Things Spike Lee Hates: Racists, Guns, and Racists with Guns
Amidst all the fanfare around Lee Daniels’ The Butler, 12 Years a Slave, and the talk of 2013 being a landmark year for black filmmaking, the biggest name in modern black independent cinema, Spike Lee, drops another joint on the moviegoing public. Oldboy, an English-language remake of the 2003 South Korean film directed by Park Chan-wook comes out on November 27th. The film is as violent and dark as it should be, considering the source material, but it also contains plenty of signature Spike Lee touches, in particular, his penchant for including commentary on modern racial politics and gun violence.
We met in Hollywood last week to talk about the film, and all the hype about the year in black cinema. As you can see from the above photo, we did a lot of laughing.
VICE: I wanted to say that I really appreciated that you used two actors from The Wire in the movie [James Ransone and Lance Reddick]. I’m sure I’m not the only one who plays that “Spot the Wire actor” game when they see movie. Was that on purpose or was that just kind of like, you just cast who you like? Spike Lee: The Wire had great actors. And I like to work with great actors. And I loved the show, David Simon’s a giant. And they were available.
What really attracted you to Oldboy as a project? It seems like a tough project to take on, first of all, it’s a remake— Malcolm X wasn’t tough?
I mean, of course that’s tough. I don’t run away from tough.
But what attracted you to it specifically? What was there in the original in the script that you got that made you really want to do this project? I wanted to work with Josh Brolin, and I’d never done a reinterpretation before so those were the two things. We wanted to work together.
