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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
The cinema icon talks about reshaping American mythology with his WWII epic, "Miracle at St. Anna," and what Hollywood would look like if he were in charge.
By James Hannaham
Read more: War, Movies, World War II, Spike Lee, Arts & Entertainment, Salon Conversations, James Hannaham
Sept. 25, 2008 | Do you remember the moment you gave up on Spike Lee? You might want to reverse your decision, because his new WWII epic, "Miracle at St. Anna," is the joint you've prayed he had in him all this time.
I gave up in 1992, during the overhyped and merely OK "Malcolm X," when Denzel Washington's voice-over describes the young Malcolm X's outrage at the way his teachers attempted to keep him in his place. He says something to the effect that he's been treated like a horse. As the speech concludes, Spike cuts to a horse. I was insulted -- this guy doesn't think I know what a horse looks like? I told myself I'd wait for some positive word-of-mouth before I dropped dollars on another Spike feature.
So I sat out duds like "Bamboozled" and "She Hate Me." Documentaries like the Oscar-nominated "4 Little Girls" suggested that his true talent lay there. But then came 2006's "Inside Man," Lee's ambitious effort to redefine the Hollywood blockbuster. Right, I thought, a staunchly independent cinema icon with an offbeat, cantankerous sensibility is going to pull that off. But to my surprise, Lee took a competent, clever bank heist film, infused it with his heterogeneous New York gestalt, and transformed it not only into a memorable examination of racism and sleazy post-9/11 politics but, above all, a sharp psychological thriller. The movie, a critical hit, took in $186 million worldwide. Instead of the customary "joint," Lee called it a "film."
It might all have ended there, or with several more bank robbery thrillers, had Lee not picked up James McBride's 2003 novel "Miracle at St. Anna." Intrigued by the story's compelling and fresh take on WWII, he has brought to the screen a complex fictional account of the real 92nd Infantry Division, a corps of black American soldiers (also called "Buffalo Soldiers"). The film follows four enlisted men who become trapped in a Tuscan village after a botched sortie. One of them, Train, is a simple-minded hulk who befriends a charmingly daft Italian kid, Angelo, who turns out to have survived a mass killing. McBride was inspired by a real mass murder that took place in the Tuscan village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema in 1944. Lee got into a tiff with Clint Eastwood recently when the diminutive Brooklynite pointed out that Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" misrepresented the African-American presence in WWII. Eastwood said he should "Shut his face," to which Lee responded, "The man is not my father and we're not on a plantation." If you think Lee's retort seems saucy, "Miracle at St. Anna" is a gauntlet thrown at Eastwood's feet.
Intrigued by the Spike renaissance, I grabbed some phone time with Lee as he began a Normandy of publicity for the film's opening weekend. (Listen to the interview here.)
How did you come across the book "Miracle at St. Anna"?Well, I needed something to read and I was in my wife's office, looking at her bookshelf. The spirit told me to take that one book out of the many books that were there. When I pulled it out of the bookcase I saw the cover with a black soldier and a young Italian boy and I said, What is this? And I read it, said I want to make it into a movie, called up James [McBride, who wrote the novel and screenplay], and we talked.
In some respects "Miracle at St. Anna" is meant to be a corrective for Hollywood World War II films that have omitted people of color.Well, No. 1, that's not what I'm saying. I'm not going to make a movie just to correct something. I mean it's there, but that's not the reason I made the film. The reason I made the film is 'cause it's a great story. This is a piece of history that happened. You know, African-Americans have fought for this country, and have always been very patriotic -- the first person to die for the United States of America was a black man, Crispus Attucks, killed by the British, so this is not a news flash. But a lot of times history is made into mythology. So we address some of that mythology at the beginning of "Miracle at St. Anna" with the film "The Longest Day" [playing on the main character's TV in the present day]. That's a film about the invasion of Normandy with the icon of all American icons, John Wayne. You can't get more American than that. It will take more than one movie, with all the war films Hollywood has done without African-Americans, to set the record straight.
It's not a historical text. When he was a young kid growing up in Brooklyn, about 10 years old, he'd go over to his uncle's house and his uncle would play cards and drink and get drunk and start telling war stories about himself and other black soldiers fighting the Nazis in Italy. That's how James got the inspiration for the book.
There are a lot of people speaking in their native languages in this movie.I could not make a WWII film with Nazis speaking English. I made the decision that everyone speak their native language. This film is about barriers, language, culture, all that stuff. So how you gonna have a scene where Train is teaching [Angelo] to communicate by tapping on his chest if they're both speaking English? Where is going to be the conflict, the drama, with these four black American soldiers stumbling into a small Tuscan village if everyone is speaking the same language?
Next page: "I wanted to show the Nazis in a different light"
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