Looking for a Spike Lee quote

March 4, 2019 7:15 AM

After the Oscars this year I read I quote from Spike Lee that I would like to find again. I thought it was in The Guardian but my Google-fu has failed me and I'm stumped. It was in response to a question about why his movies were always about black people and whether he felt that that was working in a bubble. His answer was about how no one asked great directors like Bergman, Morricone, or Kurosawa why their movies were always about Swedish or Italian or Japanese people. He also said that he felt that his movies told universal stories.

I feel that this quote speaks directly to identity politics and I would really like to find it again so I can share it.

posted by irisclara to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

Best answer: It's a 1995 quote from a Guardian interview.

Alan Pyke cited it in a recent ThinkProgress commentary.

In a 1995 interview in The Guardian, Lee was pressed with the suggestion that he’d become so “cocooned” that he rarely made it “outside of that black consciousness.” Might he be missing something essential by insisting that his characters, stories, and settings emphasized blackness?

Lee’s response then is resonant even now: “I think that black life is universal automatically. So when I do a film about a black family, I don’t think I’m in a cocoon,” Lee said. “I’m not doing a film that I think only black people can understand, because I think if a film works on a universal level, then it works.”

“What is amazing to me,” Lee continued, “is that no one’s ever, ever, ever asked Akira Kurosawa: ‘Mr. Kurosawa, why are all your films about Japanese culture?’ No one ever asked Federico Fellini: ‘Mr. Fellini, why are all your films about Italian culture?’ No one ever asked Ingmar Bergman: ‘Why are all your films about Swedish culture?’ But the minute black artists try to express themselves about our culture, then it’s like, ‘You’re not universal. When are you going to do a film that encompasses all of humanity?’ That’s crazy. Insane.”

posted by virago at 9:20 AM on March 4, 2019 [10 favorites]

I was gonna say, the quote had to be pre-Summer of Sam (1999.)
posted by kapers at 10:12 AM on March 4, 2019

Response by poster: That's it, virago! Thank you so much!
posted by irisclara at 12:56 PM on March 4, 2019

Glad to help!
posted by virago at 5:27 PM on March 4, 2019

PS Thanks for asking the question -- that's a hell of a quotation, and it will be a good comeback during identity-politics discussions.
posted by virago at 5:33 PM on March 4, 2019 [1 favorite]