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This is Fresh Air.
I'm Tanya Mosley.
With filmmaker Spike Lee, there are a few guarantees.
The story will have something to say.
The images will enter the cultural conversation and he's going to weave in New York any chance he gets.
Over 40 years and more than 35 films, Spike Lee has captured defining moments in American life.
The racial tensions on the hottest day of the year in Do the Right Thing.
The sweeping life of Malcolm X and the devastation and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and when the levees broke.
He's given us dramas, comedies, and documentaries that take on power, history, race, and community.
And along the way, he's introduced audiences to actors we now can't imagine Hollywood without.
Holly Berry, Rosie Perez, Samuel L. Jackson, and Denzel Washington.
You're leaving out G-Bunny, Giancarlo Sposito?
The list is vast.
We will be here forever.
His latest Highest to Lowest flips Akira Kurosawa's 1963 classic High and Low into a modern-day hip-hop drama.
Denzel Washington plays a music mogul whose world unravels when his family is pulled into a ransom plot.
Jeffrey Wright and AAP Rocky round out the cast, with Rocky stepping into a Spike Lee joint for the first time.
And Spike Lee, welcome back to Fresh Air.
When was the last time I was here?
I know it's been some years.
It's been a minute.
Look, I'm happy to be here.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Let me tell audiences about this film.
So in this film, Denzel Washington plays David King.
He owns this record label, this very successful record label.
And his son, along with the son of his friend and driver, Jeffrey Wright, is kidnapped for ransom.
And the kidnapper played by AAP Rocky accidentally releases the wrong young man, leaving King and the decision to fork over 175 million.
In France, in Swiss francs.
In Swiss francs for a young man who is not his son.
Let's listen to a clip.
King David, now ain't this something.
Sorry?
I got your full attention now, huh?
You finally listening to me?
Yeah, I'm listening.
Okay.
You know you got the wrong boy, right?
Yeah, so I've heard.
And I also learned you can never trust the help.
But luckily for me, it was never about the boy.
It was always about you.
Well, fair enough.
But if it's about me, then you can't expect me to pay 175 million for somebody else's son.
But then his blood is going to be on your hands then.
No, man, come on now.
This ain't no negotiation.
It's a day of reckoning.
You're not God no more than I am.
All right, listen, God give you everything you want, right?
No, God give you everything you need.
So the question is, what do you need?
How can I help you?
I ain't saying I'm God, but I could help.
That was a scene from Spike Lee's newest film, Highest to Lowest.
Spike.
This film wrestles with a couple of different themes, but there is this main question that is being asked.
What would you do to save your own child?
What would you do to save the child of someone you love?
And you've always taken on subjects that kind of move with time, like you're asking a moral question in your work.
What was it in particular about this story, reimagining this story that you felt like was so important to tell right now?
Well, I'm glad to use the word reimagining.
I say reinterpretation because I'm running away from the word remake.
But Kurosawa's film, the great Akira Kurosawa, who made this film?
Post-war Japan 1963, is from a book by a writer, Ed McBain.
And the strength of this film, the strength of the book and Kurosawa's film.
It really deals with morality.
And when you have an actor and in the Japanese version, Tisha Mufun, one of the great, great actors, and with Denzel, who's right there, great actors, when they're going through trials and tribulations, the audience becomes engaged and they're with that person every step of the way, who consequently always says when I see this film, the ones we've seen already, they're with Denzel's character, David King, and they ask themselves what would they do?
Right, right.
What would they do in the position that they see on screen that the great, magnificent Denzel Washington is in?
And it takes star quality.
Here's the thing.
The reason why people are stars is because they have the talent and the audience is engaged.
And from the jump, the audience has been engaged with Mr. Denzel Washington.
And I've been blessed with five of those dynamic duos.
Right.
You guys are like Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro.
Or you could say the late great Sidney Lumet and Al Pacino.
You could say Francis Ford with Brando and Godfather and Apocalypse Now.
So throughout history, you've had these pairings.
There's something a little disconcerting, I'll say, about seeing Denzel in this character.
He portrays it so well.
I've seen the film twice.
Twice?
Yeah.
The first time, I was like, man, he's like disheveled a little bit.
He's not like a man.
He's at the top, but he doesn't appear at the top.
The second time, I felt like that's on purpose.
There's something that's being seen in the way that he's moving that perhaps he's out of step with Denzel.
Well, I think that's a great observation.
I mean, he's not at the top anymore.
