Spike Lee

In a rich and rollicking conversation, longtime friends and collaborators Spike Lee and John Turturro reflect on their first film together, Do the Right Thing, the influence of Akira Kurosawa and Lee’s remaking of High and Low, and a shared creative history shaped by trust, teaching and time. From stories of Sinatra and Spielberg to lessons passed down in Lee’s NYU classroom, the two trade memories from their lives in cinema

Lee wears Stone Island throughout, photography by his daughter, Satchel Lee

John Turturro: I know you’re a Kurosawa fan, even before you got involved with High and Low.

Spike Lee: That’s my guy.

JT: Is that one of your favourite Kurosawa films?

SL: Yes. But I also have to give love to Rashomon, because I saw Rashomon during my first year in graduate film school – Ang Lee and Ernest Dickerson were my classmates. The way Kurosawa did it, with people telling their version of a rape and a murder? That really stuck with me.

JT: That’s a big influence. Do you remember the second Kurosawa film you saw?

SL: To tell the truth, I saw Kurosawa films before I even knew who he was. I had an older friend who would take me to see Kurosawa’s samurai films. I loved the action, the blood squirting. It wasn’t until my first year of film school that I really understood who the great master Kurosawa was.

And just the other day, we found out Highest 2 Lowest was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. We’re out of competition, but I’m just happy. This will be the first time Denzel Washington has a film at Cannes. He’s been to Cannes before, for The Mighty Quinn, but this is his first time with a film in the festival.

JT: I’m excited to see it! So when you came to this new project, you had seen High and Low probably a long time ago?

SL: A long time ago. I’ve shown High and Low several times in my New York University classes – this is my 30th year teaching at the graduate film school. Denzel was already attached, and he reached out to me and said, “Do you want to do this?” This is our fifth time working together: Mo’ Better Blues, Malcolm X, He Got Game, Inside Man and now this.

But the crazy thing is, I didn’t even realise Inside Man was 18 years ago. Time goes fast. Sometimes you have that kind of relationship where you don’t need to see somebody every day. You’ve got that connection. It’s just there. We’ve got history.

JT: Was Denzel a fan of the original?

SL: Oh, absolutely. He wouldn’t have done it otherwise. And it’s a real collaboration, like Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune – they did 16 films together. That’s how I feel about me and Denzel. That kind of creative partnership is like a marriage. Would you agree with me, my brother?

JT: Yeah, that’s right. You’ve got to have a good friendship to survive all of that.

SL: You can say that again.

JT: You’ve been a professor for 30 years now. I know your mother was a teacher.

SL: My father taught bass too. My grandmother was an art teacher in Georgia during Jim Crow. She taught for 50 years, never had a single white student. Van Gogh was her favourite painter. She saved every Social Security cheque to pay for her grandchildren’s education. I was the oldest, so she put me through Morehouse and NYU and gave me the seed money to start.

JT: That’s incredible. You really are the child of teachers.

SL: I just love it. What I’ve done over 30 years is just tell the truth about the industry, and introduce to the films, artists, directors and actors they might not have seen. And I learn from them, too. If you’re a professor and not learning from your students, you’re doing it wrong.

JT: It’s a hard business to make a living.

SL: I tell them this ain’t no joke. This is hard as fuck. Last week I took my class to see Sunset Boulevard on Broadway. Next week we’ll watch Billy Wilder’s film version. Before that, we watched A Face in the Crowd. That film was made in 1957 and it predicted everything.

JT: You met Billy Wilder, right?

SL: He kept an office at Paramount and I cold-called him saying, “Mr. Wilder, this is Spike Lee.” He said, “Oh, I like your things very much.” I asked to come by – he left my name at the gate. We had lunch. He signed two things for me. I also met Elia Kazan. I got On the Waterfront signed by both of them.

I also got a beautiful self-portrait signed by Kurosawa – he signs autographs with a paintbrush and white paint. We’ve met some great people who are no longer here. Let me ask you this – when you put in the work and meet these people and they know who you are, not just from the press, and they saw your work – that shit is, woo!

JT: I don’t think it gets better than that. They influenced you, and you gave that back.

SL: That’s why I love having guests like you in my class. One time I brought in Spielberg. I didn’t tell the class. We snuck in the back. They were bugging out.

JT: Is there one person, musician or writer that you haven’t had the chance to work with yet?

SL: I’ve had the pleasure of working with Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Prince, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin… the one person I wish I’d met was Frank Sinatra. I did a film called Do the Right Thing.

JT: I’ve never heard of it! Must be a cult classic or something.

SL: You were in it, playing Pino, who didn’t get along with Mookie, but I got along with your brother. There’s that scene in Sal’s Famous Pizzeria where Bugging Out asks why there are no brothers on the wall. Eventually, my character Mookie throws a garbage can through the window, and Sal’s place burns down with all the celebrity photos on the wall, including Frank Sinatra.

Of all the people on that wall – De Niro, Shields – Frank was the only one who had a problem. Years later, I was making Jungle Fever (you were in that too) and I wanted to use three Sinatra songs, including ‘Hello, Young Lovers’. I reached out to Tina Sinatra, his daughter, and she told me flat out: “Spike, I’m sorry, but you can’t have them. My father’s still mad that you burned his picture.”

JT: I never heard that before. That’s still funny, though.

SL: It went on for months. Tina just kept saying, “My father says no.” Eventually she told me, “Spike, you’re wearing me out. Why don’t you write him a letter?” So I wrote a 10-page letter telling him how much I respected him and loved his music. And we got the songs. Later, I heard that Sinatra screened Malcolm X in his home theatre in Palm Springs. Pierce Brosnan told me Frank really loved the film. That meant the world to me. I never met him, but that moment stayed with me.

Oh, and let me tell this story. I’m getting ready to do the casting for Do the Right Thing. I’m thinking about who I want to play Vito. I see this guy in Five Corners, I don’t know who he is. He’s dancing with his mother, doing the waltz, then he throws her out the motherfucking window, then he sneaks into the Bronx Zoo and beats a penguin with a baseball bat. I said, “That’s my guy!”

JT: I was in Venice, California, and I remember getting the script from Studio Duplicating on vinyl leather, a beautiful dark print. I read it and thought, this is the guy who did She’s Gotta Have It. I was excited. I remember meeting you at 40 Acres . You had a desk and you had scripts piled up really high, I could barely see your face. You asked who I wanted to play. I said Pino would be better. It felt like the right role.

SL: Richard Edson wanted to play Pino too. But that role – you rode the subway with it.

JT: Is there a movie that you feel didn’t get the proper love when it came out?

SL: Bamboozled.

JT: That’s what I was going to say. You showed me a rough cut. It stayed with me.

SL: People thought I’d lost my mind. But look, plenty of great works get pissed on when they first come out. Then, as time goes by, stuff gets rediscovered. You lick your wounds, keep stepping. That’s what I tell my students.

Lee wears Stone Island throughout

Photography by Lee’s daughter, Satchel Lee

Production Juice House

Executive Producer Jackson Lee

Executive Producer E. “Kellogg” Kellogg for Juice House

Producer Sasha Yimsuan for Juice House

Producer Zena Khafagy

Production Coordinator Max Acrish

Director Satchel Lee

Photographer Assistant Rowan Liebrum

Lighting Assistant Josua Jimenez

Stylist Moses Zay Fofana