While some directors like sticking to an established way of working,
Spike Lee is a filmmaker with a distinctive and constantly evolving technique
which constantly plays with form and style.
While many of his films are bound by common elements such as the role of the media,
racism, contemporary city life and political issues, the format which he uses to tell
these stories on screen can change with each project and sometimes even with each scene.
In this video I’ll break down Lee’s approach to shooting 3 films at 3 increasing budget levels:
She’s Gotta Have It, Do The Right Thing and Da 5 Bloods,
to identify the visual storytelling decisions he makes and how he allocates resources.
After completing his Master’s degree thesis film at the Tisch School Of Arts,
Spike Lee set out to make his first feature.
“I got to go to a couple of film festivals around the world...But they were unable to
generate me any work, not even an after-school special, so that just cemented in my mind what
I always thought all along: that I would have to go out and do it alone, not rely on anyone else.”
As raising funds for a first feature is difficult,
he came up with a script which he could shoot with a low budget which was still narratively strong,
unique, provocative and featured strong on-screen characters.
He raised $18,000 from the New York State Council of The Arts,
got a $10,000 grant from the Jerome Foundation, $500 from the Brooklyn
Arts and Cultural Association and got the cast to work for deferred payments.
His family also assisted the project, with his father providing the jazz score, his brother
the stills photos, his sister acting and his other brothers working as production assistants.
To produce the film on the low budget Lee had to shoot it in a very compressed period of time:
12 days to be exact.
He accommodated for this in the script by only using limited locations which
were easily accessible such as an apartment, a park and a house.
DP Ernest Dickerson, Lee’s classmate at Tisch, came on board to shoot the film.
Lee’s experimentation with mixing different mediums, began on this project. The film used
archival still photographs, Super 16mm black and white and one segment in 35mm colour.
Dickerson photographed the film with an Arriflex 16SR on spherical lenses, including a zoom.
They took a visually bold approach to shooting the film, using a mixture of forms:
from a handheld, verite camera, to stylised breakings of the 4th wall,
traditional cinematic compositions and to-camera interviews.
Likewise Dickerson used a mix of naturalistic lighting with
unrealistic, moody, low key lighting.
In what would form part of the DP and director’s visual style when working together, they used wide
angle lenses for close ups of characters in the street, mixed with tight, textural detail shots.
After production ended he managed to secure the remainder of the
$175,000 budget for post production after a rough cut screening at NYU.
She’s Gotta Have It proved to be a great first feature for Lee
which showcased his strong storytelling ability through a bold visual style
photographed in mixed mediums which made eight and half million dollars.
Lee successfully made the low budget film by getting initial financing from film funds,
deferring payment on actors, writing a contained story, with few locations,
without expensive set pieces and shooting in the lower cost 16mm black and white medium.
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For his third feature, Do The Right Thing, he managed to raise a larger $6 million budget.
“What gave me more confidence was the simple fact that I had done two feature films already. Each
one was a progression, I felt, in getting to where I needed to be as a director.”
The script was larger in scale, featuring more costly setpieces
and cast members than She’s Gotta Have It.
“It started because of the whole Howard Beach incident.
I wanted to do something to address that and racism.”
“I knew I wanted the film to take place in one day, which would be the hottest day in the summer.
And I wanted to reflect the racial climate of New York City at that time.
The day would get longer and hotter, and things would escalate until they exploded.”
Ernest Dickerson was again brought on to photograph the project and was tasked
with visually portraying this build up in heat. To do this he decided to use colour,
both in collaboration with the production and costume designer
and in the colour temperature of the lighting.
“I did a lot of research on [the] psychology [of colour]
and worked on a controlled palette that pretty much stayed in the warm range – yellows, reds,
earth tones, ambers – and tried to stay away from blues and greens, which have a cooling effect.”
For interiors he used strong lighting fixtures aimed directly at the scene
without much diffusion. This created hard lines of shadow which he would cut with flags,
black textiles which block light, to shape the areas of light and dark into different sections.
Using hard light amplified the feeling of the sun’s strength.
Certain interiors also look like he used gels in front of his lights,
such as a CTS or straw, or CTO, or orange, to enhance the warmth of the light.
Dickerson also used other tricks such as putting a butane lighter
underneath the lens to produce a heat wave effect.
As the majority of the scenes take place as exteriors in a single day of the story,
his biggest lighting challenge was to maintain continuity
over the length of the eight week production.
To do this they found a location which ran north-south.
As the sun travels from east to west it meant that one side of the street would always be in shade.
That meant that if they had full sun then they could shoot on the shaded side of the
street which could be cut seamlessly with other days when the weather was cloudy.
