The movie that almost made Spike Lee quit directing: “It was a complete disaster”
The late 1980s saw Spike Lee rise to prominence as a vital new filmmaker. Championing stories centred around race, the filmmaker’s first feature-length effort, She’s Gotta Have It, offered a realistic depiction of young African Americans living in New York.
It highlighted the need for more representation on screen, with Lee exploring pertinent issues related to race, class, and gender as well as the more mundane and everyday aspects of life. He followed the film with School Daze, which expertly interrogated college culture, with specific emphasis on the nuances to be found within discussions of racism.
The movie received mixed reviews, but its legacy stands strong. Lee has always been a defiant and political filmmaker, and his earliest movies demonstrate this. His next project, Do The Right Thing, proved to be his breakthrough, however, with the movie earning cult status as one of the greatest movies of all time. The film sees the African-American members of a New York neighbourhood clash with the Italian-Americans who own a local pizza place after it is brought to owner Sal’s attention that none of the pictures on the wall of his establishment feature black people.
Events turn violent, with the film showing that just one day is all it can take for tensions to turn tragic. Lee earned an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Original Screenplay’, establishing him as one of Hollywood’s most essential faces. He has since continued to make movies like the acclaimed biopic Malcolm X, the musical comedy Mo’ Better Blues, and more recently, BlacKkKlansman.
While Lee’s films have significantly shaped the way African American people have been depicted on screen, making him one of his generation’s most important filmmakers, he has still had moments of extreme doubt. There was even a time when he considered quitting filmmaking near the start of his career, but if he had, we’d never have been given such incredible movies like Do The Right Thing.
Lee studied at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, which allowed him to learn the art of filmmaking. After making various short films like Sarah and the hour-long Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, he started making a movie that caused him enough stress to make him reconsider everything. Speaking to The Talks, Lee admitted, “A big pivotal moment was when I did this film called The Messenger, and it did not work out, and I was really thinking about quitting. I was thinking about it seriously.”
It’s easy to want to give up in a position like that, but Lee “gathered myself and convinced myself that I was not a quitter and examined in my mind all the mistakes that I have made and said I’m not going to do those again.” It’s a good job that he decided to persevere. “And the next film was She’s Gotta Have It.”
On the Director’s Cut podcast, the filmmaker further explained why the movie didn’t come to fruition. “The money never came through. It was a complete disaster. I had to go underground, reconfigure, reevaluate and it was a very humbling experience. I remember after assembling the cast and crew and telling them there was no money and no money for the movie and no money for the time you spent in pre-production.”
It seems as though The Messenger is just water under the bridge now, with Lee quickly moving onto much more successful projects.
