“He doesn’t like anybody”: why Jamie Foxx thinks Spike Lee has “run his course”
Not everyone in the film industry will have a linear career full of masterpieces. For most directors and actors, they will make bad artistic choices, resulting in fluctuations in their success. Spike Lee, who garnered acclaim in the early years of his career, has had his fair share of cinematic flops – that’s just part and parcel of being a Hollywood director.
He began his career in the 1980s by making short films, which led him to release his debut feature, She’s Gotta Have It, in 1986. He found acclaim with the film, which was praised for its positive and complex depiction of an African-American woman’s exploration of sexuality. From there, Lee continued to make movies that earned high praise, most notably Do The Right Thing.
The movie helped to cement Lee as an incredibly important voice in the industry, with the film – which takes place over the course of one hot day – perfectly dissecting issues of race, police brutality, and class. Do the Right Thing allowed Lee to go onto bigger projects, like Malcolm X, a biopic about the influential activist, played by Denzel Washington.
Yet, in 2013, Jamie Foxx criticised the legendary filmmaker and stated that “he’s sort of run his course.” The comment came after Lee panned Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, which Foxx starred in as the titular character. On Twitter, the filmmaker wrote, “American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them.”
Evidently, Lee was not a fan of Tarantino’s revisionist western, which many viewers criticised for the amount of racial slurs used by the white characters. Yet, Foxx couldn’t understand why Lee – who has spent most of his filmmaking career highlighting racial issues within his films – needed to be so critical. In an interview with The Guardian, Foxx wasn’t afraid to ask some confronting questions about Lee’s opinion on the film.
“The question for me is: where’s Spike Lee coming from?” He added, “He didn’t like Whoopi Goldberg, he doesn’t like Tyler Perry, he doesn’t like anybody, I think he’s sort of run his course. I mean, I respect Spike, he’s a fantastic director. But he gets a little shady when he’s taking shots at his colleagues without looking at the work. To me, that’s irresponsible.”
It seems as though Foxx was not impressed with the way Lee was so vocal about those he doesn’t like in Hollywood. Around the same time, Lee released several movies that completely missed the mark, too. In 2013, his remake of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy was critically panned, and it is now widely regarded one of the worst remakes in Hollywood history. The following year, he made Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, a remake of Ganja & Hess, which was also negatively reviewed.
However, Lee proved himself with BlacKkKlansman in 2018, which picked up six Academy Award nominations and won one, ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’. Clearly, with the film, which focused on an undercover cop who joins the Klu Klux Klan to gain vital information, Lee asserted that he hadn’t, by any means, “run his course.”
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