His label, record label, Stack of Hits, is not putting out the hits anymore.
So he's in a very vulnerable part.
And also when you're at the top, and that point comes when you're not at the top anymore.
That's earth-shaking.
Yeah.
In the original film, in Kurosawa's film, the protagonist is a shoe executive.
Right.
And yours, a music mogul.
Why did you choose music as an interesting role?
Well, the script went through a hollow for many years.
And so when it ended up in Denzel's hands, that change had already been made.
So I got a call.
Denzel says, Spike, you got this script.
You want to read it?
I said, yeah, send it, FedEx.
And before I even hung up the phone, I knew I wanted to do the film, not even knowing, having read, what the script was and what it was about.
Because Denzel didn't say, he didn't describe it.
He just said, I got a script.
I want you to read it.
And that's the way it happened.
It's interesting that that was already the way the script was written when it got to you.
And, of course, immediately you're like, yes.
Music is such an integral part of your work.
It's interwoven into your storytelling.
It's part of the filmmaking.
Yeah, it's part of the filmmaking.
Yeah.
There's this piece of music, though, right off the top.
You open with the 1943 Rogers and Hammerstein, Oh, What a Beautiful Morning from Oklahoma.
Right.
But the rest of the film is like soul and hip-hop.
Is there a story behind you?
Well, I love all types of music.
And I remember my mother was a cinephile.
My father hated it. but my mother was a cinephile.
I'm the oldest so they both have passed, but she was the one that I was my mother's movie date, because my father hated Hollywood.
So she introduced me to a whole lot of films.
Of course at the time I didn't want I mean I wanted to run a It was a wild, broken game run up and down the streets and play stickball and stoopball and stuff.
You know, I'm taking your little rusty butt.
We're going to the movies, so I don't care what you say.
And here's the thing, though.
Every time I look, I don't want to go, I don't want to go.
And then we'll come out there and say, Mommy, that was good.
So it's just an example of kids don't know.
And when parents take the time introduce their kids Stuff that children might go kicking and screaming.
But when they come out of the theater the movie theater or the museum, whatever you know, you can say lives have been changed.
And that's happened to me.
Do you remember one of the movies your mom took you to that really stuck with you?
All right.
This is a famous one.
I've said this before.
So anybody at home who's heard this before, excuse me.
My mother loved Sean Connery as James Bond, 007.
And my mother, she would always want to go to the opening weekend of these films.
And the theater was packed.
And, you know, those early James Bond films, the explosions, gunplay, just crazy stuff.
And there was a lull in the film.
You can't do that the whole length of the film.
You've got to get the audience's breath, you know, just some quiet, you know.
And the theater was completely quiet.
I said to my mother, Mommy, why is that lady, why is her name Pussy Galore?
The whole theater heard that.
My mother grabbed me by the neck and said, don't you say another thing.
What'd I do?
What'd I do?
True story.
But...
That film came out in 63's.
I was born in 53's.
I was six years old.
Right.
You're like, what's this?
I don't know, but it just sounded like a funny name to me.
And you still remember it to this day.
Hey, I was not the only one that even adults probably said the name of that character.
My mother was embarrassed.
Let's take a short break.
If you're just joining us, my guest is Spike Lee.
His latest film, Highest to Lowest, is a reimagining of Akira Kurosawa's 1963 classic High and Low, set in the world of American hip-hop and global fame.
We'll continue our conversation after a short break.
This is Fresh Air.
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Today we're talking to Spike Lee, the director, writer and producer whose more than 35 films include Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, Black Klansman and When the Levees Broke.
His latest movie, Highest to Lowest, stars Denzel Washington as a music mogul whose life unravels when his family is targeted in a ransom plot.
The film also stars A$AP Rocky.
Denzel's character has lost his ear, really.
Like he's become so far away from that hungry artistic guy he was at the beginning of his life, his career.
There's a great scene where his wife Playbill says that you know she doesn't see the joy anymore.
Right.
And it's something that I've heard happen often.
I mean, sometimes I can feel it.
You get to midlife and you feel like this thing that you're so passionate about.
There are ebbs and flows.
Ebbs and flows.
Have you ever been there?
No.
You've not.
You've always had a passion.
Film?
Oh, that's Look.
I can't talk for anybody else but for me.
I've never had fell out of love with cinema, because I tell this to my students.
I'm a tenured professor of film at NYU Graduate Film School.
