The Spike Lee movie he says couldn’t be made today: “It is not an exaggeration”
Spike Lee has never been an artist who takes the easy road. From his earliest days as the pioneering voice behind films like She’s Gotta Have It and Do the Right Thing to his Oscar-winning BlackKklansman, Lee has always held a mirror up to society’s attitudes surrounding race, politics, and government. That often put him at odds with the establishment, and he has been forced to fight and claw for funding for his projects throughout his career.
Over the years, Lee’s cultural relevance has ebbed and flowed, but he has always roared back with something that puts him in the conversation again. He went through a fallow period in the 2010s, for example, before BlackKlansman’s critical and commercial success brought his provocative energy back into the mainstream. He followed that up with the Vietnam war drama Da 5 Bloods, before he decided to re-team with one of his muses for the fifth time on the upcoming remake Highest 2 Lowest.
“Mo’ Better Blues, Malcolm X, He Got Game, Inside Man and this,” Lee marvelled to The Hollywood Reporter when recounting his illustrious history with Denzel Washington. “I didn’t know it was 18 years since Inside Man. Time flies. I was shocked.”
Indeed, Lee can claim to be one of the first directors to recognise Washington’s sheer power on screen, as he cast him in Mo’ Better Blues before the future icon won his first Oscar for 1989’s Glory. It may have taken a while for them to re-team, but Highest 2 Lowest will put Lee on par with Tony Scott and Antoine Fuqua, with whom Washington has also made five movies. Arguably, none of his films with Scott or Fuqua hold the same cultural importance and cinematic artistry as the best of his collaborations with Lee, the 1992 biopic Malcolm X.
That searing film, which features a never-better Washington performance as the famed African-American civil rights activist, was difficult to mount within the studio system at the time. In fact, Lee had to get creative to make sure everyone’s efforts didn’t go down the drain when Warner Bros abandoned the film in post-production after it got cold feet about the rising budget and Lee’s refusal to budge over the three-hour runtime.
“That movie almost killed me,” Lee confessed. “That’s probably the most I’ve been depressed in my life, with the exception of my mother dying. Half my salary went into the movie. I was broke.” However, instead of letting himself wallow in misery, which would have allowed the most vital film of his career to vanish into the ether, Lee set about finding the budget Warner wouldn’t commit to. “It hit me like a ton of bricks: I know some African Americans who’ve got some money,” Lee explained. “I made a list and I got the money.”
Some of the names Lee received no-strings-attached donations from were entrepreneur Peggy Cooper Cafritz, Tracy Chapman, Janet Jackson, Prince, and Oprah Winfrey. He also pulled off a genius move when he used the natural rivalry between basketball icons Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson to juice their donations. “I let it slip to my Brooklyn brother, Michael Jordan, how much Magic gave,” Lee grinned. “Michael Jordan said, ‘OK, I got you.’ Boom.”
Lee held a press conference in Harlem, New York, where Malcolm X had preached the word of the Nation of Islam to legions of disenfranchised Black citizens, to let the world know that famous Black faces had donated their money to finish his film. The very next day, Warner Bros “took the film back from the bond company and started to finance it again.”
While making Malcolm X was fraught with peril in the early 1990s, Lee was able to get it over the line by hook or crook. Sadly, though, he believes it would be an even more difficult proposition in 2025 because of the divided social and political climate in America, perfectly embodied by a President who espouses some extremely controversial views, has more support in the country than many want to admit, and actively seeks to silence dissent.
When asked about the heads of the major Hollywood studios who have the power to champion something like Malcolm X, a defeated Lee concluded, “I don’t like to get into what-ifs, but a lot of these people were at the inauguration. I’m not naming names, but it is not an exaggeration to say that Malcolm X cannot be made today with where we are in this world.”
