Having been a high-profile filmmaker for four decades, Spike Lee has had his fair share of projects fall apart. Films like his biopics about James Brown, Joe Louis, and Jackie Robinson or even “Inside Man 2” were all floated around at various points in Lee’s career but ultimately never came together. We even wrote about 10 of these projects back in 2013. But one film that really hasn’t been discussed and was a complete “clusterfuck” per the director is “The Messenger.”
Speaking on the Director’s Cut podcast from the Directors Guild of America, Spike Lee talked about working on “The Messenger” way back in 1984 and why that film ultimately fell apart. The feature, which was set to star Giancarlo Esposito (a regular collaborator with the director) and Laurence Fishburne, tells the story of a bike messenger that becomes the head of his household after the death of his mother (according to an old report from The Washington Post). And apparently, the film was all set to go…until it wasn’t.
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“The money never came through. It was a complete disaster,” Lee explained. “I had to go underground, reconfigure, reevaluate and it was a very humbling experience. I remember after assembling the cast and crew and telling them there was no money and, no money for the movie and no money for the time you spent in pre-production.”
Lee told a story then of that experience, the heartbreak of telling the cast. Staying in the basement and was “crying like a newborn baby” in the bathtub. “I had to be truthful to myself, look in the mirror, and go over how I fucked up. And it was the classic sense of the young filmmaker and that first film; you overreach.”
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He recalled a story from his grandma and words that never left him, “‘Spike, I support you, but you gotta crawl before you walk.’ And so I said, I’m going to try this film one more time. I’m not going to have car chases in the script, people jumping through roofs.”
He continued, “It was a godsend that that film didn’t get made. I wasn’t equipped to do that stuff; stunts, it would’ve been a complete disaster, and then that woulda been the [last] you heard of Spike Lee.”
So, with the experience of “The Messenger” behind him, he tried crafting a script that was different. No car chases. No people jumping through rooms. Just folks talking.
“I should be able to write a script with three-four people in a room—all that other shit I wanna do will have to wait,” Lee said. “If this film’s successful, all that shit can come down the line. And that film was ‘She’s Gotta Have It.'”
So, even though the filmmaker had a terrible experience trying to bring “The Messenger” to life, it sounds as if he took those lemons and made some critically-acclaimed, iconic lemonade. And the rest, as they say, is history.