The first time Spike Lee met Martin Scorsese: “We had a moment”
If cinema is a roulette table, Spike Lee certainly has spread his chips across the entire board and come up big each time. Whether it’s wartime romps like Da 5 Bloods, high-octane heist movies such as Inside Man, historical crime thrillers in the shape of Summer of Sam and BlacKkKlansman, street musicals, sports dramas, adaptations of classic Korean revenge thrillers, or satirical comedies, Lee has truly done it all.
It’s a remarkably diverse oeuvre from a director who has grabbed genre filmmaking by the collar, and in return, Lee has been awarded numerous accolades. His career behind the camera has spanned over 30 years, and his status as one of the most prominent voices in modern cinema is assured. However, one of Lee’s earliest influences as a young man was Martin Scorsese, a director many now consider his peer.
“To me, he’s the guy,” was Lee’s response when asked about his feelings towards Scorsese by Variety. Scorsese’s footprints can be seen across the entire landscape of modern cinema; his influence has been monumental. Filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, the Safdie brothers, and even Ruben Östland have been vocal about the powerful effect Scorsese’s pictures have had on them. Lee is no different, citing Taxi Driver as a huge inspiration and asserting that film is like religion to Scorsese.
Lee first met Scorsese when he was a student at NYU, and it was a meeting that meant a lot to the filmmaker. At the time, Scorsese was holding a screening for the students of his latest project, After Hours, a propulsive New York odyssey that takes place over the course of one sleepless night, in which a single man meets a stranger for coffee, setting off a chain reaction of bewildering and dizzying hurdles he must overcome. If that premise sounds similar to another New York-set movie, it was indeed a significant reference point for the Safdie brothers’ heist thriller, Good Time.
After the screening, Lee approached Scorsese and recounted the interaction, “I just went up to him, introduced myself, said I was an NYU graduate film student, and he didn’t know who I was – I was still in school! But that was the first time. And he remembers that too.”
Lee continued, “He was very open. We talked. There were a lot of people there, but we had a moment.”
Since then, the two legendary filmmakers have become friends, and in a beautiful full-circle moment, the pair returned to NYU, this time to screen Lee’s period true crime drama of a black police officer going undercover to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan, BlacKkKlansman. Scorsese was in high praise of Lee’s use of documentary footage that appeared at the end of the film, showing footage of the unrest in Charlottesville.
“The picture takes you to a safe place — we’re watching a movie, it’s up on a screen — and suddenly we’re catapulted into now. Right next to you. Because it’s not only real, what you’re seeing up there on the screen — it’s happening. It is happening. And it’s sanctioned by government,” Scorsese said. “It transcends the medium, what he did there in the last 10 minutes. It’s cinema, and it’s beautiful.”
