Luke replaces Snipes in 'Anna'
Spike Lee directing WWII drama 'Miracle'
Source: Variety
Derek Luke has replaced Wesley Snipes in a lead role in "Miracle at St. Anna," the WWII drama that Spike Lee is directing in Italy. Touchstone is in talks for domestic distribution rights on the independently financed film.
Snipes withdrew because it became too difficult for him to leave the U.S. and shoot in Italy while he fights federal tax-fraud charges.
Though Snipes has pleaded not guilty to evading taxes and falsely claiming millions of dollars in tax refunds, the actor had problems when he traveled to Africa after his indictment to complete work on "Gallow Walker." At the time, a U.S. magistrate gave him until Jan. 10 to surrender his passport.
Luke, who plays an Army Ranger in Afghanistan in the Robert Redford-directed "Lions for Lambs," is re-enlisting in the Army, circa WWII, and joins an ensemble that includes John Turturro, James Gandolfini, Michael Ealy, Omar Benson and Tory Kittles.
Luke will play one of four members of the U.S. Army's all-black 92nd Division who get separated from their squad behind enemy lines. The soldiers, bitter about racism and the feeling that their own government treats its enemy better than it does them, finds humanity in the small Tuscan village of St. Anna. James McBride wrote the script.
Luke, who made his starring debut in the title role of "Antwone Fisher," just completed the ensemble romantic comedy "Definitely, Maybe."
Italians protest details in Lee's 'Miracle'
Source: Hollywood Reporter
ROME -- A group of former partisan soldiers are taking aim at Spike Lee for the way their former cause is being depicted in Lee's in-progress film "Miracle at St. Anna."
The $45 million film, based on the best-seller by James McBride, is set in the Tuscan countryside during World War II.
The film will tell the story of a group of black soldiers caught between enemy lines who come upon a town of partisans -- Italians who fought against Mussolini's Fascists and their Nazi allies -- seeking to find a traitor in their midst. Filming started Oct. 15.
The film also will include a recounting of what Italians refer to as the "St. Anna Massacre," in which 560 civilians -- women, children and elderly men -- were slaughtered and then burned by German troops in retaliation for partisan activities.
The veterans accuse Lee of changing history to suit his story, and they have demanded that that part of the story be removed or changed.
"It is a false cinematic reconstruction of events that ignores the real story and will leave an inaccurate impression," partisan veterans Moreno Costa, Enio Mancini and Giovanni Cipollini said in a statement released Tuesday. "The term 'cinematic license' should not mean that the truth can be ignored."
The three veterans did not say how many other former soldiers they represented.
Messages left with Lee's temporary Tuscan offices were not returned.
And here we go again. We should only make movies about bananas and bubble gum, in order not to upset anyone anymore. I mean, Jesus fucking Christ, there's always a group who doesn't agree...
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Spike Lee Talks About The Importance Of 'Miracle At St. Anna,' Says It's A Struggle To Make James Brown Biopic'
In a couple years, you're going to be asking me, 'Why a Spike Lee musical?,' ' director says of another dream project.
By Shawn Adler; MTV
Like his movies or not, it's hard to argue that Spike Lee isn't one of the most important filmmakers alive today, a provocateur who says what he thinks and does what he says — even when he's speaking against a living legend like Clint Eastwood.
MTV News recently caught up with the 51-year-old Oscar-nominated director to talk about his new movie, "Miracle at St. Anna"; his dreams of making a musical; the current state of black cinema; Barack Obama; his Kobe Bryant project; and more.
MTV: I suppose the obvious question is, why a Spike Lee war movie?
Spike Lee: In a couple years, you're going to be asking me, "Why a Spike Lee musical?" The films I make are stuff I'm interested in. I've never done a war film before. I've never shot a film overseas. I've never shot a film in four languages. So these are all challenges to me that were exciting.
MTV: No fair being facetious about musicals, by the way.
Lee: No, I want to do a musical. Musicals are one of my favorite genres. [No specific one] right now, but I would like to do one.
MTV: Could you snap your fingers and make a musical happen? More broadly, at this point in your career, are there films you want to do but can't?
Lee: Oh, yes. I have a black-biopic, no-money trilogy: Jackie Robinson. Joe Louis and James Brown. Those are three films I have scripts for and am trying to get done but have been unsuccessful so far.
MTV: What do you feel is the resistance to those movies?
Lee: They don't think there's a market for it, they're not interested. Or they think it costs too much. So that's one of those reasons why studios don't make anything.
MTV: I was reading an interview you did in the wake of "25th Hour," and you said that most black films had to be either minstrel-y or buffoonish to get made. Could that also be a reason? Do you think that's changed at all in the years since to be either better or worse?
Lee: People have to do what they do. I know it's very difficult as an African-American filmmaker — that if you're not doing some slapstick-comedy stuff or some drug, gangster, hip-hop, shoot-'em-up stuff — to get a film done is very hard. The subject matter is really ghettoized, even if you're Will Smith, the biggest star on the planet, or Denzel [Washington] or Sam Jackson. I have used the term gatekeeper before. It's very simple. There are four or five people on the mountain within the Hollywood studio system and network-cable TV system. A very select few of these people decide what gets made. When people of color are more able to get into those positions, I think you will see a significant [change]. Of course, it has to be the right person, because if you have a Condoleezza Rice up in there ...