Lee carried over some of the bold formal choices from She’s Gotta Have It,
such as the centrally framed, wide angle, to camera portraits.
And introduced some new strong visual decisions such as using
Dutch or canted angles. This is where the camera is set at an
angle on its roll axis so that the horizon line becomes skew instead of being straight.
By breaking framing norms, this angle introduces
a feeling of visual anxiety which feeds into the building tension in the story.
Although Spike Lee experimented with the form of the filmmaking,
Do The Right Thing maintained the same visual medium. It was shot with Arriflex cameras and
lenses, the BL4 and Super Speeds from the looks of the behind the scenes photos.
The film stock, which I’m guessing was mainly Kodak 5247 - a favourite
of Dickersons - is punchy and saturated which brings out the strong colour palette.
So, Do The Right Thing was accomplished on a higher $6 million budget by casting a broader
range of actors, shooting in 35mm colour over an 8 week period, with one large set piece and
a full crew with two camera teams, while still limiting the locations to one specific street.
After producing many movies in the medium budget range through major studios and
production companies, Lee decided to do his first film with a streaming service, Netflix.
For this genre-blending Vietnam war drama film a production budget of between $35 and $45 million
was raised, making it one of Lee’s most expensive films.
The project started as a spec script about Vietnam veterans
which was initially developed by director Oliver Stone for two years before he dropped out.
A year later Lee was pitched the script. He liked parts of the story and brought on co-writer
Kevin Willmott who he adapted the script with and changed the characters to African Americans.
This ambitious script had a long running time,
complex action sequences and large set design builds.
Production took place over three months with scenes in Ho Chi Minh City and the bulk of
production in Bangkok and Chiang Mai in Thailand, which has a well established film industry.
Lee and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel spent weeks scouting various jungle locations which were
chosen to become more and more visually claustrophobic as the film progressed.
There were many large set builds required such as one where a large plane wreckage set
was built and lined with numerous palm trees, or the final temple location which took a crew
two months to construct from wood and styrofoam.
An aspect of the cinematography which immediately stands out in the film is Lee’s use of different
mediums and aspect ratios to reflect different time periods, locations and feelings.
Sigel shot the city scenes digitally on the Alexa LF with Arri DNA lenses
which were cropped to a 2.39:1 aspect ratio.
The scenes in the jungle were also shot digitally but in the taller 16:9 aspect ratio.
“I had the idea that because it’s a Netflix show, what we call the envelope of the show,
or the packaging of the show, is basically the 16:9 format.”
“By treating the jungle that way, actually we were opening up the frame. So the frame is letterboxed
2.39:1 when you’re in Ho Chi Minh City, and then it literally opens up to the jungle.
The jungle becomes this huge canopy surrounding these guys, enveloping this group.”
For flashback sequences he used 16mm colour reversal Kodak Ektachrome film.
Sigel found the punchy colours of Ektachrome the closest representation
to what old Vietnam newsreel footage looked like.
As colour reversal film has less dynamic range than colour negative,
Sigel rated the 100 daylight stock at 80ASA and used large reflectors and textiles to
limit contrast and fill in the shadows with extra light so that more detail could be maintained.
"The color palette of Ektachrome is very specific, with a striking vibrancy. Along with
its grain structure, it is a very hard thing to reproduce in post. So it provided a great
aesthetic connection to the past, at the same time delivering a contrast to the contemporary footage
that we shot digitally." He shot 16mm on an Arriflex
416 with lenses from the period: Zeiss Super Speeds and a Canon 11-165mm zoom.
Additionally, the film included Super 8mm travelogue footage
shot on a Canon camera by one of the actors and included segments of stock footage.
Along with mixing mediums, the film also carried over other trademark Spike Lee visual traits,
such as using what’s been referred to as a ‘double dolly’ shot.
This is where characters are placed on a platform on the dolly with the camera,
or on a second dolly, which tracks backward at the same speed,
giving a surreal feeling that the actors are floating along with the camera.
Da 5 Bloods therefore used its budget to fund a three month production,
with large set builds, action sequences,
remote production locations and a large cast which was photographed on various mediums including the
higher cost large format medium along with capturing and processing of film stock.
What these three case studies show is that Lee took an approach of progression to his career,
where the size of the films he made increased in relation to him gaining more experience.
Lee excelled by never shying away from making bold filmmaking decisions,
especially when it came to his use of form and style.
By allowing the stories he directs to be supported by distinct photographic choices,
he’s created his own trademark style which makes it easy to identify a Spike Lee joint.
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