Spike Lee physically showed up to accept the Guggenheim Honor from the SilverDocs film festival tonight, but mentally, for much of the evening, he seemed to be elsewhere. Maybe his recent squabbles with Clint Eastwood have taken a toll, but when asked to talk about his non-fiction films by Denver Post film critic Lisa Kennedy, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker was virtually unresponsive. Only two subjects seemed to draw out Lee’s fierce, super-quotable Frankenstein.
One was Tyler Perry, who Lee didn’t quite slam, but definitely dissed by implication. “I’d love to see a great film anout Martin Luther King,” Lee said. “But I can’t do everything.” He paused as a smile creept across his face. “I gotta leave something for Tyler Perry.” This got the desired affect from the audience––laughs, claps, a few stray “ooooh!”s––and then Lee offered cryptic clarification. “I made the movie Bamboozled,” he said, as if that’s facetious evidence enouh that the master of the modern minstrel show would be the appropriate director for a serious film about Dr. King.
The only other subject that could jolt Lee out of his slumping stupor on stage was Barack Obama, to which all conversational roads seemed to lead. Discussing his Hurricane Katrina epic When the Levees Broke, Lee referenced the current flooding in the midwest and said, “The infrastructure of this country is crumbling, and money’s going elsewhere.” He paused, then at quadruple the volume: “That’s gonna change, though…gonna be a real Chocolate City!” He went on to drop the news that his longtime editor Sam Pollard has been filming Obama throughout the primary season and has already captured 1,000 hours of footage for a documentary being produced by Edward Norton. When Kennedy began a question with the phrase, “If Obama’s gonna become president…”, Lee inturrupted. “There is no if! It changes everything…it’s gonna be Before Obama, and After Obama. And I’m gonna be at that innaguration, too.”
As if often the case with Lee, where his off-hours personality rankles, his work is impossible to dismiss. Towards the end of the festivities, Lee presented the Cannes show reel for his next release, The Miracle at St. Anna, about an all-black brigade fighting Fascists in Northern Italy during WWII. Though you can rarely tell what a finished film will actually be like from those sorts of things, the Miracle reel certainly had one or two moments worth writing home about. In one scene, a lipsticked German vamp records a propaganda message to be broadcast to African-American soldiers. “The American white man is raping your wives and daughters,” she warns, almost in a sing-song. “There’s something wrong here,” one of these soldiers later confides to another. “I’m not a nigger here, I’m just me.” It looks like epic Oscar bait. It’s set for release in late September, so imagine we’ll see it at Toronto.
Lee also let slip details on two sports documentaries he currently has in the works. The first, inspired by Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, is a single game portrait of Kobe Bryant, shot before, during and after a game with 30 cameras; that one will air “on ESPN or ABC” at the start of next year’s basketball season. The other film would seem to be an even bigger deal for basketball fans: a documentary about Michael Jordan’s last year in Chicago, which Lee says he hopes to premiere next year at Cannes.
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