Ernest Dickerson, a great cameraman, shot all my films up at Malcolm X. Ang Lee was my classmate.
Jim Jarmusch was two years ahead of us.
So my love has always been there.
Now there's a business side that's different, but just talking about making films, and I truly believe I was put here to be a storyteller.
So I'll never, you know, you get the BS.
Well, push that aside.
It's sometimes going to be a big pile.
Right, like how do you not allow yourself to be consumed by all of that stuff you just have to deal with to get to the thing you love so much?
Because when you get to the thing after going through all that stuff, you're getting through the thing you love.
And to break it down even a little more for my sister and the audience first day of class I tell my students that I'm lucky.
And if you could make a living doing what you love, you wouldn't.
And there's this explosive, propulsive scene in the film In Highest to Lowest.
It's like the apex part of it.
It happens during the Puerto Rican Day Parade.
And I want to talk a little bit about it.
Who are the fans on the number four train and where they're going?
Baseball.
They're New York Yankee fans.
And who are the Yankees playing that day in Yankee Stadium?
Boston.
Boston.
They hate it with red socks.
Right, right.
We got it.
We can't, like, leave that out.
There are so many.
I mean, that whole scene, there's so much there.
You know what's that called, really?
A set piece.
Say more.
What does that mean?
A scene that stands out.
Yes.
Yeah, that's a set piece.
But also the set piece.
There's one like that in the original too, on the bullet trains in Tokyo, Japan.
So both scenes take place where the ransom...
It's dumped, to be picked up by the kidnapper.
I was wondering what came first.
Was it the music and the parade?
Was it the scene in the train?
Because it's really like a story about New York set inside of a town.
Well, it comes from the original.
I mean, that's where inspiration comes from.
But I knew I cannot do a reinterpretation of that, but not even use this scene, a famous scene from that film.
And the thing that was important, that the character played by Ace of Rocky I don't want to be.
People think it's just a young thug rapper.
No.
Young thug is smart.
Even though his intentions are off the mark, but...
I also don't want to play the NYPD as dopes, as stupid.
So I had to come up with this scenario, where it would be very complicated for NYPD to stop this thing happening.
Right.
So all of a sudden I thought about having this...
Having this drop, ransom drop, happen on a Sunday afternoon, Yankee Stadium, the Red Sox in town.
And also, on top of that, the Puerto Rican Day Parade is always on a Sunday.
So have both of those on a Sunday.
And then...
I went on to my brother, Eddie Palmieri, who recently he passed away three days, three or four days before the premiere in New York, in Brooklyn.
Did he ever have a chance to see it?
He didn't, did he see himself in it?
No.
And filming this, you know, we were very respectful and it was not done to playback.
We did seven or eight takes.
I don't remember exactly.
And each time was live.
The Eddie Palmieri South Orchestra playing live.
And when you see the film, you can see the joy in Eddie's face as he's performing and doing a thing that he was born to be on earth, you know, to perform and sing and represent the great people of Puerto Rico.
It's such a moving scene, too, also in knowing and understanding that he just passed away.
We just lost him.
One of the giants.
In general, one of the giants.
And it was very emotional at the premiere in New York, in Brooklyn.
We had Eddie II there.
And there's many members of the family were there too.
He spoke to the audience before we began the film.
Oh, that's beautiful.
I want to stay on Highest to Lowest because I wanted to tour this penthouse apartment that Denzel his wife.
That's a real building.
It's a real building.
And the art and the artifacts.
Tell me the story about that.
Are those your pieces?
A lot of them are, but the copies were made because stuff gets messed up on a film.
So I cannot have somebody accidentally put a hole in the Basquiat.
We weren't.
I've heard that before.
A rigid Abaddon porch of Lena Horne, you know.
So those are ports.
And then we finished those.
Those copies were destroyed.
Okay, so like copies of copies.
But just to describe for the audience, I mean, Basquiat's on the wall.
It's a shortcut.
It's a shortcut to show that this is a fluent black family.
Yeah.
And the money.
First, you see where they live from open credit sticks.
But when you go inside their penthouse you see there's millions of dollars on the wall.
Of black art in particular.
Black art.
A lot of that art. is owned by my wife and I, Tonya.
When did you start collecting art?
Well, I started collecting comic books, baseball cards, basketball cards.
So the art thing came much later when I had some money.
But here's the thing.
I'm under the age where Our mothers threw out our comic books, our baseball cards, which were worth thousands and thousands.
