Why does Spike Lee refuse to use CGI?
Even though Hollywood’s most prominent filmmakers try to keep things as practical as possible, digital touch-ups are often an inevitability. Spike Lee is hardly someone who’s going to mount a massive-scale sci-fi epic, though, but neither does he have any interest in using CGI for the sake of it.
Christopher Nolan is cinema’s most vocal proponent of keeping things as real as he can on productions of enormous scale, but even he needs to call in the digital wizards to smooth out the edges. Similarly, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino don’t make movies that necessarily obligate oodles of effects work, but it’s there nonetheless to both serve the story and create backdrops that mirror their creative vision.
While Lee has never helmed anything that obligates excessive amounts of digital manipulation, that’s very much by design. As he explained to CNET, the advent of the CGI era has created a sense of uniformity and familiarity on a visual level, which fails to distinguish one effects-heavy extravaganza from the next.
“CGI has definitely changed the game, and I think the trick is how do you use these CGI images to tell a story and to make it original,” he said. “Now, in my opinion, all these movies look the same. It’s like the same effects house is doing everything. They all look the same.” In his mind, it’s all down to business decisions.
“In many cases, the marketing department has a large say in what gets made and what doesn’t,” he continued. “That’s why the majority of films today have special effects and 3D and this type of stuff.” That being said, Lee’s joint Da 5 Bloods did use CGI blood and muzzle flashes, but he drew the line at de-ageing in favour of having the same cast members play their parts in each distinct time period.
Then again, it was a budgetary decision, first and foremost. “I was not getting $100 million to de-age our guys,” he said in a thinly veiled jab at Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, which was also a Netflix original feature from an acclaimed filmmaker, albeit one that cost over four times as much to produce as Da 5 Bloods. “I think we were able to turn a negative into a positive.”
It’s becoming increasingly difficult for any director to make even a mid-budget motion picture without having to rely on visual effects, and it can often be something as simple as using a greenscreen to add in a backdrop that couldn’t be shot on location. Lee maintains his career-long desire to shoot as much in-camera as he possibly can even when his status affords him the leeway to do otherwise if he sees fit, but in the case of Da 5 Bloods in particular, that becomes much harder when there are squibs, explosions, and gunplay aplenty.
