BEVERLY HILLS – Spike Lee was the man of the hour at a reception at the Four Seasons Hotel Wednesday evening celebrating the home entertainment release of “BlacKkKlansman.” Stars John David Washington and Topher Grace were also on hand, but Lee was who everyone wanted to talk to and it wasn’t hard to imagine why.
The Focus Features release is one of the biggest hits of the summer ($84.5 million global off a reported $15 million production budget) as well as one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year (83 on Metacritic, 95% on Rotten Tomatoes). The film took home the Grand Prix at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival and the Audience Award at Locarno in August. It’s also a very likely Best Picture nominee and could garner Lee his – shockingly – first Best Director nomination (he won an honorary Oscar in 2016). Of course, don’t expect Lee to want to discuss any of this.
Sitting down before the event I asked Lee what he thought about the Oscar buzz about “BlacKkKlansman” and he insisted on not commenting because he “doesn’t want to jinx” anything. That’s understandable, but I wondered if there was anyone among his cast and crew who deserved a nomination who wasn’t getting the hype they deserved and before I could finish my question he emphatically responded “Terence Blanchard! Terence Blanchard! He was my composer on ‘Malcolm X’ and ‘Inside Man’ and ‘Four Little Girls’ and he deserves a nomination!”
Lee also added he hoped his longtime editor Barry Alexander Brown, among others, would also be recognized by Academy voters. And as for his leading man? With a coy smile, he sounded like someone who thinks Washington has more support in the acting branch than some might believe.
One of the reasons that “BlacKkKlansman” is expected to be a significant awards player is because of the emotional reaction many audience members had while watching it.
“The [most common thing I’ve heard] from people who I know, people just come up to you on the street, is they talk about the ending. Charlottesville,” Lee says. “And everyone uses the same words. ‘You couldn’t hear a pin drop.’ Everybody uses those words. They’re paralyzed. They can’t move when they see that act of homegrown, American terrorism, which resulted in the death of Heather Heyer. And then I’ve had some black friends who told me, who went to see the film with a predominantly white audience, that white people come up to them and hugging them.”
Wait, really?
“Swear to God,” Lee continues. “And apologizing, like, ‘What can I do?’ Which is, that is totally f**king insane. I swear to God, my friends they had seen the film with a predominantly white audience and when the lights came up the whole theater was looking at them like … and I know it sounds funny, but people very genuine, like moved and reaching out to these black people who sitting there with them, just like hugging them.”
The film chronicles how Ron Stallworth (Washington), an African-American police detective in Colorado Springs, Colorado, helped take down a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1970’s and how none other than the Klan’s Grandmaster at the time, David Duke (Grace), was involved in the case. Lee’s use of footage from Charlottesville at the end of the picture is a stirring reminder of how little the nation has come in the decades since, but he’ll remind you this racist, fascist thinking isn’t limited to the U.S.
“It’s Brexit, Le Pen in France, you got this new guy in Italy. These two people running for president in Brazil. One guy running for office from jail,” Lee says. “I mean, it’s this outbreak of this right-wing, you might say semi-fascist movement. And the one thing that connects all this, which is something we’ve seen from the playbook of Mussolini and Hitler, is you gotta have a scapegoat. Any time we see fascism, one group is targeted as a scapegoat and they’re the reasons why shit’s so f**ked up. So we get, ‘Lock ’em up, burn ’em, kill ’em,’ whatever. And now the new scapegoat is immigrants.”
Lee isn’t sure what his next film will be because he has more pressing things on his agenda. A red-eye flight back to New York where he has a slew of student meetings bright and early at 8 AM. The Brooklyn native has been a tenured professor at NYU for 25 years and awards season or not, the students come first.
“Blackkklansman” will be available on Digital on October 23rd, and on 4K, Blu-ray and DVD on November 6th.
