The celebrated director’s latest film fuses past and present, updating the true tale of a black detective who infiltrated the KKK with the racial tensions of 2018 to searing effect
Spike Lee had mellowed somewhat. Not that the motormouth director with a socially provocative back catalogue had traded his sneakers for slippers, but in February 2015, having just released vampire romance Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, he was making a documentary about Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall and, he told the Atlantic, time and fatherhood might have softened him. “If you get angry about everything you’re going to give yourself cancer,” he said. “You can’t let anger rule your life. It’s just not productive.” The truth, though, is that anger has been extremely productive for Spike Lee. And a lot has changed since 2015.
In February 2017, a month after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Get Out director Jordan Peele was given a screenplay adapted from black police officer Ron Stallworth’s memoir Black Klansman, about his experience infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s – on the phone, then with a white surrogate in the flesh. Lee, thought Peele [who has produced the film], would be ideal to direct it. “Spike just has an ability,” he told the Hollywood Reporter, “to do tension right, to do the moments of levity right, to deliver a social message and a punch.” In August, the Unite the Right rally took place in Charlottesville, followed by the killing of Heather Heyer, and Trump’s “blame on both sides” diatribe. Weeks later, cameras rolled on BlacKkKlansman. “I’ve never been in a movie that came out so fast, from when it was shot,” says Topher Grace, who plays the KKK’s David Duke. “There was this feeling on the set, like: ‘We’ve gotta get this movie out tomorrow.’” The result is Lee’s most entertaining, accessible and – without a doubt – angriest film in years.
Continue reading...posted from The Guardian
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