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‘INSIDE’ THE MIND OF SPIKE LEE: ‘Inside Man’ director talks Tyler Perry, first encounter with John Singleton, and making history with Denzel.
*Spike Lee’s eyes light up at the prospect of himself and Denzel Washington emerging as this generation’s Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro.
“We got a couple more films [than Scorsese/DeNiro],” Lee says, before quickly rethinking his response. “Wait, how many did they do together? Let’s count them: ‘Mean Streets,’ ‘Raging Bull,’ ‘Goodfellas,’ ‘Taxi Driver,’ ‘Casino’ – five right? [They have] one more! One more, and we there!”
Lee says a fifth film with Denzel will definitely happen down the line, and sooner rather than later. The two New Yorkers began their working relationship in 1990 with Lee’s fourth feature film, “Mo’ Better Blues,” and was followed by 1992’s “Malcolm X” and 1998’s “He Got Game.” The eight years between “Game” and today’s opening of “Inside Man,” marks the longest time they’ve spent apart.
“If you look at the time table, it’s been a minute since ‘He Got Game,’” he says. “We both said look, the next film can’t [take] as long. We don’t know what it’s gonna be, but we know we wanna work together soon for number five.”
It was a miracle that their number four even took place. According to Spike, Denzel was supposed to do another film for Imagine Entertainment’s Brian Grazer, but it fell through at the last minute.
“When you’re Denzel, he’s getting $20 million a film, so he’s like, ‘Alright, I’m doing this film behind this film, and this film.’ So when his film [with Grazer] fell apart, he’s like, ‘I got this block here [open].’ That’s when he played Brutus in [the Broadway play] ‘Julius Caesar.’ But the run of the play wasn’t the run of the [vacated] window. So he still had time after the play ended. So I gave the script to Denzel. He said, ‘Spike, I wanna do this, but you got X amount of time.’”
Once Washington was confirmed to play the lead role of a New York cop going toe-to-toe with a clever bank robber, Lee reached out to Clive Owen about portraying Washington’s nemesis.
“Simultaneously, I’d been speaking to Clive about another film,” he said. “He came on board on a whim. On a humble, we sent it to Jodie Foster and she liked it. And we were on our way.”
Foster rounds out the cast as a power broker who inserts herself into the face off between Washington and Owen, making an already tenuous situation even worse.
All three leads have admitted that a desire to work under Spike Lee drove their decisions to join the project.
“But also, let’s not negate the fact that it’s the script,” Lee deflects. “I might’ve been a factor, but it’s the material. These guys didn’t have to do it, especially Jodie. She just finished ‘Flight Plan’ and, you know, she might do a film every four or five years.”
Lee, who turned 49 on Monday, is currently celebrating his 20th year making feature films. With several dozen movies, documentaries, television projects and music videos on his resume, the Brooklynite has certainly been a source of inspiration to his peers – both aspiring directors and veteran filmmakers. It’s something Lee views only as part of a cycle that began with the influence of his heroes.
“Gordon Parks, who just passed, Ossie Davis, those are individuals that made it possible for myself,” he says. “The granddaddy of them all, Oscar Micheaux, Melvin Van Peebles, those men enabled me to tell stories.”
“‘She’s Gotta Have It’ came out 20 years ago,” he continues. “When it opened in LA, I was in front of the theater and after the movie let out, this skinny kid with glasses this thick said, ‘Hello, my name is John Singleton. I’m in high school. I wanna make movies like you.’ True story. So it’s an evolution, you know. People are making films now that were inspired by John Singleton’s film ‘Boyz n the Hood.’ So you just gotta keep it going.”
Lee has passed one of his Hollywood torches to playwright-turned-filmmaker Tyler Perry, whose Hollywood cache went from zero to 60 on February 25, 2005 – the day his “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” entered theaters en route to a box-office shocker.
“I’ve got mad love for Tyler,” Lee says. “He’s someone who’s become a force. When he was trying to get that film made, people were telling him, ‘Black people who go to church don’t go to movies,’ and that type of stuff. He didn’t take that or let it stop him, and he’s been a box office king. So hopefully people will use him as an example, if you have a vision and you’re driven, no matter who you are, black, white, Latino, Asian, you get your stuff done.”
Lee has had to remind himself of that can-do stamina lately as he continues work on his next project, “When the Levees Broke,” an HBO documentary due Aug. 29 about the issues of class and race uprooted by Hurricane Katrina.
“My first documentary, ‘4 Little Girls,’ was about the bombing of the 16th St. Baptist Church, which took place in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963,” he says. “We did that film 20 years later. For the most part, that story would’ve been told. But for this documentary, everyday there’s something new. This story is constantly shifting and changing, so it is a challenge.”
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