![]() “Delroy tried to talk me out of it, but he knew it was the best thing for his character and the best thing for his film.” Kevin and I just thought it would be interesting if one of these cats supported Agent Orange, pun intended,” Lee said, using his nickname of choice for Trump. After the war, everyone had gone their separate ways and had their own path. “We had to have some conflict within the group. Similarly, by making Lindo’s character of Paul an embittered black Trump supporter in “Da 5 Bloods,” Lee sought to tie the sins of the past to what he sees as the sins of the present. In “BlacKkKlansman,” Lee drew a straight line from the story of a black police officer infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s to the racial divisions and resurgent white supremacy movement of the Trump era. In society, unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to ring the same.”įour African American veterans return to Vietnam decades after the war to find their squad leader’s remains - and a stash of buried gold. When you’re in the battlefield, there is no black and white. “Being a combat brother, if you will - pink, green, black or white - it’s the same blood and the same mud. “There’s a mutual respect among warriors,” Humphries said. ![]() As a white veteran who had fought during the war alongside many African Americans, he felt a duty to help get their story right. What made Vietnam so different was that there’s an actual black revolution going on back home and people are dying in that revolution while you’re in the jungles fighting another struggle.”įormer Navy SEAL Harry Humphries, who served two tours in Vietnam, was brought on board the film as a military consultant. “The black soldier’s story has been that he’s fighting for rights that he doesn’t have himself, with the notion that your participation and your patriotism will somehow earn you equality back home. “There really hadn’t been a major film about the black Vietnam experience, one that really explored what black veterans had gone through,” said “BlacKkKlansman” co-writer Kevin Willmott, whom Lee brought in to help retrofit the script. Jumping off its “Treasure of the Sierra Madre"-style adventure plot, he saw an opportunity to tell a larger story about the way African Americans had been disproportionately drafted to fight in Vietnam while simultaneously having to fight for their own civil rights back home. Anna,” in 2008 - came on board and refocused the script on the experience of black soldiers. When Oliver Stone, who had been attached to the project, dropped out, Lee - who had made a film about African American Buffalo Soldiers in World War II, “Miracle at St. “Da 5 Bloods” began its life as a script by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo called “The Last Tour” about white soldiers returning to Vietnam to hunt for buried treasure. “He was telling us to negate the false narrative we were seeing growing up, not knowing any better.” “My father would see us watching those films and he’d say, ‘I want you to know black people fought in those wars too,’ ” Lee said. I’ve just been taken away with Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor - I mean, it’s like open season.”īack then, Lee and his brother Chris loved to watch black-and-white World War II movies like “Is Paris Burning?” and “The Train,” movies that depicted soldiers, who were invariably white, valiantly fighting overseas for the cause of liberty and the American way. “And here we are in modern-day America, pandemic America, and cities are up in flames. ![]() “One of the biggest criticisms of ‘Do the Right Thing’ was that I did not provide the answer to racism at the end of the movie,” Lee said. Now what had struck many at the time as a provocation seemed like a prophecy. Three decades ago, Lee’s seminal 1989 film “Do the Right Thing” climaxed with an unarmed black man, a gentle giant named Radio Raheem, being choked to death by a racist cop, sparking a riot. “I mean, you’ve got to laugh to keep from crying.” ![]() WTF! OMG! Jesus, Mary and Jo-Jo!” He let out a dark chuckle. “I’m reading on Twitter, ‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts.’ Twitter flagged that so he put it back on not through his personal Twitter account but the White House. “I woke up this morning and I see my brother from CNN who’s just doing a story and he got arrested,” Lee told The Times by phone. And now, in the wake of the death of George Floyd days earlier at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis, a conflagration of protests rapidly spreading across the country. Last Friday morning, director Spike Lee woke up at his home in New York City and surveyed the day’s fresh horrors in a world that had come to seem at once both unrecognizable and all too recognizable.Ī deadly pandemic.
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