Spike Lee & Me
A 2013 conversation from the vault with the seminal filmmaker about the tension between evolution & continuity, the impact of seeing The Exorcist underground, & how the hustle never ends--only changes
The transcript for my unpublished interview with the late Leeway guitarist Michael Gibbons, who passed away two weeks ago, is over twenty-five pages long. I didn’t want to cram on something I very much want to get right. So, I went into the vault for this long out of print, never online feature I did on Spike Lee a little over a decade ago for Fangoria around the time he “reimagined” the cult classic Ganja & Hess as Da Sweet Blood of Jesus.
I was warned by quite a few people that Lee could be prickly in interviews and, considering mine came at the end of a long day of shooting for him, I was braced for ice. But it was actually one of the best conversations I had for that mag — Lee was open, thoughtful, warm, engaged, and genuine. I hope you enjoy it…
During the final days of 1973, Spike Lee stood in a line wrapping around the Gulf & Western building on the edge of Columbus Circle in Manhattan, waiting.
And waiting.
And waiting some more.
Across the street, the chilly expanse of Central Park stretched out before him, but at the moment, the future rabble-rousing director of such iconic American classics as She's Gotta Have It, Do the Right Thing, and Malcolm X— not to mention the executive producer of the cult horror anthology Tales from the Hood—was more concerned with what lay beneath the soles of his icy feet: The subterranean Paramount Theater, a silver screen-adorned catacomb which, twenty years hence, would be demolished and gutted to serve as he Trump Tower underground parking garage. On this particular day, however, it hosted one sellout crowd after another—congregations seeking to test their mettle against a genre-leveling landmark of supernatural shock cinema: The Exorcist.
Three hours later, Lee got his own cinematic baptism.
“At that time, I must have been in junior high…or maybe I’d just started high school,” Lee tells Fangoria. “And the experience of seeing The Exorcist where I did and in the way I did—woo!—that was some powerful stuff! Man, was that film was scary! I didn’t know I wanted to be a filmmaker back then, but The Exorcist sure had an impact on me. Oh, it shook me. It shook me like seeing Jaws shook me. Like seeing Alien on 42nd Street shook me. And I count myself as very fortunate to have been of an age to see films like those in the theater.”
And yet it was a much smaller, stranger genre movie, initially released eight months before Lee watched Father Merrin struggle against Pazuzu, that would speak more directly to the then-fledgling film student’s heart when he saw it a few years later: Ganja & Hess, Bill Gunn’s esoteric, adventurous, frequently confounding tale of ancient curses transported to the modern world, bloodlust, addiction, love amidst the ruins, and the power and peril of true outsider status.
“Ganja just always stuck with me,” Lee says. “I liked how the late, great Bill Gunn turned the expectations of audiences and studios on their head. Ganja arrived on this wave of black exploitation films—you know, Blacula had made a tone of money and Bill was given a bunch of cash to do something exactly…like…that. But he did an end-run—a misdirect!—and made something completely original and completely his own instead.”
Now, forty-plus years after Ganja’s release, Lee has reimagined the film as Da Sweet Blood of Jesus—a wholly immersive, dreamlike spiritual successor to the original spiked (sorry) with frequent, bracing salvos of explicit sex and unadulterated violence.
“Some people have been saying to me, ‘Yo, Spike, where did that shit come from?’” Lee says, breaking into a wicked cackle. “Maybe it’s not a compliment, but I’m choosing to take it as one. There’s nothing in Da Sweet Blood of Jesus that’s going to make you jump out of your seat like the facehugger in Alien. You won’t see people in the theater looking like they just stuck a finger in an electrical socket. I do think it’s maybe gonna unsettle some people, though; maybe make ‘em think a little bit, too.”
In Da Sweet Blood, Stephen Tyrone Williams and Zaraah Abrahams take over for the original’s Duane Jones and Marlene Clark as Dr. Hess Greene, an anthropologist who develops a thirst for blood thanks to an ancient dagger, and Ganja, the widow of his first victim, with whom he becomes romantically involved. As the title change suggests, while the storyline, inciting action, and some sequences unmistakably hearken back to its predecessor, these elements are leavened with idiosyncrasies, and triple-cool swagger that transform Da Sweet Blood of Jesus into something that is both separate from the auteur’s oeuvre and yet firmly (if weirdly) fits into the ”Spike Lee Joint” universe.
“At a certain point you gotta let go of the original,” Lee says. “So we changed some things. We contemporized the story. We included the Martha’s Vineyard element—there has been a strong African-American presence there for a long time, particularly in Oak Bluffs, since probably the late ‘40s, early ‘50s. So it felt right. Plus, I’ve had a house out there for many years and always wanted to shoot something in the area. Lots of little things, you know? You always want to be respectful of the source material, while at the same time putting your own spin on it. And that’s what we did.”
The stark nature of the film’s violence meanwhile put its own spin on the seasoned filmmaker. “Here I gotta say, ‘Spoiler alert, Fangoria readers!’” Lee warns before addressing a nasty bit of savagery early in the film. “We shot that in a rented-out apartment in Fort Greene, Brookyln. We had a guy offscreen pumping blood [through a wound] and, first take, he gets a little too happy with it. I’m yelling, ‘Cut! Cut! Cut!’ and blood’s flying everywhere. Kinda different from my usual sets.
