How Akira Kurosawa inspired Spike Lee movie ‘She’s Gotta Have It’
The first movie of any filmmaker’s career will always be viewed as a landmark, but in the case of Spike Lee and She’s Gotta Have It, his debut ended up becoming a touchstone for the entirety of independent cinema.
The black-and-white dramatic comedy follows Tracy Camilla Johns’ Nola Darling, who tests the waters of the dating pool by seeing three men at once. Each has positives and negatives, but she still can’t decide whether she should be exclusive with the wealthy and chiselled Greer Childs, the strong and determined Jamie Overstreet, or the diminutive and bespectacled Mars Blackmon.
A pivotal moment for the resurgence of auteur-driven cinema in the late 1980s that carried through to the early 1990s, She’s Gotta Have It emerged as a pivotal moment for African-American filmmakers, with Quentin Tarantino one of just many contemporaries to have lauded its impact on the art form.
Lee named one of the greatest movies ever made as the inspiration behind She’s Gotta Have It, but a period piece released 36 years previously doesn’t quite stand out as the obvious connection to make. Nonetheless, Akira Kurosawa’s timeless Rashomon was anointed as the number one creative driving force behind the formation of his first film, even if the similarities between the two aren’t particularly obvious.
Speaking to Vulture, Lee was unequivocal in how he lifted directly from the legendary director: “She’s Gotta Have It was inspired by Kurosawa’s Rashomon,” he said. “The whole story of Rashomon, where a rape and murder is committed, and you get witnesses – everybody gives their own version of what happened, and the audience is left to make up their mind.”
Even though Rashomon revolves around a suspicious death and Lee’s debut focuses on a complicated quartet of love interests, he expanded on the direct correlation between the two on a narrative level: “That’s the same thing in She’s Gotta Have It, where you have these three men who are in love with Nola Darling, and they’re giving their version of Nola.”
Further elaborating on Rashomon’s inescapable influence, Lee shared a personalised photo signed by Kurosawa himself on Instagram, once more underlining how heavily it played into the creation of his own arrival on the scene: “Akira Kurosawa is one of my true hero’s [sic]. His classic film Rashomon, gave me the premise for my 1st joint She’s Gotta Have It“.
The list of industry figures to owe a debt of gratitude to Kurosawa is one of the longest around, with Lee just one of many to give his props to the legendary director and the way in which he played a part in the development of their own style.