MTV: Forget gatekeeper. Pretty soon, we might have an African-American president.
Lee: I still think a lot of people, even myself, haven't been truly able to comprehend the significance of it. I think in a lot of ways, the rest of the world sees it sooner than we do. This is huge. This change is everything, and I think we can truly become a great country [with Obama]. I do feel that people will put aside their fears and vote for what's best for this country — they're going to do the right thing.
MTV: "Do the Right Thing"! Ever been tempted to do a sequel to that?
Lee: Never, never. After my first film, they wanted a "She's Gotta Have It 2," and I said, "Hell, no." You want a sequel? I've only done one film!
MTV: You recently had some words with Clint Eastwood over war movies. Why is "Miracle at St. Anna" such an important story to tell?
Lee: The guys I met who fought in World War II. I really honor these African-American men who fought for this country, for the red, white and blue, who fought for democracy at a time when they were still second-class citizens. At a time where the United States Armed Forces were still segregated. At a time that many places in the country, you still had to get them at the back of the bus.
MTV: It occurs to me listening to you that a lot of people of my generation might not even know what a Buffalo Soldier is beyond vaguely recalling it as a title to a Bob Marley song.
Lee: [Laughs.] Well, hopefully they'll know some more. I think there's many stories that have yet to be told in this country. I think many young people are interested in the past. I think many are interested in stuff that wasn't taught in their school. I think many people miss the fact that all they learned in school was Washington chopped down the cherry tree and Abraham Lincoln and Christopher Columbus discovered America.
MTV: You're doing a documentary on Kobe Bryant. What about him fascinates you? He seems to me like a guy with a lot of weaknesses.
Lee: As far as basketball?
MTV: No, no. As far as basketball, he's the best player.
Lee: Yeah, but what we're doing is [actually] only one game. We're not doing a documentary on his life. He played on April 13 in the Staples Center. They played against the world-champion San Antonio Spurs. The film's going to be about that one day — that's it. We had 25 cameras on him while he was playing. Phil Jackson allowed us access in the locker room before the game, at halftime and postgame. and he'd never, ever done that before.
MTV: So is Kobe Bryant the best player today?
Lee: Him and LeBron James.
MTV: Yeah, but you're not doing a movie on LeBron.
Lee: Not yet!
Trailer here. (http://movies.yahoo.com/premieres/8290153/standardformat/)
Release Date: September 26th, 2008 (wide)
Starring: Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso, Omar Benson Miller, Matteo Sciabordi
Directed by: Spike Lee
Premise: Four soldiers from the army's Negro 92nd Division find themselves separated from their unit and behind enemy lines. Risking their lives for a country in which they are treated with less respect than the enemy they are fighting, they discover humanity in the small Tuscan village of St. Anna di Stazzema.
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Spike Lee discusses 'Miracle at St. Anna' (and Obama)
The Buffalo Soldiers tale 'Miracle at St. Anna' arrives as the U.S. considers electing its first black president. Spike Lee is loving it.
By Tom Roston, Special to The Times
"NEWS flash," says director Spike Lee, grabbing the digital voice recorder that's on the table before him, placing it to his lips. "Spike Lee does not assume that every white person is racist. I do not feel that way. And I have not felt that way in the past. Are there some people who are like that? Yes. But I am not going to assume they are."
Lee is sitting at a large conference table in Disney's Touchstone offices in New York City's Times Square, surrounded by posters of his latest film, "Miracle at St. Anna," which opens Friday. The movie follows the grim fate of four black soldiers from the 92nd Infantry Division -- which consisted of 15,000 African American men, also known as Buffalo Soldiers -- who are caught behind enemy lines in Italy during World War II. Crouching over the table in a coiled position that suggests lack of sleep more than a readiness to pounce, Lee is fielding the question of whether he dares to think that the United States, with a population that is nearly three-quarters white, could soon vote for Barack Obama to be the first African American president.
"It's going to happen," the 51-year-old director says with a giddy rap of his fist on the wood table. Lee cites an emotional exchange from his film to explain his own state of anticipation: "There's a scene between two of the leads, Derek Luke, who plays Stamps, and Michael Ealy, who plays Bishop. It's an argument that's been going on for years, from Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois on through Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Bishop asks, 'Why are we here? This is not our war.' And Stamps says, 'I am doing this for the future. I am doing this for my children.'
"People like Stamps have so much faith that one day America would deliver on its promise that everyone is created equal. And we are now closer to that than any other time in this country. In 2008, we are on the verge of having a black man as president. I think that that is a sign of the greatness of this country."