Today.
We didn't know.
Here's the thing, though, especially in Brooklyn.
We're flipping cards.
We're putting cards on our bikes, on the spokes, so you can hear the noise.
No one knew.
Yes.
No one knew.
That they would be worth something.
Millions of dollars.
Right?
You could have funded your first She's Got a Heavy with all of those.
Which cost $175,000, which was, their cars were worth more than that.
Right.
I follow this young woman on TikTok and she talks a lot about art and she I think she was an art history major and she's like out in the world now just starting out.
And I was like, she seems familiar.
I don't know.
And then one day I happened across one of her videos and it's your daughter.
So she grew up.
Yeah.
She grew up around all this, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
She's grown.
So is my son, Jackson.
And they're both in the arts.
My daughter's a great photographer.
My son Jackson, you know, he works for me.
He's like the merchandise, you know, getting deals done.
So they're both, you know, thriving.
They're thriving.
But art, obviously... It's the bedrock.
It's the bedrock in the foundation.
My wife, Tanya's a producer, too.
In fact, the films she produced... was the first place I saw A$AP Rocky in that film.
Wait, that was her film, his first film.
What is it called?
The title of the film that Ty produced, Dope, was Dope.
That's where I first saw Rocky in front of the camera.
Not a music video, in a film.
Rocky's performance is amazing.
Last night, the screening here in L.A., I gave him a big hug.
I said, look, I love you.
You're great.
But the next film, you can't play a rapper.
You cannot just be corned into doing this role again.
You have immense talent, so please don't play another rapper right after this.
Right, you see more.
You see depth.
There's a lot of comparisons people give to him and Denzel because of the way they look.
They look the first I saw checking it out five years ago saying this guy looks like Denzel.
Denzel's son.
Yeah.
And that was even before, you know, the whole thing in the high and low happening.
High is the lowest happening.
Yeah.
I mean, the community said that.
I don't want him to be put in the corner this early in his career.
Yeah.
I mean, he's a leading man.
Let's take a short break.
My guest today is Spike Lee.
We're talking about his new film, Highest to Lowest.
We'll be right back after a short break.
I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.
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I'm actually just thinking about you back when you first came on the scene.
I mean, you came like a lightning bolt.
You talk about campaigning for Malcolm X, putting that nicely on.
I remember the media really portraying you, talking to you a lot about being angry.
And I had this debate with my husband about it because I was like, I actually really loved it.
I felt, like you know, as a young person, being anti-establishment.
You felt like What did your husband say?
Well, he said, well, I never thought he was angry.
I just thought he was confident and knew what he wanted and had a point of view.
Right.
But what was your assessment?
You were kind of tough on the media those early days.
Well...
They were tough on me, you know, this belligerent, young rabble-rouser.
I mean, when Do the Right Thing came out?
The Turturro brothers, Nick and John.
So I don't combat that type of criticism as much as I used to, of course, as it died down.
But when Do the Right Thing premiered in Cannes in 1989.
American journals were saying that this film was going to cause riots black people rioting in the summertime.
And they were pleading to Universal Pictures if you're going to release the film, don't release it in the summertime.
Because they thought that would be where we'd be all riled up or something.
It's kind of crazy looking back on that.
A film's not going to do that.
But if you look, that film really had the crystal ball.
If you look at the killing, the murder of Ray Rahim by the NYPD and the chokehold, where did that happen?
We were talking about global warming, a lot of things in that film.
You know, we talked about...
Came to life in later years.
I mean, the sociopolitical message, it almost mirrored to a T-2020.
Yes.
That's when everyone was talking about it, like Radio Rahim became a meme.
And I wrote that script in 88.
We shot in 89.
Look, I'm not happy.
I'm not bragging about that, but we...
I'm not happy that the stuff you had in the film ended up happening in real life, but it did.
The thing about it is it seems like we didn't have the.
We weren't there yet in the 80s and 90s to have a true conversation about it.
Came back up in 2020, allowed us to tap into it a little bit.
I know what you're saying, sis, but it's sad that people had to die for this to happen.
Yeah.
Families were destroyed because of this.
They really weaponized the word woke.
And as we sit here in LA, you know they got the feds now trying to take over DC, formerly known as Chalker City.
We live in, you know, the world now is bananas.
Let's talk a little bit about your documentary work because you've done quite a few of them.
Academy Award nominated Four Little Girls about the 63 Birmingham church bombing.