“But, you know, we wanted to be realistic with the violence, with the sex,” he continues. I just felt that was the best approach to tell the story that needed to be told—to be real with those things. I will tell you this: Sex is harder to shoot than violence—always, always, always—and that’s how it was on Da Sweet Blood of Jesus.”
Want to get a laugh out of Spike Lee?
Ask if he carried any lesson from his remake of Oldboy over to adapting Gunn’s picture.
“Yeah, I did,” he says, apparently laughing through the pain. “It was, ‘Next time, I’m making a Kickstarter film!’ I wasn’t getting no notes on this one!”
It’s true: In a much-publicized move, Lee raised the $1.4 million Da Sweet Blood budget via the crowd-sourcing site, somewhat mischievously pitching the film as, “A new kind of love story (and not a remake of Blacula).” And, one-liners aside, the Oldboy experience figured heavily into that decision.
“Actually, all I will say about Oldboy, sir, is that the film Josh Brolin and I wished to make was shot, but it is not the film you saw in theaters,” Lee says. (As those who have read Tim Lucas and Dave Walker’s excellent history of Ganja & Hess accompanying the film’s Kino Blu-ray reissue will know, this would most certainly not be an unfamiliar story to Gunn.) “I’m not going to mince my words: It was an oppressive creative atmosphere. Kickstarter gave me a chance to breathe freely again.”
Let’s campaign was not without its detractors. Why, they asked, was a such a high-profile director wading into the crowd-funding pond with the smaller fish? It was a criticism Lee answered implicitly in his Kickstarter introductory video, telling potential donors, “I was doing Kickstarter before there was a Kickstarter… [Back then] social media was writing letters, making phone calls, shaking hands. This isn’t necessarily new to me, going out there and trying to rally the troops, trying to mobilize the community.”
“I was sort of forced to come out and say that, because there was a type of thinking out there that I was committing what amounted to a criminal act by funding my movie this way,” Lee says, citing the scramble to fund his debut She’s Gotta Have It as well as the concerned celebrity salvaging of Malcolm X when a bond company dispute threatened to deep-six the production as examples of his proto-crowd-funding efforts. “Let’s be honest: Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is not a film that is going to open on the same day on twenty thousand screens worldwide. I wasn’t gonna go knocking on any studio doors trying to get this film made, because no studio was gonna answer. It’s too small—that’s their thinking.”
Lee did, of course, have a couple built-in advantages: First, a thirty-year track record of unpredictable, boundary-pushing filmmaking and the devoted fanbase that grew out of that. And, second, an insane collection of cinema-history paraphernalia to put up for rewards, ranging from vintage Mo’ Better Blues pins and He Got Game Abraham Lincoln High School Railsplitters jerseys to one of only four existing “X” flags from the Malcolm X opening sequence.
There were also immaterial offerings: a chance to be an extra in Da Sweet Blood of Jesus; a hometown screening of the Lee film of your choice with the filmmaker in attendance; dinner with Lee and a courtside seat at a Madison Square Garden Knicks game.
“We went to the vault, baby!” Lee says. “I'd like to give a shout-out to Steven Soderbergh, who was the first to make one of those $10,000 pledges. When he did that, it really helped legitimize this whole thing. So that meant a lot to me. Yep, that's my man right there...”
The director’s chuckle trails off; his voice lowers.
"But let me tell you a story about the other side of this," he says. "I got three emails from three different people saying basically the same thing: ‘I'm sitting here, Spike, with five dollars in my pocket and I'm trying to decide whether I'm gonna eat tonight or whether I'm gonna support your movie. And these individuals chose to go hungry in order to send me the money.
“Now isn't that something?” he continues. “I don't even know who these people are. It's not like I was saying, 'People! Don't eat tonight! Send me money!' That is not the case. But when I was reading those e-mails—and this might sound corny; I don't care—it touched me. Whatever film of mine it was for those people, there was something I had done in my career that had made such an impression on them that they would sacrifice to help me get another film made. That's unbelievable."
“I'm not going to front: I teared up. I always feel responsibility to make a good film. This time, though, that responsibility was heightened.”
Lee first learned of Kickstarter through his students at the New York University Graduate Film School, where he has served as professor and artistic director for the last fifteen years. (“I received my tenure there this summer—thank you, Jesus.”) When Lee describes his professor student relationship as "a two-way street," he isn't kidding: Two former students, Daniel Patterson and Randy Wilkins, served on Da Sweet Blood of Jesus as cinematographer and editor, respectively.
"We had the NYU Graduate Film Mafia up in there on this set," Lee says, obvious pride sneaking into his voice. "And they did an amazing job."
The gang surely had its work cut out for it: Da Sweet Blood of Jesus was shot in a lean sixteen days. But when Fangoria congratulates Lee on accomplishing so much in such a short period of time, the film icon demurs.
"Look, we shot She's Gotta Have It in twelve days," he says. "There's a budget, there's a schedule, and you do what you need to do to make your days. My people? I got a machine here for you. We get it done.”