Lee would do it his own way was when he asked leading black celebrities to help plug the budget when making Malcolm X for Warner Bros. He felt it was the only way he could complete the epic while doing the story of the leading Civil Rights activist justice. It remains one of Lee’s most beloved films, and features one of the alltime great Denzel Washington performances.

Lee also delivered one of the great studio heist movies, from a Russell Gewirtz script, in Inside Man (2006), which starred Washington again (their fourth collaboration) alongside Brits Clive Owen and Chiwetel Ejiofor. What’s remarkable is the way Lee used clothing, from baseball hats to turbans, to show modern New York from inside a bank vault.

Throughout his work, Lee has been one of the great chroniclers of American life, so perhaps it’s no surprise that when David Benioff adapted his novel 25th Hour for Lee to direct in 2002, the story was updated to include scenes at Ground Zero. It was the first, and for many, the best film about post-9/11 New York. Similarly, his recent BlacKkKlansman turns a 1970s’ cop tale about the KKK into an impactful and on-point message about how racists have changed tactics to become electable.

BARRY ALEXANDER BROWN

"'It's the work - the work is the only thing important.' I have heard Spike say this, or something like it, from the time I met him 37 years ago. I have had the great pleasure to be a part of much of that work and I am still surprised how fresh he has kept his sense of cinema over all these years - still experimenting, still approaching each film with the excitement of youth and still pushing me to keep up, to do my best as a collaborator. I have seen him tired and at the edge of exhaustion but I have never seen him disinterested. He will sit in the editing room with me after having watched a cut; his head bowed, his eyes seeing what his mind is playing back and then look at me to share an insight on the film that I have completely missed, share an idea that will either quicken the pace or sharpen a moment, whether it's dramatic or comic. Working with Spike has kept me young, has kept me inspired."

Brown first collaborated with Spike Lee on School Daze (1988) and went on to edit many of his other films, including most recently BlacKkKlansman (2018)

Kaleem Aftab is a film writer and critic for various outlets, including The Independent, and wrote Spike Lee’s official biography, Spike Lee: That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It (2005)

SPIKE LEE FILMOGRAPHY

2018 BlacKkKlansman

2018 Pass Over

2017 Rodney King

2015 Chi-Raq

2014 Da Sweet Blood of Jesus

2013 Oldboy

2012 Red Hook Summer

2009 Passing Strange

2008 Miracle at St. Anna

2006 When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts

2006 Inside Man

2004 She Hate Me

2002 25th Hour

2002 Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (segment ‘We Wuz Robbed’)

2000 Bamboozled

2000 The Original Kings of Comedy

1999 Summer of Sam

1998 He Got Game

1997 4 Little Girls

1996 Get on the Bus

1996 Girl 6

1995 Clockers

1994 Crooklyn

1992 Malcolm X

1991 Jungle Fever

1990 Mo’ Better Blues

1989 Do the Right Thing

1988 School Daze

1986 She’s Gotta Have It