But directing wasn’t an early career aspiration for Lee. He grew up in Brooklyn, the son of a schoolteacher and a medical records administrator, and did not see filmmaking as something open to him. This changed when his cousin, Spike, 13 years his senior, moved into the basement of the family brownstone while he pursued an MFA from the film school at NYU. Remembers Malcolm, “I didn’t really think that somebody in my family or somebody who was Black could do that.
“Spike would always mention how powerful film was, particularly when it came to African American perception around the world and even in the United States,” he says. It is this ethos that carried into his first feature,. Black men in movies, he says, “were either abusers or misogynists. Or even if they’re educated, they would be very stiff and devoid of cultural specificity, checking their Blackness at the door.
“There is a sense of really direct communication,” recalls Hall of Lee’s openly collaborative directing style. “His temperament has always been that way — ‘Let’s talk.’ “
This explains much.
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