Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods,” released last summer on Netflix, is the story of four friends who served together during the Vietnam War. Decades later, the group—played by Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock, Jr., and, in what may be the performance of his career, Delroy Lindo—returns to Vietnam, in order to reclaim a treasure that they left behind. The film is a pointed and melancholy meditation on warfare, memory, mammon, and trauma undiluted by time’s passage. To watch it is to be haunted, in multiple ways. First, by a soundtrack that leans heavily on Marvin Gaye’s classic protest album, “What’s Going On,” making Gaye, with his wistful cynicism—“Are things really getting better like the newspaper said?”—almost a character in the film. And then there’s the sight of Chadwick Boseman, who died not long after the movie’s release, at the age of forty-three, of cancer. Boseman plays Norman, the unofficial and unsubtly Christlike leader of the group, who did not survive the war. With one exception, he appears only during the film’s extended flashbacks, and therefore seems, uncannily, like a spectral visitor.
I first spoke with Lee about the movie in June, just before it was released, while protests, sparked by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police, raged in American streets. Donald Trump, whom Lee consistently referred to as Agent Orange, was still President. We spoke again in late February. In between, Lee had released another movie, the performance film “American Utopia,” a cinematic reimagining of David Byrne’s recent Broadway show. Just after our last conversation, HBO announced that Lee was at work on a multipart documentary for the network, “NYC Epicenters 9/11 → 2021 ½,” which will narrate the past two decades in New York, bookended by 9/11 and the coronavirus, and will première later this year.
My interviews with Lee have been condensed for length and edited for clarity. In June and again in February, we talked about the state of New York and the country, the coronavirus pandemic, and Lee’s relationship with the New York Knicks. And we talked about the movies, both his own—from “Do the Right Thing” to “Bamboozled,” his satire about minstrelsy and modern show business, to “BlacKkKlansman”—and those that shaped him. “Da 5 Bloods” is, like many of Lee’s films, a kind of personal archive: it pays homage to, among other works, John Huston’s “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” which Lee assigned to me as homework, and “Apocalypse Now,” which was, for him, a formative moviegoing experience. “Da 5 Bloods” is also a revisitation of the cultural milieu of Lee’s youth, during the great conflagrations of the late sixties. The bloodshed, social strife, distant war, and sudden upswellings of domestic revolt on display in that era constituted Lee’s earliest conscious exposure to politics, and, via television, also became his introduction to American visual culture. In one of the flashback sections of “Da 5 Bloods,” the men learn that Martin Luther King, Jr., a much-mentioned guardian angel in Lee’s films, has been assassinated. Our conversation began with Lee’s own experience of that moment.
How old were you then?
In ’68? I was eleven.
Was your home the kind of home where you would sit and talk about the stuff you were seeing on the TV?
Oh, yes. And not just the TV—the stuff that we’d seen out on the streets, because there was a war in America, too, a war about the Vietnam war.
Were your folks pretty antiwar?
Oh, yeah. Antiwar, anti-racist, all that stuff.
Did you go to protests as a kid?
No, they didn’t take me to protests. But my mother’s old friend took me to D.C., back in the day, on that Eastern Shuttle, with the Poor People’s Campaign. Also, my mother took me to see Dr. King speak at this church in Brooklyn Heights.
“Da 5 Bloods” has two bookends. One is Muhammad Ali. The other is Dr. Martin Luther King. Both were critics of that war, and both of them carried a great price. Ali had a heavyweight-champion belt stripped from him. He lost prime years of his athleticism, which you can never regain. And Dr. King, I think that that’s what got him assassinated. When he came out against the war, he’s talking against the war machine—big money. He wasn’t talking about, let’s let Black people drink out of a white water fountain, or ride the bus. And, also, L.B.J. felt betrayed, because they had been partners on the 1964 Civil Rights Act. So L.B.J. probably felt that he got stabbed in the back. And wars—people make money! How much money did Dow Chemical make being at war making napalm?
So when he came out against the war, that was it. And the scene we have, his speech, which he gave at Riverside Church, April 4th, 1967—he died a year later, to the day. He was assassinated because he was f*cking with people’s money. Big money. That’s what I think. And J. Edgar Hoover and the F.B.I., they weren’t helping either. And, what was his name, James Earl Ray? What, he got arrested in London? He assassinated Martin King, Jr., and he’s able to get out of the country? Come on now. How do you get from Memphis to London? And they knew who he was!
I’m looking this up now. He went from Canada to Portugal, to London, and was arrested in London two months after King’s death.
WTF!? He had no help doing that? Passport? Money? Come on now. He did not act alone.
I was so struck at the beginning of “Da 5 Bloods” by the news footage, which we’ve all seen on TV. Nguyễn Văn Lém getting shot in the middle of the street, for instance—images that just horrify you.
Here’s the thing, though: people never seen that footage. They only saw the stills of the photograph. They never showed that. I didn’t even know until doing research that there was moving footage of that. I just thought it was a still photograph.
You’re trying to show people from the very beginning that this wasn’t a pretty, romantic American narrative—there were people on fire.
It’s a prologue, you know? And Muhammad Ali shoulders the prologue, and Dr. Martin Luther King shoulders the epilogue.
At one point, Otis, Clarke Peters’s character, says that Norman was both their Malcolm X and their Martin Luther King—that he channelled both of these sides of this tradition that we’ve inherited. He was both prologue and epilogue, in a way.
That goes back to the credits of “Do the Right Thing,” where we had Dr. King’s take on nonviolence and Malcolm X’s take on self-defense. And there are a lot of people who got that meaning wrong, who thought I was saying that you had to make a choice. That was not the case at all. I was trying to say that both philosophies could work. There’s a reason why Smiley is walking around trying to sell that postcard, which he colors, of the only picture taken of Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. And, before they got assassinated, both men were on their way to finding common ground, to move this thing forward.
I’ve been thinking about those credits from “Do the Right Thing,” watching the scenes on TV these days. Some of the conversations that are happening now about peaceful versus, let’s say, non-peaceful protesting have reminded me of that moment.
I’m sixty-three, so I remember the night Dr. King got assassinated. I remember watching the news where over a hundred cities in America were up in flames. That’s in the film.
Crazy thing: the first time I ever showed “Malcolm X” to the Warner Bros. Studio heads, Bob Daly and Terry Semel, was the day of the uprising in L.A., behind the verdict of Rodney King. If I would’ve known...
Our curfew here in New York City ended yesterday, and I found out that the last time there was a curfew there was a riot in 1943, when a Black soldier got shot by a cop. When people, historically, are fed up, they gotta vent their rage, so I was not surprised with the people reacting in the way they did to the killing of George Floyd, who’s being laid to rest today.
I wanted to ask you a question about “Da 5 Bloods” that I’ve not seen anybody ask you. You have a character named Eddie; you have characters named Otis, Paul, Melvin, David.
