Playboy's 20Q: Spike Lee

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[Q] Playboy: Your new film, She Hate Me, tackles the subjects of corporate greed and sex for money. For you that's tame stuff. Are you mellowing on us?

[A] Lee: Not at all. The majority of Americans think these corporate guys are crooks. I'm disheartened to see people work their entire lives and lose their life savings or their retirement or have the money for their children's education wiped out. Enron's Ken Lay has yet to spend a day in jail. And with the furor now about gay marriage, this film is an intelligent look at sex the way it is today. I did my research. The oldest sperm bank in New York state is in the Empire State Building, the great phallic symbol. If you're a woman, you go there and they have a folder--what color eyes do you want, how tall, left-handed or right-handed? If the donor has a post-grad degree, that costs more. It's almost as if people are playing God now.

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[Q] Playboy: You looked at explosive inner-city race relations in Do the Right Thing, explored interracial sex in Jungle Fever and made headlines with Malcolm X. But now it seems the most controversial director around is Mel Gibson. Are you jealous?

[A] Lee: It's good when other people come in and take the spears. But in all honesty, when I choose the films I want to do, I really don't choose them by asking what new controversy I can tackle. I look first for a story. Sometimes controversy is inherent in real stories.

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[Q] Playboy: She Hate Me's protagonist, an African American executive named Jack Armstrong, exposes wrongdoing and then gets framed by his own company. He fights back and raises hell in a Senate hearing room. Haven't we seen that story before?

[A] Lee: No, because I don't know if he wins. His business career is over. This film is really about whistle-blowers. When he's in that Capitol setting, he cites the whistle-blowers from the CIA, Enron and WorldCom. And he cites a great whistle-blower who never got his due, Frank Wills [the security guard who discovered the Watergate break-in]; he later couldn't get a job and just fell by the wayside. He's a true American hero.

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[Q] Playboy: The Armstrong character changes careers and exhibits prodigious potency when he impregnates lesbians for big bucks. But we see him popping a few of those blue pills. Are you bracing yourself for complaints from black men who buy into the stud stereotype and might be insulted by the idea of Viagra? LEE: I don't care who he is, any man put in that position is going to need some help. He's a breeder. The women come to him when they're ovulating. He's on 24-hour call, like a doctor. Historically, white American men have felt some inadequacy when it comes to black men's sexuality. Otherwise we wouldn't have been castrated and lynched because of the fear of a black man looking at a white woman. There's a great term--reckless eyeballing. Emmett Till was murdered for it. During the 1950s, when he was 14 years old, he went down to Mississippi for the summer and was murdered for reckless eyeballing. In The Birth of a Nation a white lady jumps off a cliff rather than be ravaged by the black savage.

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[Q] Playboy: Lesbians lining up at the door to have sex with a virile black man--is that Spike Lee's ultimate fantasy?

[A] Lee: I would never do that. I couldn't, no matter how good a friend she was. But here you have someone in the business world with high ethics, and because of that he becomes a whistle-blower. To complicate matters, he doesn't come up with the idea of impregnating lesbians; his ex-fiancée, who is now a lesbian, is the one insisting he do it. He's compromising the high standards that got him in trouble in the first place, but he's getting $10,000 a wallop. Meanwhile, she wants a 10 percent cut. And she's very slick, because she makes sure the first women she brings to him are really good-looking lipstick lesbians. But we tried to be careful. Not every woman there could be orgasmic. We had to show that some of those women have no use for men. They're not getting off; they just want to get pregnant. Then he starts to realize, I'm going to burn in hell. I'm just as bad as the people I blew the whistle on.

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[Q] Playboy: Did you deliberately cast Jim Brown as Armstrong's father to provide a backstory for his masculinity?

[A] LEE: Jim Brown is the definition of manliness. I felt it would be amazing to have this man--who exemplified masculinity, strength and being a warrior--in a wheelchair and remain dignified. It really hit Jim, because he said, "I've always been so physical. Me being in a wheelchair is a trip."

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[Q] Playboy: The Playboy Advisor cautions that relationships are usually affected adversely by the inclusion of a third person. Given the three-way relationship, involving people with kids, depicted in She Hate Me, should we assume you hold a different opinion?

[A] Lee: You really don't know what happens with this new relationship. There's a reason the film ends with Jim Brown looking at his son and laughing. He's like, "Oh boy!" No one should think that at the end of this film the characters walk off into the sunset with the perfect three-way marriage. I don't know how that could work. They all realize they don't know how it is going to work. I wanted to end the film by showing that they were going to attempt it.

