Spike Lee is not a man to mince words, and during a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival to promote his upcoming film BlacKkKlansman, the prolific director ripped President Donald Trump a new one because of his refusal to denounce the Ku Klux Klan after the Unite the Right white supremacy rally in August in Charlottesville, Va.
During the rally, held near the campus of the University of Virginia, white supremacists marched with their heavily starched khakis and their tiki torches, proclaiming their whiteness. In the end, several people were left injured after a car drove into a crowd, and counterprotester Heather Heyer was killed.
It was during this time that Lee was filming his movie, and he decided to contact Heyer’s mother to ask for permission to use footage of her death in the movie. At his press conference in France, Lee said this:
I was given Susan Bro’s phone number. She is the mother of Heather Heyer, who got murdered when that car came crashing down the street. I was not gonna put that murder scene in the film without her blessing. Mrs. Bro said, “Spike, I give you permission to put that in.” Once I got permission, I said, “Fuck everybody else, that motherfucking scene is staying in the motherfucking movie.” Cuz that was a murder.
And we have a guy in the White House—I’m not gonna say his fucking name—who defined that moment not just for Americans but the world, and that motherfucker was given the chance to say we are about love, not hate. And that motherfucker did not denounce the motherfucking Klan, the “alt-right,” and those Nazis motherfuckers. It was a defining moment, and he could have said to the world, not just the United States, that we were better than that.
The so-called American cradle of democracy, that’s bullshit. The United States of America was built on the genocide of Native people and slavery. That is the fabric of the United States of America. As my Brooklyn brother Jay-Z would say, facts. That scene had to go in.
Lee’s movie, which tells the story of Ron Stallworth, a black Colorado Springs, Colo., police officer who infiltrated the KKK, received rave reviews from Cannes and will be released on the one-year anniversary of the Charlottesville rally. Lee hopes it has a lasting effect on moviegoers.
“The purpose of this film was to spark discussion. ... We know the difference between right and wrong, and when you see wrong staring you dead in the face and you’re like, ‘Mum’s the word,’ you’re helping the other people, in my opinion.”