Spike Lee

Academic career and teaching

In 1991, Lee taught a course at Harvard about filmmaking. In 1993, he began to teach at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in the Graduate Film Program. It was there that he received his master of fine arts. In 2002, he was appointed as artistic director of the school. He is now a tenured professor at NYU.

1990–1999: Established director

In 1990, Lee had his first collaboration with Denzel Washington in Mo' Better Blues. After the release of Mo' Better Blues, Lee was accused of antisemitism by the Anti-Defamation League and several film critics. They criticized the characters of the club owners Josh and Moe Flatbush, described as "Shylocks". Lee denied the charge, explaining that he wrote those characters in order to depict how black artists struggled against exploitation. Lee said that Lew Wasserman, Sidney Sheinberg, or Tom Pollock, the Jewish heads of MCA and Universal Studios, were unlikely to allow antisemitic content in a film they produced. He said he could not make an antisemitic film because Jews run Hollywood, and "that's a fact". His next film was Jungle Fever (1991), for which Samuel L. Jackson won acclaim for his performance as a crack addict.

In 1992, Spike released his biographical epic film Malcolm X based on the Autobiography of Malcolm X, starring Denzel Washington as the famed civil rights leader. The film dramatizes key events in Malcolm X's life: his criminal career, his incarceration, his conversion to Islam, his ministry as a member of the Nation of Islam and his later falling out with the organization, his marriage to Betty X, his pilgrimage to Mecca and reevaluation of his views concerning whites, and his assassination on February 21, 1965. Defining childhood incidents, including his father's death, his mother's mental illness, and his experiences with racism are dramatized in flashbacks. The film received widespread critical acclaim including from critic Roger Ebert, who ranked the film No. 1 on his Top 10 list for 1992 and described the film as "one of the great screen biographies, celebrating the sweep of an American life that bottomed out in prison before its hero reinvented himself." Ebert and Martin Scorsese, who was sitting in for late At the Movies co-host Gene Siskel, both ranked Malcolm X among the ten best films of the 1990s. Denzel Washington's portrayal of Malcolm X in particular was widely praised and he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Washington lost to Al Pacino (Scent of a Woman), a decision which Lee criticized, saying "I'm not the only one who thinks Denzel was robbed on that one."

Lee next directed Crooklyn (1994), a semi-autobiographical film which he co-wrote with his siblings Joie Lee and Cinqué Lee. He followed this with the films Clockers (1995) and Girl 6 and Get on the Bus (both 1996). His 1997 documentary 4 Little Girls, about the girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. In 2017, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". He had his third collaboration with Denzel Washington on the sports drama He Got Game (1998). He followed this with Summer of Sam (1999), based on the Son of Sam murders.

2000–2014: Studio films and career fluctuations

In 2000, Lee directed Bamboozled (2000), a satire about a modern televised minstrel show. He followed this with 25th Hour (2002) starring Edward Norton and Philip Seymour Hoffman which opened to positive reviews, with several critics since having named it one of the best films of its decade. Film critic Roger Ebert added the film to his "Great Movies" list on December 16, 2009. A. O. Scott, Richard Roeper and Roger Ebert all put it on their "best films of the decade" lists. It was later named the 26th greatest film since 2000 in a BBC poll of 177 critics. The film was also a financial success earning almost $24 million against a $5 million budget. He followed 25th Hour with She Hate Me (2004), which received negative reviews.

In 2006, Lee directed Inside Man starring Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster, Clive Owen, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Willem Dafoe and Christopher Plummer. The film was an unusual film for Lee considering it was a studio heist thriller. The film was a critical and financial success earning $186 million off a $45 million budget. Empire gave the film four stars out of five, concluding, "It's certainly a Spike Lee film, but no Spike Lee Joint. Still, he's delivered a pacy, vigorous and frequently masterful take on a well-worn genre. Thanks to some slick lens work and a cast on cracking form, Lee proves (perhaps above all to himself?) that playing it straight is not always a bad thing."

On May 2, 2007, the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival honored Spike Lee with the San Francisco Film Society's Directing Award. In 2008, he received the Wexner Prize. The same year, Lee directed the drama Miracle at St. Anna about an all-black U.S. division fighting in Italy during World War II. At the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Lee, who was then making Miracle at St. Anna, criticized director Clint Eastwood for not depicting black Marines in his own World War II film, Flags of Our Fathers. Citing historical accuracy, Eastwood responded that his film was specifically about the Marines who raised the flag on Mount Suribachi at Iwo Jima, pointing out that while black Marines did fight at Iwo Jima, the U.S. military was racially segregated during World War II, and none of the men who raised the flag were black. He angrily said that Lee should "shut his face". Lee responded that Eastwood was acting like an "angry old man", and argued that despite making two Iwo Jima films back to back, Letters from Iwo Jima and Flags of Our Fathers, "there was not one black soldier in both of those films". He added that he and Eastwood were "not on a plantation". Lee later claimed that the event was exaggerated by the media and that he and Eastwood had reconciled through mutual friend Steven Spielberg, culminating in his sending Eastwood a print of Miracle at St. Anna.

