Legendary movie director, Spike Lee, has been directing movies for over three decades, so it is safe to say that he has learned a thing or two in those times.
So this revelation comes as no surprise. Lee’s realization is from one of his iconic films that cemented his legacy as one of our most powerful American filmmakers, “She’s Gotta Have It.”.
Although Spike Lee has been unafraid to tackle the big issues or even the toughest ones, he’s made a lot of very important movies, but there’s only one scene he would like to change.
This 1986 movie was made under that banner of his first film, and in the movie, protagonist Nola Darling, who is a woman, takes on three men to see if they can fit her needs.
Nola was supposed to be an empowered person who was choosing her suitor and sexual equal.
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But in the story, she is raped by one of the men as a punishment for her sexual freedom and then gets more tricky when Darling dates her rapist.
Lee made the revelation in his 2005 biography, where he asserted that many of his works were informed by “unreconstructed male chauvinism,” but he’s trying to fight it in his recent works.
Spike Lee identifies the mistakes in the storyline now, even if he didn’t in 1986.
In 2014, Lee said that the rape scene was his “biggest regret” as a filmmaker and even went on to say that if he had “any do-overs, that would be it.”
He kept the “any do-overs” promise while reworking the TV show version of the story on Netflix in 2017, where he omitted the rape assault scene.
As filmmakers, if we’re not growing as people and learning empathy within our projects, then we’re doing a disservice to ourselves.
Making movies and TV shows is about learning the messages we want to tell the world and emphasizing them for audiences.