Bad 25, which I forgot about, but Bad 25 about Michael Jackson's Bad album.
And that's not, I mean, that's not even a full list.
Off the wall.
Off the wall.
I've heard many storytellers say especially documentarians, like they take on work that they can't get out of their heads.
And I wanted to know what's your rubric for finding the documentaries, the stories that you want to tell.
For me, I don't make a distinction between feature films and documentaries.
For me, it's storytelling.
And one of the most significant films I've ever made was Four Little Girls, which is about the September 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama.
And the goal was to talk to the parents, the relatives, the teachers, talk about these four beautiful young black girls who were murdered by multiple sticks of dynamite and who these beautiful young girls might have been if they were allowed to live.
These members of the KKK stuck dynamite in a place of worship, a church, and murdered four beautiful young black girls who weren't allowed to live.
Who knows what they might have been Mothers, grandchildren.
Their life was snuffed out with the act of hate.
J Edgar Hoover was not a friend of the black folks, not a friend of Dr King or the civil rights movement.
That week, they know who did it.
It was one of the people.
The guy's nickname was Donnie McBob.
Hmm.
And we wanted this film to be seen.
I did it at HBO.
We wanted this film to be eligible for the best feature length documentary.
And so in order to do that, you have to have a week-long run, theatrical run.
And a couple days before that, I got a call by FBI.
I'm like, I don't know why they're calling me.
They said they would like to see a print of the film.
And a week later, they reopened the case.
Wow.
And sent two of those murderers to prison.
They had been walking around free since September 1960.
Jacob Hoover, they knew who did it.
That's pretty powerful, Spike.
So I can't do anything to top that.
No, that's pretty.
And it's not a thing I talk about a lot, but it did happen.
It's one of your most powerful pieces of work.
I agree.
You lost an Academy Award.
You were nominated for it, but you didn't win.
Let me tell you a funny story.
Yeah.
So we got nominated.
And I told HBO, we've got to bring the parents to L.A.
So we did not win.
And so at that time, Denzel co-owned a restaurant.
So that was supposed to be the party.
But it was a party.
And no one was upset about not winning anymore, because their night was made.
They got a hug and a kiss on the cheek from Denzel Washington.
For them, that was the Oscar.
That was the Oscar.
Denzel hugged them and gave them a kiss on the cheek.
And they got their Oscar.
Another story that you told was the story of Hurricane Katrina.
And we're now coming up on the anniversary.
20 years.
Yeah.
Let me ask you a question.
My sister.
You've got to help me here.
What word can I say instead of anniversary?
Right.
And commemoration doesn't work.
It is like, what is the word that speaks to something?
I'll give you my email.
So when you get that word.
Right, you find it.
Because I think it's coming up August 29th, right?
It is, yeah.
Please give me that word because I refuse to say anniversary.
Right.
For me, that's...
Birthdays, wedding or what.
But what happened... Happened 20 years ago.
I don't want to... Yep.
Help me.
I can't say anniversary anymore.
I won't say anniversary.
So you just say it's been 20 years.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Boom.
It's been 20 years.
There's another documentary, Katrina Come Hell or High Water, that you're associated with.
Are you a producer, director?
Yeah, I'm an exec producer.
And there's three parts.
I did the final...
Episode of the three.
And also Ryan Coogler has one, too.
So a big moment coming up.
What is it about this particular story?
You've already done it with one.
What is it that we need to revisit, that we need to sit with and understand about it in this second go-round.
Americans have short memories.
So that's why I came apart of this revisiting of it.
And here's another thing that was sad.
By going back 20 years and then looking at New Orleans today, they've lost a large part of the black population.
Black folks have gone on and thrived in Houston, Atlanta, Georgia, Charlotte, North Carolina.
It's a good argument to say that New Orleans has not.
To show us what it is now, what's been lost.
I think that people are still dealing with that.
Yeah.
20 years later.
Right.
As you mentioned, your mom was deep into movies.
Your dad was a jazz musician.
You grew up just surrounded by music.
Creative household.
Creative household.
They often say we love and we are connected to the music that was a coming of age for us.
We are often perpetually stuck in it.
But as a creative, how do you view the moving times, the music that we're hearing today, without sounding like a fuddy-duddy?
Can you see that value?
I like all types of music.
People complained about rock and roll back in the day.
So I'm not necessarily a purist like my father was.
Anything that was played...
Well, electricity, you know, he was not with that.