In 2012, Lee directed Red Hook Summer, in which he reprised his role as Mookie from Do the Right Thing. In 2013, Lee won The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, one of the richest prizes in the American arts worth $300,000. The same year, he directed Oldboy, a remake of the Park Chan-wook 2003 film, which was reportedly taken away from Lee in the editing room, leading him to remove his trademark "A Spike Lee Joint" credit for a more impersonal "A Spike Lee Film". He followed this with Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014), which was primarily funded on Kickstarter.

2015–present: Career resurgence

In 2015, Lee received an Academy Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his contributions to film. Friends and frequent collaborators Wesley Snipes, Denzel Washington, and Samuel L. Jackson presented Lee with the award at the private Governors Awards ceremony. Lee directed, wrote, and produced the MyCareer story mode in the video game NBA 2K16. Later that same year, after a perceived long dip in quality, Lee rebounded with a musical drama film, Chi-Raq. The film is a modern-day adaptation of the ancient Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes set in modern-day Chicago's Southside and explores the challenges of race, sex, and violence in America. Teyonah Parris, Angela Bassett, Jennifer Hudson, Nick Cannon, Dave Chappelle, Wesley Snipes, John Cusack, and Samuel L. Jackson starred in the film. The film was released by Amazon Studios in select cities in November. Chi-Raq received generally positive reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has rating of 82% with the site's critical consensus stating, "Chi-Raq is as urgently topical and satisfyingly ambitious as it is wildly uneven – and it contains some of Spike Lee's smartest, sharpest, and all-around entertaining late-period work."

Lee's 2018 film BlacKkKlansman, a true crime drama set in the 1970s, centered around the true story of a black police officer, Ron Stallworth, infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan. The film premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix and opened the following August. The film received near universal praise when it opened in North America receiving a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes with the critics consensus reading, "BlacKkKlansman uses history to offer bitingly trenchant commentary on current events – and brings out some of Spike Lee's hardest-hitting work in decades along the way." In 2019, during the awards season leading up to the Academy Awards, Lee was invited to join a Directors Roundtable conversation run by The Hollywood Reporter. The roundtable included Ryan Coogler (Black Panther), Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite), Alfonso Cuarón (Roma), Marielle Heller (Can You Ever Forgive Me?), and Bradley Cooper (A Star is Born). It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director (Lee's first ever nomination in this category). Lee won his first competitive Academy Award in the category Best Adapted Screenplay. When asked by journalists from the BBC if the Best Picture winner Green Book offended him, Lee replied, "Let me give you a British answer, it's not my cup of tea". Many journalists in the industry noted how the 2019 Oscars with BlacKkKlansman competing against eventual winner Green Book mirrored the 1989 Oscars with Do the Right Thing missing out on a Best Picture nomination over the eventual winner Driving Miss Daisy.

Lee's Vietnam war film Da 5 Bloods was released worldwide on Netflix on June 12, 2020. The film starred Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Mélanie Thierry, Paul Walter Hauser and Chadwick Boseman. The film's plot follows a group of aging Vietnam War veterans who return to the country in search of the remains of their fallen squad leader, as well as the treasure they buried while serving there. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the film had been scheduled to premiere out-of-competition at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, then play in theaters in May or June before streaming on Netflix. The film received widespread critical acclaim; the website Rotten Tomatoes gave it an approval rating of 92% based on 252 reviews, with the critical consensus reading: "Fierce energy and ambition course through Da 5 Bloods, coming together to fuel one of Spike Lee's most urgent and impactful films." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 82 out of 100, based on 49 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

In 2020, Lee was linked to a movie musical about the origin story of Viagra, Pfizer's erectile dysfunction drug. In December 2021, he signed a deal with Netflix to direct and produce more movies. In February 2024, it was announced that Lee was confirmed as the director of Highest 2 Lowest, a reinterpretation of High and Low (1963) originally directed by Akira Kurosawa, with Denzel Washington to star. In 2025, he directed an episode of the Netflix three-part documentary series Katrina: Come Hell and High Water, for which he also served as executive producer.

Sports

Lee is a fan of the New York Knicks basketball team, the New York Yankees baseball team (although he grew up a New York Mets fan), the New York Rangers ice hockey team, and the English football club Arsenal. One of the documentaries in ESPN's 30 for 30 series, Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. The New York Knicks, focuses partly on Lee's interaction with Miller at Knicks games in Madison Square Garden. In June 2003, Lee sought an injunction against Spike TV to prevent them from using his nickname; he claimed that because of his fame, viewers would think he was associated with the channel. In March 2020, Lee and the security team at Madison Square Garden had a disagreement over which entrance to use to see the New York Knicks; Lee stated he would not attend the rest of the games for the season. Spike Lee has also frequented New York Liberty games at Barclays Center, sitting courtside during the 2024 WNBA playoffs in a Sabrina Ionescu jersey.

Lee is also a supporter of Spanish tennis player Carlos Alcaraz and Italian soccer team Inter Milan, featuring as the narrator in a promotional video for the club in June 2025.