Spike Lee

“Everything I do is always scrutinised. But that's all I'll say about that.”

“All directors are storytellers, so the motivation was to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's what I love.”

“'25th Hour,' like a lot of my films, takes place in New York City. I've been very fortunate to make films in the city that I live. I mean, it's great going home at night instead of being on location.”

“'Red Hook Summer' is another chapter in my chronicles of Brooklyn.”

“You have to do the research. If you don't know about something, then you ask the right people who do.”

“I think it is very important that films make people look at what they've forgotten.”

“I like to work with the same people when I can, and you want to get people with the same interests that you have, and the same aesthetic.”

“I'm very careful about how I portray violence in my films. I do believe that violence, especially violent video games, are not a good thing for young kids.”

“I get offered to do stuff where the money's nice but it's not something I want to do - I get offered a lot of commercials too.”

“I don't think I'm a total pessimist, so I think you can find hope in all my films.”

“I don't get tripped up in technology. I use technology as a tool. 'Oldboy' we shot Two Pro 35mm. For 'Da Blood of Jesus,' we shot digitally. We shot the new Sony F55. It's a 4K camera.”

“I used the principles of Kickstarter to make 'She's Gotta Have It.' We filmed that in 1985 to 1986. The final cost was $175,000. I didn't have that money. It was friends, grants, donations. We saved our bottles for the nickel deposit.”

“The truth is I've been doing Kickstarter before there was Kickstarter; there was no Internet. Social Media was writing letters, making phone calls, beating the bushes.”

“If we became students of Malcolm X, we would not have young black men out there killing each other like they're killing each other now. Young black men would not be impregnating young black women at the rate going on now. We'd not have the drugs we have now, or the alcoholism.”

“When I went to school, you had to take art, you had to play an instrument. You had to play an instrument. But it's all degraded since then. I do not know what kind of nation we are that is cutting art, music, and gym out of the public-school curriculum.”

“I live in New York City, the stories of my films take place in New York; I'm a New York filmmaker.”

“Making films has got to be one of the hardest endeavors known to humankind.”

“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.”

“First of all, what in this world does not revolve around money? But money is a big part of film, unlike a lot of other art forms.”

“I respect the audience's intelligence a lot, and that's why I don't try to go for the lowest common denominator.”