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[Q] Playboy: In Jungle Fever Ossie Davis delivers a passionate speech against the white man's exploitation of black women. Do you suppose Senator Strom Thurmond, who fathered Essie Mae Washington-Williams with a black woman, missed that movie?

[A] Lee: Old Strom missed a lot of stuff. That was a revelation about his daughter. This goes back to Thomas Jefferson. All these guys were going to the slave quarters to have sex and had children by black women. That borders on rape. I just can't understand why she kept quiet. Maybe she felt she couldn't tell that secret to the world, so it passed. It's ironic that Thurmond was one of the staunchest segregationists. It made me start to wonder about Jesse Helms.

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[Q] Playboy: John Turturro's turn as a Mafia don in She Hate Me is memorable in part because Monica Bellucci plays his daughter and in part because of his rant that "gangsta rappers can never be us." What is it with Spike Lee and Italians?

[A] Lee: When I was in first grade I moved to an Italian American neighborhood, Cobble Hill in Brooklyn. Since those formative years a lot of my friends have been Italian American. I've noticed that despite the friction between blacks and Italian Americans over the years, they have many similarities. It's hard for me to describe, but the sensibilities are very similar--the way people talk, the way they move, the flashiness, the loudness, the brashness. Turturro's character was a good opportunity to give a riff.

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[Q] Playboy: You've been to Africa many times. What would you tell others about your experience?

[A] Lee: African Americans grew up here, so our images of Africa are for the most part uninformed. We get images from Tarzan movies--Ooga-booga and lions and tigers. It's astounding to Africans that African Americans don't know as much as they should about Africa. Even more, they don't want to know. This whole thing of race is very interesting to me. Now, because of DNA, African Americans can finally find out what region of Africa their ancestors were from. My wife, Tanya, and I took a test--we swabbed the inside of our cheek with a Q-tip--from a company called African Ancestry. Tanya's ancestors on her mother's side were from Sierra Leone. My mother's side came from what is now Niger, and my father's side came from the region that is now Cameroon. It was a revelation for Tanya and me to finally discover where our ancestors were from. And I really encourage other African Americans to take that test.

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[Q] Playboy: You don't exactly have a high opinion of the Oscars, but do you happen to have an acceptance speech in your desk drawer?

[A] Lee: No. As an artist you can't rely on any organization of power to validate your work, whether it be the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Grammys, the Tonys. You have to have enough confidence to know that what you do is worthwhile. For example, Ordinary People won for best picture over Raging Bull. Robert Redford won for best director over Scorsese. No one is watching Ordinary People now. Driving Miss Daisy won for best picture, and it's not being taught in college film classes across America as Do the Right Thing is. We didn't get nominated for best picture--I got nominated for original screenplay and Danny Aiello for best supporting actor--but every year Do the Right Thing grows in stature. Denzel should have won for Malcolm X. Who did he lose to? Al Pacino, for that film he was blind in, Scent of a Woman. How can you compare Al Pacino's performance with what Denzel did in Malcolm X? Denzel got it later for Training Day, but that's not his best performance. You can go crazy thinking about that.

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[Q] Playboy: NASCAR is making a pitch for African American fans. Will we ever spot Spike Lee at the speedway?

[A] Lee: Yee-haw! I just imagine hearing some country-and-western song over a loudspeaker at NASCAR: "Hang them niggers up high! Hang them niggers up high!" I'm not going to no NASCAR.

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[Q] Playboy: You're an unabashed fan of your hometown. Some Brooklyn is still maintain that their city screwed up in 1898 when it became part of New York. Do you think Brooklyn is the greatest city in the world?

[A] Lee: Brooklyn is my favorite borough. It looks as if the New Jersey Nets will move there, and I think that's great, even though it won't changemy allegiance to the Knicks. Everyone always forgets that 4 million people live in Brooklyn, and if you made a roster of all the great people who came out of there, you couldn't top it: Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand, Biggie Smalls. Very diverse. It's not a coincidence that Jackie Robinson, the first African American in modern baseball, played for the Brooklyn Dodgers. That's the spirit and the vibe of Brooklyn.

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[Q] Playboy: We enjoyed the Reverend Al Sharpton's wit during the Democratic primaries and his performance as host on Saturday Night Live. Can you help us figure him out?

