Honoring Spike Lee, a film director who makes us look at what's underneath

Spike Lee is known for stirring the pot, but that's not all there is to him.

We talked at the downtown W Hotel Wednesday before his appearance at the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF).

Lee said he is done trying to wrestle with the public perception of him as prickly.

"I don't even deal with that anymore, that's 20 years, been old. I just try to do the work. I'm not worried about the image people have."

Why? "I got older," said the 52-year-old filmmaker.

"The films I'm trying to make," he said, "are not necessarily about a popularity contest."

His work has made him popular, though.

The movie that made Lee's reputation, that made him the face of black moviemaking for a lot of people, "Do the Right Thing," came out 20 years ago this June.

It's set in Brooklyn, as many of his movies are, and tells the story of a black neighborhood where the two businesses are an Italian pizza place and a Korean-run grocery. The film became a phenomenon — and so did Lee, as a writer, director, actor, producer.

He's turned out lots more movies that expose stuff people generally don't share with each other across social-dividing lines.

The Seattle International Film Festival paid tribute Wednesday night to Lee's "outstanding achievement in directing."

SIFF Artistic Director Carl Spence said the festival has wanted to bring Lee to Seattle for some time, calling him "a gifted filmmaker and genuine cultural icon."

Spence, who grew up in Seattle, said, "seeing his films have provided me with an awareness and perspective I wouldn't otherwise have ... helping me outside the bubble of thinking everything is equal."

On touchy subjects, Lee fearlessly turns over the sod to look at what's underneath in his fiction and documentaries like "4 Little Girls" about the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four young girls and showed how vicious racism was. Or "When the Levees Broke," about the disastrous abandonment of the people of the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina hit.

Lee said "When the Levees Broke" may be his most important work yet. New Orleans is still messed up, he said, but the people there appreciate the chance he gave them to tell their story.

Lee's work spans a swath of subjects and genres from sports (his latest is on Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers) to music to crime thrillers, even commercials.

He said he makes movies that he feels passionate about. "It's all filmmaking," he said.

Lee said he feels blessed to be doing what he loves, making movies.

"Very few people are able to make a living doing what they love," he said.

He recently completed a filmed version of the musical "Passing Strange," which is about a young African-American musician who feels he must leave the country to find himself.

He chose this latest project because of the story, but also because he identified with the main character, whose mother died when he was young.

Lee's mother died when he was a 20-year-old sophomore at Morehouse College, also the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's alma mater.

Lee is the total New Yorker, (he wore a Yankees cap and running suit for the interview), but his early years were spent in Atlanta and after high school in Brooklyn he went back to the cluster of historically black colleges in Atlanta for his undergraduate work.

Family kept coming up in our conversation.

His mother taught art and black literature, and his father played and composed jazz.

His father, sister and both of his brothers have all worked on films with him.

He says with pride that he's a third-generation Morehouse man and his mother and grandmother both graduated from Spelman College across the street.

"Education has always been stressed in my family."

And now, as a father, (his daughter is 15, his son 12) he worries about the effects of too much media on his kids.

"I don't twitter, I don't do MySpace, Facebook," he said. "My children do. My daughter, she can be doing her homework, watching TV, have the iPod and the computer all at the same time."

He sticks to the newspaper, Lee said, but lately he's been reading it on a new Kindle and downloading baseball books like mad.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.