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An Interview With Spike Lee

By John Ellingsworth

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Award-winning director Spike Lee talks to John Ellingsworth about his upcoming film, the angry lesbian recidivist melodrama Nuns in the Hood.

JOHN ELLINGSWORTH: In the past, you’ve described yourself as an “instigator”. Just who are you hoping to offend with your new film? 

SPIKE LEE: Everyone. But I want to be clear on this – by getting them angry I’m making them think. We wanted to jam pack as much as we could into this film within the allotted time, all the issues, so that it would be like an assault, and you couldn’t watch it and then not go on to debate, discuss, and exchange ideas. That’s why the film is so controversial.

JE: And so violent? 

SL: The violence arises from the situation. You’ve got a Mother Superior [Dame Maggie Smith] who is just out of control. She prays for Jesus to burn up the homos, she prays for Jesus to kill the Mexicans and the Puerto Ricans. She’s an out of control leader, and she’s just a menace to mankind in general. I’m sorry, a menace to humankind in general, and nuns in particular. The whole convent has to stop her, and because she’s been left alone too long and has too much power in their society, violence is their only recourse. 

JE: A lot of the filming was done at the New York convent. Was it important to have that element of realism?   

SL: Yeah, we actually hired a technical consultant. Her name is Sister Mary Eustace, who has been at the NY convent twenty-six years. We hired her and she worked with me on the script, which was written, but she looked at the script and pointed things out. 

JE: What kind of things? 

SL: Anything against convent rules. How a New York nun would spend a regular day. She also worked with the actresses. She was under a vow of silence and she couldn’t speak except from two till four on weekends, so we had to work around that, but it wasn’t as much of a problem as we anticipated. She turned out to be a charming, witty lady. We all fell in love with her on set.

JE: Does it have a big impact on the film, that kind of specialist input? 

SL: Sure. We also had a lesbian technical consultant, Tristine Tormeno, who we kept over from She Hate Me. She put the actresses through something we used to call ‘Lesbian Boot Camp’, but now we like to refer to them as ‘Lesbian Sensitising Seminars’. All the actresses responded really well. Keira [Pirates of the Caribbean sensation Keira Knightly] told me Tristine changed her whole outlook on the role.  

JE: Where does this film fit into your body of work?

SL: I don’t see it in those terms. I see it as fitting into the whole filmmaking scene that’s emerging right now. We’re starting to see films, films like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Super Size Me, that really reach out to their audiences politically. Those are great films but they’re a minority and we need more of them. I mean, McDonalds is still doing OK. And look who’s in the Whitehouse. The important thing is not to get apathetic, and I see films as becoming the intelligent alternative to the apathy of mass media and entertainment. That stuff is used as an opium. Movies, television, all these reality shows, the music, it’s used as an opium to make people go to sleep.  

JE: And news? Documentaries? 

SL: The same thing. You just have to watch CNN giving the people what they want – news items they can nod all the way through. 

JE: You’re bringing them the truth about lesbian nuns? 

SL: Let’s be serious about this. It’s not about nuns. Those nuns could be monks or cardinals. It’s not about lesbians. They could be straight women or even homosexual men. The types don’t really matter; this film is about a person in power, abusing that power, affecting every other person in the community.

JE: So does it matter that your early films have African-American characters? Or are they merely representative as well? 

SL: You could generalise every film ever made. That’s kind of a dead-end argument. 

JE: The second half of this film is really going to shock people. It seems like the death of the Mother Superior, in the first half, is something you justify and perhaps condone, but the subsequent deaths are just innocent people who get caught up. 

SL: I like to bring things to a proper conclusion. I mean not shy away from the violence. The end of the film should have dealt with that.

JE: And left Malcolm X dead. Or the homo bleeding on the sidewalk. 

SL: It comes back to anger. It comes back to controversy. This is going to be a very circular interview. You see, in this country, in America, we need to get angry sooner rather than later. We need to get angry right now over global warming, over racial intolerance, over the American government acting on its oil interests, over the deregulating of the FCC [Federal Communications Commission], over the big, big corporations and the people who run them, who are just stealing money left and right, and over, most of all over that man George Bush Junior. We need to get in a rage about these things. The alternative is apathy until our lives become unlivable, and that’s when the violence starts. Anger too late causes violence; anger at the right time can save us from it. 

JE: Anger is our salvation?

SL: You could say that. 

Nuns in the Hood is on selected release from Sunday 5^th May 2006.

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There is a John Ellingsworth who lives in Philadelphia, goes canoeing, likes to hike, takes really pretty good photos, has a dog called Max, and keeps a blog. This is a different John Ellingsworth.