[A] Lee: He was phenomenal on Saturday Night Live. He could definitely act in movies. He was in Malcolm X. He had a scene with Johnnie Cochran in Bamboozled--they were demonstrating against a television network. That poster of Sharpton in She Hate Me is from Sean John, Puffy's clothing line. If you watched all the primaries, Sharpton made more sense than anybody else. He wasn't going to get elected, but he served a great purpose, because he kept the topics focused on what really matters to Americans. He will be an asset to Democrats come November.

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[Q] Playboy: Cornel West, a professor of religion and African American studies at Princeton, theorizes that white American youths are becoming culturally Afro-Americanized. Do you agree? Would you like to claim some credit?

[A] Lee: I'm not going to take credit, but it's true, because hip-hop has become the dominant culture. I'm not going to say that's all good. But it's not an overstatement if you look at the way hip-hop has invaded the culture--movies, music, fashion, language. African Americans have always had that influence on culture. We had the minstrel shows and then jazz. I don't know what the outcome will be, but it's good that we're getting acknowledgment for being creative. In some art forms that hasn't been the case. Rock and roll is seen as a tribute to Elvis; Bo Diddley, Little Richard and Chuck Berry are overlooked.

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[Q] Playboy: Your lawsuit against Spike TV for adopting the Spike moniker has been settled. But your award-winning student film was called Joe'sBed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads. Did the makers of Barbershop and Barbershop 2 know to tread lightly around your intellectual property?

[A] Lee: I never said there was a trademark Spike Lee (continued frompage 118) on the word Spike. The problem was the combination of Spike and Spike TV. I hired Johnnie Cochran, and we got the settlement. To this day people come up to me on the street and say, "I watched your network, your channel." I have no copyrights on barbershops. The barbershop is a staple of the African American community, a meeting place. So that's there for any artist to utilize.

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[Q] Playboy: You deconstructed blackface--burnt cork over cocoa butter--in Bamboozled. Can we learn something from the minstrel show?

[A] Lee: It's putting on a mask. It's not who you are. It's projecting something that's not positive. And people laugh at you. A lot of minstrel shows and minstrel people are still around today. If you turn on BET and watch some of these rappers, that stuff is borderline minstrel show. They've just become more sophisticated, so you don't have to put on red lipstick and blackface. It's horrible, and they don't even realize it. I love rapping. The rap I grew up on originated in the South Bronx and was about having a good time: hip-hop, graffiti, break dancing and MCs rapping. It was not about" I got my nine millimeter and I'll blow your fucking brains out and make your ho or your bitch suck my dick."

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[Q] Playboy: We hear you rapping right now. Want to go on?

[A] Lee: What was the title of 50 Cent's debut album? Get Rich or Die Thin'. He's one of the biggest rappers out there. He is not a fake act. He's been shot several times. He's shot at people. He wears a bulletproof vest when he's outside, and he's not doing it for fashion. When young African Americans live by the code "Get rich or die tryin'," it's a very sad state: [raps] "Whatever I got to do to get my Nikes, my Adidas, my Sean John, my Timberlands, my ride, to get my rims, so I can drink my Cristal, to have my platinums. I run the bitches and hos. I gotta kill some people. Igotta shoot somebody. I gotta maim you. I gotta paralyze you. I gotta kill you. I gotta rob you." It's insane.

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[Q] Playboy: You're a big sports fan. With NBA players on trial for rapeand manslaughter and with steroids a problem throughout the sports world, is it tough to root for a lot of athletes these days?

[A] Lee: I'm able to separate their personal stuff from what they do as athletes. This is not new. It's just that it wasn't reported back then. I know some people can't separate it. I was telling my wife that the Knicks may be getting Kobe, and her feeling was, Why would the Knicks want Kobe Bryant, an alleged rapist? Valid point. In the sports realm today, the bottom line is to win. If a great athlete has some character flaws or problems, that's overlooked as long as he is able to perform. For singer R. Kelly, I can't make that separation. I saw that DVD with him and those girls. I have a nine-year-old daughter. I look at him in a different light now. I can't listen to his music, and I wouldn't buy a record of his.

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[Q] Playboy: Everyone's giving advice to the slumping Tiger Woods. Some even suggest that his Swedish girlfriend has gotten him off his game. Could the director of Jungle Fever counsel the pro?

[A] Lee: I heard that a lot. There may be some truth to it. [laughs] I've never met the woman. I've met Tiger a couple of times. The same thing happened with Derek Jeter recently when he was zero for 32--everybody and his mom were giving him advice. Sometimes you just have to let people alone and let them work it out. Hopefully Tiger will get back to where he was.