He always was tone as is.
Like literally?
Like he didn't even like to play records?
My father, Bill Lee, was a top folk bassist working.
He was on the first Simon and Garfunkel album, the first in life, with album like play with judy collins, i mean a whole bunch of people.
He's on the bob dylan album and when uh, bob dylan went electric, everybody went electric.
And my father used to play fender bass.
He called it tone as is.
I'm not gonna do anything where electricity is used to amplify the sound and make it louder.
Wow, and my mother had to go to work.
If you saw Crooklyn.
That's real life.
That actually happened.
That's the Lee family.
Yeah.
And my mother, I mean, before my father was working, she was going to Bloomerdales and Lord & Taylor, you know, every week.
But my father said, I'm not doing that.
I'm not playing electric bass.
My mother had to work, you know.
And I saw.
I was the eldest of five.
I was feeling a certain way about my father because...
My mother was working, had to cook and clean, including myself and my siblings.
We were crazy.
I mean, when relatives knew that them bad leaves were coming over, we were like oh boy, I hope they don't eat up all our food and tear our house up.
That was a real possibility, huh?
Oh, it happened.
Yeah.
It happened.
So I felt the way about my father.
But then I understood that he's a purist.
And my mother supported and loved him.
And so she had to work, cook, and clean.
And she didn't do that.
And hopefully, God willing, my father would get a break.
And the world would see the great musician he was.
And later on, my mother died.
He scored my films, my student films at NYU, right at film school.
And then She's a Habit, Mobile Blues, The Right Thing, and Jungle Fever.
You know, Spike, this is a real treat for me to talk to you.
The treat is mutual, my sister.
Oh, well, I'm happy about that.
I think your films are part of, like my self-conception, my understanding of who I am and the role that I play in this world.
What's the first film you saw?
Do you have it?
No, because I was too young for that, but I saw that later.
But the one that really sits with me the most is Malcolm X, And I'll tell you why because I grew up in Detroit.
Détroit.
I grew up in Détroit.
Detroit Public Schools.
The day that your film came out, they allowed kids to leave school to go see it.
And a teacher of mine had us all get on a bus, and we arrived.
You got on the bus?
We all got on the bus together.
I made a move, too.
And we arrived at the theater, and there were lots of other schools there.
And there's this moment at the end of the film that I want to play.
It is where there are kids in classrooms in the United States and then on the continent of Africa.
Soweto.
Yes.
Mm-hmm. on May 19th, that they designate Malcolm X Day.
And each student stands up and says, I am Malcolm X. Let's listen to it.
May 19th, we celebrate Malcolm X's birthday because he was a great, great Afro-American.
And Malcolm X is you, all of you.
And you are Malcolm X.
I am Malcolm X.
As Brother Malcolm said, we declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be given the rights of a human being to be respected as a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day which we intend to bring into existence.
By any means necessary.
That was a clip from Spike Lee's 1992 film right Malcolm X.
It makes me emotional to hear it today, but I'll tell you that day I saw it in the theater when that by any means necessary, everybody stood up in the theater.
They were yelling, they were screaming, they were doing the fist up.
The black power fist.
What grade was this?
Ninth grade.
So first year of high school.
Let me tell you the story.
I've seen a lot of people, a lot of great people, but to be in a room and directing the great Nelson Mandela for the end of the movie.
And the reason why I chose that?
Because I read that Mr Mandela, who is in prison for 27 years, I think.
Yes.
On Robben Island.
He said one of the things that kept him going was the autobiography of Malcolm X.
I was told to Alex Haley.
And we're going over the script, which is a quote by Malcolm X.
And he said Spike.
No, he said Mr Lee, I cannot say by any means necessary.
But I was... First of all, I had the footage of him saying this.
I knew I could put that in there.
But it wasn't until...
Later on, I understood that because he was going to run to be president of South Africa.
Mandela, yeah.
And Afrikaners would use that against him.
By means necessary, I mean, we're going to kill you white folks.
So he was very smart.
I didn't protest.
I said, it's okay.
And also, one of those kids that says I'm Malcolm X is John David Washington.
Denzel Washington's son.
He's a young... I have to go back and look at it again.
Later on, start my film, Black Klansman.
Yes.
How did that idea come about to have the kids stand up and declare that classroom scene?
It's a homage to Spartacus, but also it worked also to show that we could do it then and then.
The thing is that that sequence where kids stand up in the school starts with Soweto, but then it goes to Harlem.
