Spike Lee Made The Movie We Need Right Now

With the Oscar-nominated BlacKkKlansman, the legendary director returns to the subjects he’s helped define for a generation of film-goers – racism, power and the inescapability of history. It’s a film that feels vital to the Trump era, even though, as Lee knows, the story behind it stretches back decades.

- Zach Baron

Spike Lee lights a candle. He motions wordlessly to the spot on the red couch where he’d like me to sit. He lights a second candle. The two of us are inside an editing room in Lee’s memorabilia-filled office in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. He has his reference materials on hand here: Joe Louis’ boxing trunks, flattened and framed. Copies of the New York Post and the Daily News with headlines about Spike Lee and his adventures at Madison Square Garden, where he holds Knicks season tickets. Books about lynchings, about history, about people whose stories haven’t yet been told – or told right – on screen. In the quiet of the editing room he lights a third candle without speaking, then sits in an office chair set low to the ground, so that even at Lee’s modest height, his knees push up into the air. Knicks-orange glasses, Knicksorange Nikes. “All right,” he says, sighing. “Let’s go.”