Being on the cusp of a possible "seismic change" has Lee in a good mood, no sign of any soreness from the salvos he traded in May with Clint Eastwood after he criticized Eastwood's exclusion of African American soldiers in his pair of World War II movies from 2006, "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima." Eastwood went so far as to respond, "A guy like that should shut his face." But Lee still refuses to back down: "In World War II movies, rarely do you see black men in the picture at all, never mind being heroic," he says. "I have problems with this mythology. To this day, I still do. And if people have a problem with me because I have a problem with that, I don't know what to say, because I am not lying."
But now Lee can let his work do the talking, and his message comes through loud and clear, just as it did in his 1989 racially charged landmark feature "Do the Right Thing." In one of the first scenes in "Miracle at St. Anna," a black man watches John Wayne in "The Longest Day" on television, and whispers, "Pilgrim, we fought for this country too," a line that Lee himself wrote into James McBride's screenplay.
Growing up in Brooklyn, Lee loved watching movies about the Second World War, but his awareness that black people weren't showing up on screen didn't jibe with his own personal experience: Two of his uncles had served in the war as part of the Red Ball Express, the supply line that helped fuel Gen. George S. Patton's march toward Germany.
"I've wanted to make a World War II film since I wanted to be a filmmaker," says Lee. "Everything I have done up to this point has prepared me to make something this epic in size and scope."
He also needed the right source material, which came along in McBride's 2002 book, a fictionalized account of four Buffalo Soldiers that was based on McBride's extensive research. On the heels of his 2006 commercial success, "Inside Man," Lee enlisted McBride to write the screenplay. McBride found his director to be very demanding. "But he's very demanding of himself," says the writer, who adds that Lee pushed him most of all to create "multidimensional" characters, whether they were African American, Italian partisans or Nazi officers.
Production on the $45-million film began in October 2007 in Florence, Italy. Unable to secure higher-profile talent, including Terrence Howard (who had a scheduling conflict) and Wesley Snipes (who was in the middle of his troubles with the IRS), Lee settled upon four relative unknowns in Luke, Ealy, Laz Alonso and Omar Benson Miller.
Luke says he sees Lee as a "mediator of history" and was impressed by his director's rabid commitment, to the point of putting the actors through a two-week boot camp before shooting began. The fact that the African American actors were bunked in lesser quarters than the German actors -- intended to parallel how African American soldiers were actually given worse facilities to live in than certain German POWs -- impressed upon Luke how "the enormity of this film was as enormous as the history," he says.
Lee even shot a pivotal scene, the murder of more than 500 women, children and elderly Italians, at the actual site at Sant'Anna di Stazzema, where the Nazis had committed a massacre in 1944. "We could feel the spirits and souls while shooting," says Lee, who emphasizes that as much as "Miracle at St. Anna" is about reclaiming African Americans' place in history, it's about more than that. "This film is about many different things. It's framed in a murder mystery. It's about the Italians, some of whom followed the fascist regime and the others who wanted democracy."
Lee describes his prolificacy -- he turns out at least one feature every two years, along with a trail of critically acclaimed documentaries and commercial work -- as "shedding," a jazz term. "Got to get in the woodshed. Got to keep working on the craft," he says. He currently has three films in different states of development -- a sequel to "Inside Man," a film about the L.A. riots, and a biopic about James Brown.
But would he be ready with his camera should Obama win his bid for the White House?
"The Obama camp has my number," says Lee, who proudly adds that he had been flying an Obama-Biden flag outside his brownstone in the Upper East Side. But he recently had to take it down. "People were ringing the bell, thinking it was Obama headquarters," Lee says, with a laugh that turns into a cackle of glee.
Spike Lee fends off partisan attack
'Miracle' blasted in Italy as misrepresentation
Source: Variety
ROME -- Spike Lee's "Miracle at St. Anna" is raising historical hackles in Italy, where the WWII drama -- which links an antifascist Italian partisan resistance group to the 1944 Nazi massacre of 560 Italian civilians -- is being blasted as a misrepresentation of the facts.
Following the pic's Italo press screening on Monday in Rome, Lee and "St. Anna" scribe James McBride fielded questions on the sensitive subject of their depiction of the dynamics of the Nazi slaughter in the Tuscan village.
In the film, which spotlights the role of African-American soldiers in WWII, a partisan named Rodolfo collaborates with the Nazis, indirectly sparking the slaughter.
This aspect of Lee's "St. Anna" has incensed partisan veteran orgs, which fear it could fuel a "revisionist" backlash, as former partisan Moreno Costa told Corriere della Sera.
"This is a fictional story," McBride said. "The real question for me was how to make 'St. Anna' a reveal, because that is the craft of fiction.
"I am very sorry if I have offended the partisans. I have enormous respect for them. As a black American, we understand what it's like for someone to tell your history, and they are not you.
"But unfortunately, the history of World War II here in Italy is ours as well, and this was the best I could do," McBride added.
Lee was not apologetic.
"I am not apologizing for anything. I think these questions are evidence that there is still a lot about your history during the war that you (Italians) have got to come to grips with.
"This film is no clear picture of what happened. It is our interpretation, and I stand behind it."
"Miracle at St. Anna," which did not seem to be well received by local critics, will go out Friday in Italy on 250 screens via co-producer RAI Cinema's 01 Distribuzione arm.