It's a powerful show that we are a diaspora.
Yes.
And also, apartheid was still in place.
Going back, though, to that time period, you were sort of like responding to the media.
You were responding to them, responding to your work and the thoughts that this work would spark something within black America.
But something shifted.
There'll be uprising.
Right.
Right.
And so there was a response that you were giving to the media during that time that I just really remember feeling so strong.
And then something happened with you.
Then you became like the person we see today, like so jovial and so open.
I was like that from the beginning.
But I cannot stand silent and say that I mean, for example, that this film was caused black folks to riot.
I'm talking specifically about Do the Right Thing.
And that film got two nominations.
Denny Ello for Sal.
And also Denzel Washington for Glory.
When I saw Glory and that scene was getting whipped and that lone tear went down his eye, I thought to myself Danny, you ain't winning.
This is not going to happen.
And then also, I got nominated for a screenplay.
The film that won that year was Driver's Daisy, so that could tell you more than enough about the climate.
Then also people who voted and who were members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Did you ever feel that way, though?
Like you were entitled to awards that you did not get, that you earned awards that you did not get?
And where do you sit on it?
Well, I think that, I mean, there's footage of me being not happy.
The last time was with Black Klansmen.
Which wasn't that long ago.
What was the name of that film?
Green Book.
Green Book.
Oh, okay.
So it won.
And so I said, man, every time somebody's driving somebody, I'm going to lose.
Driving Stacy and Green Book.
And the funny thing, though, I was very upset.
And I jumped out.
I mean, there's footage of this at the Academy that night.
I jumped out of my car.
See all sweet Carson and my wife trying to have me sit down.
I'm like, just get off me.
And you sit.
Then my wife sit my son out there to get me.
And so I calmed down.
If you're just joining us, my guest is filmmaker Spike Lee.
We'll be right back after a short break.
This is Fresh Air.
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It's never been a secret about the filmmakers who have inspired you over the years.
I remember a few years ago you had an exhibit at the Academy Museum and all the folks were there, all of your heroes.
My giants, yes.
Yeah, all of your giants.
For you, though, a few years ago, She's Gotta Have It was remade.
Not remade.
Reimagined.
That's the same thing that happened with this film.
People think Highest Law is not a remake of High and Low.
Right.
It was reinterpretation.
Yes.
That interpretation was an interpretation for the 20s, you know, the 2020s now.
Your She's Gotta Have It was so subversive because it was like...
1986 about sexual liberation, a young woman who has the freedom to choose.
I just wonder, like as you move through time and you're experiencing your own work, other folks reimagining your story for a new time, like it's kind of like the beauty of storytelling.
But let me tell you this, though.
It was only when I got into NYU Graduate Film School three-year program that I really got introduced to world cinema.
And the first Kurosawa film that I saw that wasn't a samurai film was Rashomon.
It was a film about a murder and a rape and how these different characters each tell their version of the story.
And that premise I used for She's Gonna Have It.
So this is not the first thing, you know, I'm getting down with my brother.
I got to meet, too.
When did you meet him?
It was when he was here in the States.
And at that time, Scorsese and Spielberg and Francis Ford were promoting.
They produced the film.
I forgot the name of the film.
And one of my prized possessions it was in the show at the Brooklyn Museum is a beautiful portrait that he signed for me.
He did his autographs with a paintbrush, not ink.
So it's white ink and gives me a beautiful People.
You go to my Instagram Official Spike Lee, you'll see this portrait of him that Curacao assigned me with a paintbrush for white paint.
What a moment and what a prized possession.
Yes.
Did he know and understand the impact that he had on you through your films?
Did you guys talk about it?
Yeah, I told him.
You told him about it.
Yeah.
A lot of times when you meet these giants, you know after a while.
I'm going for an hour like Spike.
All right, we get you.
I'm glad I influenced your work, but I don't have an hour right here for you to tell me that.
Yeah, right, right.
Spike Lee, thank you so much for this conversation.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you very much.
Yes.
Spike Lee's new film Highest to Lowest. is now playing in theaters.
It will be available to stream on Apple TV+, starting September 5th.
Tomorrow on Fresh Air, journalist Ruth Marcus joins us to talk about President Trump's combative Attorney General Pam Bondi.
In her latest piece for The New Yorker, Marcus describes how Bondi has upended the Justice Department, reversing policies and firing staff in what she calls the most convulsive transition of power since Watergate.
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