The Martin Scorsese movie that made Spike Lee want to be a director
These days, he’s lauded as one of the most influential filmmakers of his generation, but it was a Martin Scorsese classic that first opened the eyes of Spike Lee to the magic of cinema.
Even though the two have experienced very different career paths, Lee was effusive in his praise for the way in which Scorsese’s 1973 feature Mean Streets completely upended his worldview on the medium.
Speaking to GQ, Lee explained that “my mother would take me to movies” because “my father wouldn’t go to movies, he hated films, particularly for how they portrayed Black people at that time”. Praising his mother for being the one to take him along to their local multiplex, it was she who made him “responsible for being a great fan of Martin Scorsese”. All it took was one viewing of Mean Streets; his life and career trajectory would be forever altered.
Even though he wasn’t entirely sure of the year, Lee would have been 16 years old during the film’s initial run in cinemas, so it makes perfect sense that his creative energies would be given a jolt he didn’t see coming: “She took me to see Mean Streets. Whatever year that was, that’s the year we went,” he added. “At that time, I didn’t want to be a film man. I didn’t even know people made films, you just went to the movie theatre. But that film really made an impact on me.”
Not only that, during the period when Lee and Scorsese became peers and ultimately friends, he even regaled him with the tale of the first time they met: “I remember the first time I met Marty,” he explained. “I was at NYU, he had a screening of After Hours, and afterward I went up to him and I told him the story. He still remembers it. So, I knew I made an impact on him by just talking to him, telling him how much I liked the film, and we’ve been friends ever since.”
On the surface, a crime thriller set in New York City’s Little Italy district doesn’t seem like the kind of movie a teenaged Lee would identify with, but that didn’t prove to be the case given the familiarity he found on-screen and the way he identified with its cast and characters. He added: “What was familiar about the film was that my family, we were the first Black family in Cobble Hill, which is a neighbourhood in Brooklyn, and back then it was Italian-American. At that time, in Brooklyn, it was all Italian-American. So, I was very kind of familiar with those guys that were in that film Mean Streets.”
Scorsese’s influence has been felt all across the industry for decades, but Lee wasn’t even sure what a filmmaker was and what they did until he experienced Mean Streets for the first time, which underlines just how heavily it inspired him given all that he’s accomplished.
