Spike Lee
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“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 -
“David Duke Called Us Out By Name”: BlacKkKlansman Screenwriters Charlie Wachtel and David Rabinowitz
When I went to see BlacKkKlansman earlier this summer, I was startled to completely lose it two minutes in. The opening scene is a fire-breathing racist monologue by Alec Baldwin as a segregationist leader. I knew the premise of the film — the true story of how black police officer Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) infiltrated a Colorado branch of the KKK with the help of a white partner, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), in the late ’70s — and figured a fair amount of racist invective would be involved. What I did not expect was to hear Baldwin spit out the words “fucking Jews” […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 9, 2018 -
Back to One Podcast: BlacKkKlansman Actor Topher Grace Talks Playing Evil People, Working with Great Directors, and the Epidemic of the Hollywood Earpiece
Seven seasons on the sitcom That ’70s Show led Topher Grace to roles in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, In Good Company, a not entirely successful turn as “Venom” in Spider Man 3, and lighter projects like Win A Date With Tad Hamilton and Valentine’s Day. He then decided to change the trajectory of his career. He told his agents he wanted to work exclusively with great film artists in environments that inspired him. Worthy projects like Interstellar, Truth and War Machine followed. And this year, Grace’s next chapter continues with David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake and the challenging role […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Aug 7, 2018 -
Cannes Dispatch #5: BlacKkKlansman, The House That Jack Built
Among the markers of a great film—of a great work of art in general—is its ability to conjure itself up unannounced, repeatedly, in the light of neighboring films and artworks; it becomes a lens through which other work is viewed, a standard by which everything else is held, a shadow enlightening the world we now walk through. This is one way of briefly reiterating something I attempted to articulate in my third dispatch: Jean-Luc Godard’s The Image Bookis great art, corroborated for me by its persistent presence in my consciousness during the last several days of movie watching—most notably (and […]
by Blake Williams on May 15, 2018 -
Crystals, a Severed Head and “the Cannes Experience”: Sam Kuhn’s Cannes Diary, Part Three
Director, screenwriter and boatbuilder (!) Sam Kuhn is in Cannes premiering his short film, Möbius — described as “a moth-eaten tale of magic and mutation half remembered by a teen poet who’s beloved lies lifeless in a stream” — in Critic’s Week. Filmmaker asked Kuhn, who hails from the Pacific Northwest, to keep a diary of his experiences, which rapidly went from jet-lagged to deeply strange. Here is his third entry; click here for them all. Day 5 The Hungarian ghost emailed producer L to ask, “What was the end destiny of the rock?” Her last post to Facebook, “Life, […]
by Sam Kuhn on May 24, 2017 -
“Television Has Been Good in That It’s Paid the Bills”: Ernest Dickerson on Double Play, The Wire and Spike Lee
Ernest Dickerson’s new film Double Play, an adaptation of the acclaimed Dutch-language Caribbean textbook standard by Curacaoan author Frank Martinus Arion, received its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival. The novel uses a game of dominoes as a framework to look at the unrest on the Caribbean island during the tumultuous transition from Dutch colonial rule to independence. The film adaptation stars Lennie James, Colin Salmon and Louis Gossett Jr. as men with different personalities but an all too similar interest in women. Director Dickerson rose to fame for his glorious cinematography. He will forever be associated with Spike Lee, with whom he began […]
by Kaleem Aftab on Feb 7, 2017 -
Watch: Spike Lee’s ESPN Documentary 2 Fists Up, On Protests at University of Missouri
The Undefeated, ESPN’s new platform focusing on the intersection of race and sports, premiered the new season of the TV miniseries Spike Lee’s Lil’ Joints with the release of 2 Fists Up, directed by Lee himself. The film takes a look at the protests on the campus of the University of Missouri last November, which included a boycott by the school’s football players. This documentary emphasizes the women organizers behind the protests rather than the football team, a welcome surprise from an ESPN production. 2 Fists Up initially premiered on the university campus in early April with the announcement that […]
by Marc Nemcik on May 31, 2016 -
A Neighborhood Movie Mentored by Spike Lee: Michael Larnell on Cronies
Michael Larnell grew his black-and-white debut feature Cronies through New York University’s Graduate Film program. Executive produced by NYU professor and project advisor Spike Lee, Larnell’s film follows three young men living in St. Louis as they discuss women, drugs, and other salacious topics of interest to innocently pass the time over a twenty-four hour period. A nonchalant, unassuming look at how men externalize their emotions, Cronies’ pleasures derive from its layered, amusing screenplay, documentary-inspired character interviews, and conflicted study of how far one will go to protect their brethren. As Cronies opens this Friday in IFP’s Screen Forward screening series, I spoke with Larnell about the decision […]
by Erik Luers on Dec 11, 2015 -
Trailer Watch: Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq
The idea of a movie about gun violence in Chicago structured as an update of Lysistrata may not make intuitive sense, but the trailer for Spike Lee’s forthcoming Chi-Raq (and Amazon Studios’ first foray into theatrical distribution) makes it immediately clear what you’re going to see. It’s a Spike Lee movie: there will be didactic politics, a people-mover shot, and a definite can-this-actually-work? factor. For more information, read this excellent recent interview with Lee.
by Vadim Rizov on Nov 3, 2015
