Spike Lee on Self-Financing 'Red Hook Summer'

I met the great writer James McBride for breakfast one morning at a coffee shop in New York. We were bemoaning the fact that there’s a low point right now in African-American cinema. We decided to do a movie about a young suburban black kid from Atlanta who’s sent to the Red Hook projects in Brooklyn to spend a summer with a grandfather he’s never met.

From the get-go, I knew it would be self-financed. I never went to the studios. Hollywood is really superhero land now. It’s harder to make adult films today without people flying, unless you’re a select few: Spielberg, James Cameron, Clint Eastwood, George Lucas. I couldn’t get them to fund a sequel to Inside Man, my most successful film ever. If that wasn’t a signal, then I don’t know what is. I refused to go through the frustration of knocking on steel doors, hat in hand like Oliver Twist, saying “Please sir, can you make this film?”