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Credit: Spike Lee
Spike Lee has shown recently that, aside from being one of the great directors of our time, he can be relied upon to land on the right side of history. That was proven with his most recent project, 2025’s Katrina: Hell or Highwater.
A miniseries for Netflix, it examined the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina on the US Gulf Coast back in 2005 and specifically the shocking response, or rather lack of it, from the state, the federal government and the bodies set up to deal with such an event.
At least 1,300 people died, mostly in poor areas of Louisiana. Lee examined how the disaster unfolded, speaking to survivors two decades on. It isn’t the first time he’s done such a project; he has also directed films about pivotal American moments such as 9/11 and the Rodney King beating, and he had already shone a light on the failures around Katrina in 2006 with When the Levees Broke.
A sense of justice and a desire to draw attention to when it isn’t present have also informed much of his now-huge catalogue, stretching back to the 1980s and the student films he made while studying film at New York University. When he did make his debut, it was with 1986’s She’s Gotta Have It, a comedy made on a budget of less than $200,000, which brought in more than $7million at the box office.
That was the kind of result that made studios sit up and take notice, but had things gone differently, Lee could have attempted something far more ambitious that might not have gone the same way at all. As he told the DGA: “She’s Gotta Have It was really my second attempt at a feature film. The first attempt was a fiasco. It was a film called The Messenger. And it didn’t work out because of money.”
A lack of funds meant an inexpensive comedy with a small cast was the sensible choice, but it would be a blessing in disguise, as Lee added: “It turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me because I was ill-equipped to direct that script. I mean, it had helicopter chases, car chases. And thank God I didn’t get the money, because it would have been a total disaster. I was not ready yet.”
Lee kept things modest as he honed his craft. His next film was the 1988 musical comedy School Daze, which again showed there was a huge audience waiting for the kind of movies he wanted to make, more than doubling its budget of $6.5m on release.
Finally, Lee was ready to show the world what he could do. The following year brought Do the Right Thing, the incendiary story of the inhabitants of a Brooklyn block sweltering in the summer heat and on the brink of a riot. The film earned him an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Original Screenplay’, but crucially not a ‘Best Picture’ nod, something that even the attendees at the ceremony publicly said wasn’t right.
That injustice, and more so that Driving Miss Daisy won instead – a film he believed reinforced racial stereotypes – infuriated Lee for many years to come.
Lee will now be showing his lighter side with a couple of forthcoming projects, Boner, about the development of Viagra, and Prince of Cats, a hip-hop retelling of Romeo and Juliet set in 1980s New York.
