The Mau Maus feel like they're doing it for the good of all African American people. They're misguided, but they have to take responsibility. We wanted this guy to be someone who's very uncomfortable in his black skin, someone who's never felt at ease with being black, someone who doesn't achieve knowledge of self until it's literally too late, when he's on his way to buy the farm. And for the Myrna Goldfarb character, there's an unwritten law that you cannot have a Jewish character in a film who isn't 100 percent perfect, or you' re labeled anti-Semitic. And I'd like to state that Spike Lee is not saying that African American culture is just for black people alone to enjoy and cherish.
Culture is for everybody.
But there's a distinction between appreciating a culture and appropriating it, and Dunwitty is an appropriator. He thinks he knows something because he knows who Willie Mays is. All your films have very precise, vivid looks, and this one too, but differently. Any time you talk about the look of the film, it's not just the director and the director of photography. You have to include the costume designer and the production designer, and for a lot of my films, the costume designer has been Ruth Carter, the production designer's been Wynn Thomas, and for this one, Victor Kempster, who's worked on a ton of Oliver Stone's stuff.