CANNES – It was no surprise the first question at the official Cannes Film Festival press conference for “BlacKkKlansman” went to director Spike Lee. The fact he spoke for over 10 minutes before any of his cast on the dias were asked a question was slightly unexpected. But Lee simply had a lot to say about his movie in these racially charged times.
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“BlacKkKlansman,” which debuted at Cannes on Monday night, tells the true story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), a black police officer in Colorado Springs who infiltrated a local Ku Klux Klan chapter with the help of his white colleague Flip (Adam Driver). Stallworth posed on the phone as “himself” while Flip portrayed the “Ron Stallworth” the KKK thought was joining their organization in person. To make matters even more surreal, Stallworth had numerous conversations with the Grand Wizard of the KKK at the time, David Duke (Topher Grace), who had no idea he was talking to a black man. The film is set in the early ’70s, but Lee and his screenwriters strikingly show how little has changed in the four decades since. The film includes significant footage from the Charlottesville Alt-Right clashes with counter-protesters last August which Lee reveals occurred only a few weeks after filming had wrapped.
“I was stuck to CNN and I saw what happened and I knew right away I knew this had to be my coda for the film. But, I had to do something first,” Lee says. “I was given Susan Bro‘s phone number. She is the mother of Heather Heyer who got murdered when that car came crashing down the street and I was not going to put that murder scene in the film without her blessing and Mrs. Bro said, ‘Spike, I give you permission to put that in.’ Once I got permission. I said, ‘F**k everybody else. That motherf**king scene in is staying in the motherf**king movie.’ Cause that was a murder.”
Like many, Lee has been an outspoken critic of the current U.S. president and when discussing Charlottesville he could not contain his disdain for how he handled the situation. And Lee’s thoughts in this case absolutely deserve to be presented in their entirety.
“We have a guy in the White House I’m not even going to say his f**king name whose defining moment not just for America but for the world and that mother f**ker was given a chance to say, ‘We are about love and not about hate.’ And that motherf**ker did not denounce the mother fucking Klan, the alt-right, and those Nazi motherfuckers,” Lee says. “It was a defining moment where he could have said to the world ‘Not the United States, we’re better than that.’ The United States of America was built upon the genocide of native people and slavery. That is the fabric of the United States of America. As my Brooklyn brother Jay-z would say, ‘Facts.’ That scene had to go in. We look to our leaders to give us direction to make moral decisions and I’d like to say this isn’t just something that pertains to the United States of America. This right wing bull shit is not just America. It’s all over the world and we need to wake up. We can’t be silent. It’s not black, white, or brown. It’s everybody.”
Lee continues, “We all live on this planet and this guy in the White House has a nuclear code. I go to bed every night thinking about it. I’ve seen the football that attache case. My wife and I gave a benefit for President Obama the second term. I saw the attache case in the car. It’s not science fiction. That shit is real. And this motherf**ker has the nuclear guy. And you got this guy in Korea, this guy in Russia. What the f**k is going on? So, this film to me is a wake-up call because we’ve gone for the okie-doke walking around in a daze and stuff is happening and it’s topsy-turvy and fake has been trumpeted as the truth. That’s what this film is about. And I know in my heart I don’t care what the critics say we are on the right side of history with this film.”
After some applause from the media, Lee smiles and adds, “Please excuse me for some profane words. The shit that’s going on makes you want to curse.”
The project came Lee’s way via producer Jordan Peele and he was surprised he hadn’t heard of Stallworth’s story before. He says he knew his job as a filmmaker was to connect the story to present day and that involves weaving something of a history lesson in the movie.
“What is happening now did not just pop up in thin air,” Lee says. “We had to connect what happened in the early ’70s in the Vietnam War. The last war we were in WWII after that everything has been a bad choice. We had in the film and present day. But, I do not have the crystal ball even though my friends call me Negrodomous. (Laughs.) That ending was not written. A Spike Lee joint is you gotta flow. Can’t be rigid. You gotta be with it. You gotta be on it. No way I could not make that the end of the film. With the help of Focus, we are gonna release this film on the one year anniversary of Charlottesville and it’s an ugly, ugly blemish on the United States of America.”
“BlacKkKlansman” opens nationwide on August 10.