Director of the Month: Spike Lee
Shot over 12 days in July of 1985 at a total cost of $175,000, Spike Lee’s She's Gotta Have It exploded onto American movie screens, redefining American independent cinema in the 1980s (along with filmmakers like Wayne Wang, John Sayles, and Jim Jarmusch). Having earned a Student Academy Award for his NYU thesis film, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop, Lee was surprised to find Hollywood’s doors closed to him. So he decided to do it himself.
Lee applied for arts grants, sought donations from friends and family, and approached Black professionals and artists. With such a tight budget, Lee saved an actor’s fee by playing the iconic role of Mars Blackmon himself. His sister Jolie took a small role, and his father, jazz bassist Bill Lee, composed and performed the score. This was Lee’s first collaboration with the great cinematographer Ernest Dickerson (Lee’s NYU classmate), who would photograph all of Lee’s movies through Malcolm X, before he became a director himself.
The plot focuses on Nola Darling, a strong 20-something Black woman artist, and the three men in her life, who are frustrated by her independence. Lee wanted a lot of sex in the film, but he also wanted to be respectful of the woman whose story he was telling: "Nola Darling is my heroine,” he wrote in 1986. "I love and respect her, and I must show that love and respect in my treatment of her in the script. That's the way it's gotta be."