Spike Lee at Northwestern: Director's Thoughts on Trump, the Oscars, College Athletes and 'ChiRaq'

EVANSTON, IL - Well-known filmmaker Spike Lee was at Northwestern University’s Cahn Auditorium Wednesday night to discuss “Chi-Raq,” his latest film which focuses on gun violence in Chicago, with students and other members of the Northwestern community.

While the conversation focused mostly on the controversial 2015 film based on the ancient Greek work ‘Lysistrata,’ Lee did not shy away from his thoughts on other subjects.

Republican Presidential hopeful and primary leader Donald Trump made his way into Lee’s speech before hundreds of interested spectators who had just viewed a screening of Chi-Raq.

Lee recalled a recent time in which he had President Barack Obama at his New York City home for a fundraiser.

“A week before they put our whole block in Manhattan on lockdown,” Lee recalls. “I remember when the President was outside, there was a vehicle and a door had been open so I looked in...There was a guy sitting next to a device with buttons. There’s a guy who presses those buttons when told (by the President).”

“I do not want Donald Trump anywhere near (whoever controls those buttons).”

Lee previously endorsed Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders for President, according to CNN and other media reports.

Even before Trump - or ChiRaq even - was mentioned, Lee spoke briefly about the issue of college athletes being paid, specifically mentioning Northwestern as the place where a group of athletes attempted to form a union.

“Athletes need to be paid...work that out,” he said in a brief statement on the matter, the only sports-related topic brought up during the two-hour plus discussion co-sponsored by the University’s Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, department of African-American studies, and department of classics.

Lee ripped Hollywood and the recent Academy Awards, which for the second year in a row failed to nominate an African-American actor or actress as one of 20 individual nominations.

“In my mind that’s 40 to zip...we weren’t going,” he said, explaining that as a recipient of an honorary Oscar he would normally have been expected to attend, but instead he was “courtside at Madison Square Garden” that night.

But the film director kept mostly to ‘Chi-Raq’ related topics, first addressing the many critics of the film, which was filmed during the summer of 2015 mostly on the city’s South Side and West Side and released in December.

“There’s been a lot of bulls**t said about ChiRaq...It all started with a meeting with your Mayor,” he said (referring to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, not Elizabeth Tisdahl of Evanston - the city in which the event was located). “In that meeting he said he didn’t like the title. He never said ‘Spike, don’t make that film,’ he said he wanted the title changed because it would possibly hurt economic development on the South Side...Then he said this is going to give Chicago a bad name.”

Lee pointed out that during the same week he met with Emanuel, the city was preparing for three large events that would have the city abuzz for much of the summer.

“You had the NFL Draft, the last show of the Grateful Dead and Lollapalooza,” he said. “If you were here for any of those three, you couldn’t get a hotel room, restaurant reservation or even in a bar.”

But at the same time, city aldermen were signing off on the $5 million settlement with the family of LaQuan McDonald, a teenager who in 2014 was shot to death by Chicago Police officer Jason Van Dyke on the southwest side. A settlement that came before the public release of a videotape that showed Van Dyke firing 16 shots at McDonald and footage that refuted the original police report.

“So I was wondering what the Mayor was talking about,” Lee said in reference to the notion that it was his movie, and not these problems, that were giving Chicago a bad name.

“This is a tale of two cities. Chicago is the largest segregated city in America,” said Lee, a Brooklyn native and proud New Yorker.

Lee also denied making light of a serious situation with the production of his film, which includes some scenes that are more than a bit comedic.

“I think people are misunderstanding what satire is,” he said. “It’s satire.”

“We were not making light of a serious situation. It is possible to have humor with a serious subject matter,” he added, noting that several women who had lost loved ones in real life took part in the movie, including Jennifer Hudson, who played a key role.

“Why would Jennifer Hudson be in the film making a mockery of her loved ones?” Lee asked.

Lee’s fiercest criticism was not directed at Emanuel, perhaps surprisingly. It was aimed at Chance the Rapper, a Chicagoan Lee chastised for his connection to the Mayor.

“Chance the Rapper is a straight up fraud,” Lee said. “He puts himself up as a speaker of the people, but you can’t pick and choose the way you talk and when to be sincere.”

Lee claims the rapper’s father is a big wig in the Emanuel administration.

Chance the Rapper has criticized Lee’s film as “an oversimplification of a bigger problem,” has called it “explosive and problematic” and accused Lee of using Chicago’s actors and problems to promote himself.

“You can blast the film, but you can’t say anything about the policies of the Mayor? It’s a weak and a punk a** move,” Lee told the crowd.

The name “Chi-Raq” - Lee claims - did not originally come from him, but other rappers in the city who “likened where they live to war tone Iraq.”

The idea, he said, came from a routine Lee had in which he’d post a picture on Instagram of anyone who was killed by police. A commenter asked him on one of the photos to do something on Chicago in particular.

“We did ‘Gotta Give it Up!’ six years ago and thought...let’s do that again, except for to have it take place in ChiRaq.”

But it really could have taken place in any big city.

“Killidelphia (Philadelphia), Bodymore (Baltimore),” he said. “I know it’s not just in Chicago, but if you are trying to get to the problem, you go to ground zero.”

Photo by Rob Hart