Spike Lee
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Costume Designer Ruth E. Carter on Her Career and New Book
Ruth E. Carter is one of the best-known and most highly acclaimed costume designers working today. Since the very beginning of her 30-plus-year career, she’s had a creative partnership with Spike Lee, designing everything from the iconic streetwear of Do the Right Thing to the period looks of Malcolm X, Crooklyn and Summer of Sam. Carter’s resume also includes collaborations with directors like Steven Spielberg (Amistad) and Ava DuVernay (Selma). This year, she made history as the first Black woman to win two Oscars, when she took home the Best Costume Design statue for her beautifully bold work in Black […]
by Abbey Bender on Aug 10, 2023 -
“We are Proving the Market Wrong and Hopefully Inspiring Other Filmmakers”: Writer/Director Dina Amer on Bringing You Resemble Me to Screen
It’s been nearly seven years since I embarked on the journey of my directorial debut, You Resemble Me. It has been a thorny and steep hill to climb. My film is about a woman caught in the center of a terrorist attack, notorious after being named the first female suicide bomber in Europe. I’m a Muslim Egyptian American–not a fluent French speaker–and yet I found myself drawn to a story, at once delicate and destructive, one with roots buried deep in French soil, layers of history — of, for many, injury — that are still raw. The decision to make the […]
by Dina Amer on Nov 4, 2022 -
Back to One, Episode 141: Delroy Lindo
There are several moments in Delroy Lindo’s performance as Paul in Da 5 Bloods where I believe the voiceless (Black solders who never came back from Vietnam?) speak through him. Sure that might be hooey, but the very idea that I believe it says something about his incredible work in Spike Lee’s celebrated Netflix film. On this episode, I ask Lindo to break down the filming of the gripping monologue that is the centerpiece of that performance, and about his initial apprehension and ultimate acceptance of the MAGA aspect of Paul’s character. He takes us back to his first formative […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Feb 9, 2021 -
“Every Day There’s Less People Who Really Know How to Handle Film and Do Focus for Film”: DP Newton Thomas Sigel on Da 5 Bloods
There’s something circular to the idea of Newton Thomas Sigel shooting firefights in the jungle on 16mm. It’s how Sigel’s career began, hauling gear into Central American combat zones as a photojournalist and documentarian in the 1980s. His first narrative as a cinematographer, Latino, was set during the Contra War in Nicaragua. His first studio break came with a 2nd Unit gig on Oliver Stone’s Platoon. Sigel’s latest, Da 5 Bloods, finds him back in the jungle, 16mm camera in hand. Filmed over three months in Vietnam and Thailand and directed by Spike Lee, Da 5 Bloods follows four of the […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Dec 15, 2020 -
TIFF 2020 (I): David Byrne’s American Utopia
Even without the pandemic, and the attendant pulling of high-market-value films from the festival circuit until it’s over (?), it’s likely Spike Lee’s David Byrne’s American Utopia would have been the opening night film of TIFF 2020. The goal of gala presentations is to sell out expensive seats, and the Q&A combo of Lee and Byrne after a concert movie would have been a surefire bet. A mostly workmanlike rendering of Byrne’s 2019 Broadway show, American Utopia opens with “Here,” one of two songs co-written with Daniel Lopatin from the fairly poky album of the same name—the least familiar selections, five in all, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 10, 2020 -
How a War Never Ends: Spike Lee Fights the Old New Fight in Da 5 Bloods
In the opening montage of the new Spike Lee Joint, Da 5 Bloods, Neil Armstrong—sporting his white A7-L spacesuit, Old Glory patch on the left shoulder—descends from Apollo 11’s lunar module, cast into relief by the black shadow of the spacecraft on the moon. From there, Lee cuts to a black-and-white photo of Reverend Ralph Abernathy protesting the Apollo 11 launch on the steps of a lunar module mockup with a sign that reads: “$12 a day to feed an astronaut. We could feed a starving child for $8.” Not shown in the film: the 500 or so predominantly Black […]
by A.E. Hunt on Jun 11, 2020 -
Bamboozled, Showboat and Vitalina Varela: Jim Hemphill’s Home Viewing Recommendations, March 27, 2020
Although it borrows liberally from earlier films like A Face in the Crowd, The Producers, and Network, there’s nothing else quite like Spike Lee’s 2000 satire Bamboozled, the most ferociously funny movie of the writer-director’s career as well as one of his most formally adventurous. It’s a movie of extremes, raucous in its gleeful willingness to offend (as Mel Brooks said of The Producers, it “rises below vulgarity”) and relentless in the psychological trauma it inflicts on both its characters and its audience, with Lee’s mission being nothing less than a history of racist representation in American pop culture and […]
by Jim Hemphill on Mar 28, 2020 -
Trading Blue Chips for Uncut Gems: The NBA Cinematic Universe
Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems could lazily be classified as a “basketball movie,” which raises the stakes in the third act via a tense and deciding Game 7 in the NBA Playoffs—numerous critics cite the nail-biting play-by-play action as the film’s tensest sequence. Yet Uncut Gems isn’t just driven by the attributes afforded a fast-paced sport: the narrative’s “house of cards” doesn’t come down to a single three-pointer or clutch free-throw that rolls around the rim before dropping in as the game clock strikes zero, Teen Wolf be damned. The Safdies pull off something trickier, interlocking their film with both on-the-record, […]
by Erik Luers on Jan 9, 2020 -
“Nothing is More Gorgeous than When Things Get Real in a Movie”: Editor Barry Alexander Brown on Three Decades Cutting for Spike Lee
As Barry Alexander Brown toiled on the editing of School Daze, he was convinced that, at any moment, he’d be found out. That someone would inform director Spike Lee he was no longer working in the indie trenches of She’s Gotta Have It. That he was now working under the auspices of Columbia Pictures and could no longer simply hire his buddies to cut his movies. Recalls Brown, “I was sure somebody was going to come into the editing room and say, ‘What are you doing here?’” That never happened and, three decades later, Barry Alexander Brown is still cutting movies […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Feb 20, 2019 -
BlacKkKlansman DP Chayse Irvin on Shooting with Expired Ektachrome and the Spike Lee Dolly
Early in Spike Lee’s collaboration with Chayse Irvin, the venerable director asked his cinematographer if there was anything special he needed for BlacKkKlansman. Irvin answered, “a third camera”—an extravagance on a low budget movie, but one Irvin believed would allow him “to take massive risks on every scene, whether it be a unique angle or the freedom to use a lens that was flawed.” Irvin embraced that self-imposed mandate for boldness by employing imperfect vintage lenses, “flashing” the image with a contrast-reducing filter and dusting off long-expired film stock. Never one to wilt in the face of risky choices, Lee […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Sep 21, 2018
