Spike Lee's voice bellows up the staircase in Claridge’s hotel. “Is Kaleem there yet?” Lee is wearing the Arsenal T-shirt with Thierry Henry’s name on the back that I gave him. I joke that he still hasn’t seen the light and started supporting my team, Fulham. It’s a on old joke with us: two years ago I spent a year at Lee’s office in Brooklyn, interviewing the director, his friends and family for my biography of him,
Spike Lee: That’s My Story and I’m Sticking To It.
In London for his new film Inside Man, Lee tells me about his trip to the New Orleans Mardi Gras the week before. “Things are as they were when the water subsided,” he tells me. “People are waiting for their Government to do what they should be doing.” This is typical anti- establishment fare from a director who thinks that the last correct military intervention by America was entry into the Second World War.
We were both at the Venice Film Festival when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf coast last August — Lee spent every spare moment watching the disaster unfold on TV. The thousands of African-Americans crammed into the New Orleans Superdome seemed to confirm what Lee had been arguing in his films for the past two decades — that African-Americans are at the bottom of the country’s food chain.
Back from New Orleans, though, he no longer seems to see America in black and white terms alone. “Before, I used to think that everything was based on race,” he says. “Now class matters just as much. If you are a poor person: black, white, Latino, whatever, the Bush Administration does not have your best interests at heart. If the Government thought poor people mattered, the response would have been much quicker.”
It’s a huge surprise to me: in all my conversations with Lee and in the films he is best remembered for — Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, Malcolm X — race has always been the No 1 driving factor. In Lee’s America, racism is the ultimate evil, and always responsible for Black America’s subjugation. Now it looks as if the fiery director is changing his angle of attack. Or at least starting to get a broader perspective of America for the first time. Ironically, his change in philosophy comes just as the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has given its Best Picture Oscar to Crash, a movie about the undercurrent of racial tension in Los Angeles.
When I mention the Oscars to Lee, he breaks into a rendition of this year’s Best Song winner, It's Hard out Here for a Pimp, from Hustle & Flow. “When they cut away to Morgan Freeman’s face on TV it was priceless . . . That said everything about this year’s Oscars,” laughs Lee. As for Crash’s victory, he says: “The academy is not going to give their award to a film about gay cowboys.” I note that he does not praise Crash, nor its race politics.
The first indication that Lee’s rhetoric has changed and that he is less of an awkward interview subject — he once argued so much with an Esquire interviewer that the magazine ran the piece with the headline: Spike Lee hates your cracker ass — is matched by a new direction in his movies. The heist thriller Inside Man is his first traditional Hollywood genre picture. It is backed by a major producer and features several A-list stars — Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster, Willem Dafoe and Clive Owen. It’s a far cry from the nearly all-black and overtly polemical films we are used to from him.
Lee sees it as his homage to Dog Day Afternoon. His classy picture owes a huge debt in style and tone to both that Al Pacino vehicle and to another Sidney Lumet picture starring Pacino — Serpico. Wildly entertaining, not only is this a return to form for Lee, it’s also the best heist movie since The Usual Suspects.
Lee had to fight to get into the director’s chair. “Someone passed me the script for Inside Man on the down low. I read it and at a meeting with the producer Brian Grazer said I really liked it. He said he was intrigued by me directing the film and felt I had the talent to do it, but didn't know if we could work together. I had to convince him it would be OK.”
Grazer and Lee first tried to work together after Do the Right Thing in 1989, but the relationship suffered a series “of stops and starts”. It reached its nadir in 1992 when Lee's cousin Malcolm dropped a project he was working on with Spike and went off to make the more lucrative Undercover Brother with Grazer. It was an incident that left Lee fuming at both Malcolm and Grazer. “Brian Grazer — I think he often sees black people as buffoons and coons,” he said at the time.
While nothing suggests that Grazer has ever held such an opinion, the incident reveals Lee’s previous inclination to see everything in terms of race. It also shows how he would use the race card when things didn’t go his own way.
Another change is in the very way he speaks. Occasionally — and particularly in situations where he feels uncomfortable — he stutters. This would often lead to some awkward silences between us. These days, though, the silences have been replaced by his boisterous laughter. He seems calmer. There are few signs of the old argumentative Spike Lee.
He could be said to be breaking the habit of a lifetime. Why, he might even have to change his name if he carries on like this. He was born Shelton Jackson Lee in March 1957, but given the nickname Spike by his mother Jacquelyn — who died when he was a teenager — because of his feistiness.
The nickname was most apt in the early part of his career, when he was quick to speak his mind, especially on racial themes. He famously criticised Whoopi Goldberg for wearing blue contact lenses and Hollywood studio bosses for not giving African-American film-makers jobs. Equally famously, he once asked black teenagers across America to boycott school: they would learn more by watching his film Malcolm X, he said. Lee has since admitted to regretting some of these outbursts.
Like many people who are approaching the half-century mark, Lee is, I feel, in a process of reappraisal. He regrets the one-dimensional portrayal of women in his early films. He says he cannot watch his debut film She's Gotta Have It because a rape is glossed over by the female protagonist.
In recent years he has tried to put an emphasis on female characters — with mixed results. His most recent outing, She Hate Me (2004), was a regression — its central character is a man who impregnates child-hungry lesbians at $10,000 a time — but it’s noticeable that the toughest character in Inside Man is the lawyer played by Jodie Foster.
Juggling life as a father of two alongside movie-making and business interests seems to have softened him. He is no longer the hustler who put 25 hours a day into running both a store selling movie merchandise and his production company, 40 Acres and a Mule.
In fact, these days, Lee spends much of his time at Spike/DDB, an advertising company of which he owns 51 per cent. He once claimed that in marketing terms, “only Madonna can rival me”. Now he’s happy to let the names of Washington, Foster and Owen hog the limelight. He no longer needs to be the centre of attention, it seems.
Having made one genre film, Lee now wants to make another. “I've always wanted to make an original musical, but as I don't write music I'd have to get someone else to write it: Prince or Stevie Wonder." The way he cackles makes me suspect that something is already in the works.
