Spike Lee is speaking out on how Donald Trump is impacting the film industry. The auteur told THR amid Trump’s announcement of international film tariffs that his own 1992 Oscar-nominated film “Malcolm X” could not be made today.
The biopic, which starred Denzel Washington as the civil rights leader, was notoriously a grueling shoot to finance as Warner Bros. infamously shut down production due to budget concerns. “That movie almost killed me when Warner Bros. let the bond company take over the film in postproduction and shut it down,” Lee said. “That’s probably the most I’ve been depressed in my life with the exception of my mother dying. Half my salary went into the movie. I was broke.”
However, despite the film’s later success, Lee isn’t sure if WBD or any studio would even finance the film today. “I don’t like to get into what-ifs, but a lot of these people [who own movie studios] were at the [Trump] inauguration,” he said. “I’m not naming names, but it is not an exaggeration to say that [‘Malcolm X’] cannot be made today with where we are in this world.”
As for his thoughts on President Trump in total, Lee pointed to a fellow Hollywood icon’s statements.
“Have you seen what [Robert] De Niro said about him? I’m a child of the ’70s, and I think the history of this country is artists. The Vietnam War, the songs, the movies. Black, white, brown people stood up against a war that was wrong. Jackson State. Kent State. The Democratic Convention, Chicago and those cops going crazy cracking heads. And they were saying, ‘The whole world is watching.’ But it is a shock. We haven’t seen this exactly. I mean before, I mean not even Nixon did the stuff this guy is doing,” Lee said. “I’m a teacher, an NYU tenured professor; I’ve got a lot of students. Before spring break, the [school] administration sent an email, ‘Don’t go away for spring break.’ It’s scary. I mean, if you are an international student, clean record, and you see what’s happening in the world. This is the year of living dangerously.”
The “Highest 2 Lowest” director added that even Trump supporters now can’t believe what the administration is doing.
“I read the papers and even the people who voted for him are like, ‘WTF,’” he said. “When I travel all over the world, people I don’t even know will come up to me in an airport and say, ‘Spike, what’s happened to the United States, the so-called leader of the free world?’ They’re like, ‘How did this happen?’”
