Wassup!
Peace,
my name is
Spike Lee.
And the new Spike Lee Joint is Da 5 Bloods.
And this is my Mood Board.
The term "mood boards,"
I mean that's kinda,
that's a kinda new terminology.
But people have been doing this since
the beginning of cinema.
All it is is, you wanna give a visual sense
of what is in your mind.
I tell my students, first day, every semester
at NYU Grad Film,
"People can't read minds!"
So, what I've done for my cinematographer,
for my production designer, for my costume designer, is just
show them pictures.
Pictures that might be even photograph books,
newspapers, even screen movies
that make people understand
where you're coming from.
I'm gonna start with the sound.
And that has to begin with
one of the greatest albums ever made,
Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" album.
As you see,
Marvin.
Marvin Gaye's older brother, Franklin,
did three tours in Vietnam.
So Marvin was getting first hand account of the war
from his brother.
Also, Marvin lived in Detroit, Motown,
was seeing the Black soldiers come back from Vietnam, all
you know, jacked up.
And I think that those things gave impetus
for one of the greatest albums of all time.
So right away, I knew I wanted to incorporate
as many songs as I could
from the greatest album, one of the greatest albums,
of all time.
We wanted this film to look and feel authentic.
We wanted this film to have an epic look,
going in. I mean, I'm not gonna be shy about it,
the goal was to make an epic film.
And I told everybody that.
"This has to be an epic."
And for that, the visual sense,
it would have to start with Apocalypse Now.
There are several homages to Francis's film.
We shot this film, Chiang Mai, Thailand,
Bangkok, Thailand, and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
We shot at a club, a bar/disco,
in Saigon, Vietnam.
It's called Apocalypse Now, that's the name of the club!
We had to get the “really real.”
There was no faking the funk with this.
This could not be shot on the back lot.
We had to shoot in the jungle.
Y'all ready?
- Yeah. - Yeah, let's go.
You got the paperwork?
You can check. I got the paperwork with me.
Is that a MAGA hat? Goddamn!
People forget
the Vietnam war was the first war that was televised
into American homes.
Back then, they shot on 16 millimeter
and when I spoke to my DP, Tom Sigel,
we both shared seeing the war on our TV sets.
So together, we came up with the idea of,
when we had the flashback scenes,
we shoot it in Super 16,
and that definitely came from just seeing
the Vietnam war televised.
- Goddamn bullshit. - Wrong for a
motherfucking enemy.
Yeah.
Goddamn white man gone too far!
The Bible says an eye for an eye.
And a tooth for a tooth.
We need to kill some crackers.
I just felt, along with Kevin Willmott,
that the audience would believe
that these guys, these four Black Vietnam vets,
we were seeing what's in their mind
as they were going back in time.
That's one thing.
Number two, we were shooting in the jungle
and every day was over 100 degrees.
Prosthetics makeup would melt.
And then, thirdly – if that's a word –
it would be nearly impossible to add another
100 million dollars to the budget
for the de-aging process.
A lot of people have forgotten, or don't know,
that I'm also a documentary filmmaker.
And as I moved along in my path as a filmmaker
I started using more things that you might say come
from documentary:
archival footage,
archival photos.
The opening credits of Malcolm X feature
the brutal beating of Rodney King by the police.
More recently, at the end of BlacKkKlansman,
we go from the narrative to
Charlottesville, Virginia,
that hate march.
So what we did, what we've done,
in Da 5 Bloods is not something new.
And I just think that it's
another example of what a Spike Lee Joint is.
It's not one thing.
It's a mixture.
You might say that a Spike Lee Joint is like a gumbo.
Without the pork.
No swine in a Spike Lee Joint!