Leftist movie director Spike Lee is featured on the cover of Sunday's Washington Post Magazine with the headline "By Any Means Necessary." That could include wild conspiracy theories about 9/11. Post interviewer K.K. Ottesen sympathetically gave Lee an opportunity to complain about having to cut 30 minutes out of his documentary NYC Epicenter spinning out arguments from 9/11 truthers.
[Y]ou caught a lot of flak for including them. So I wanted to ask you about why you chose to include them in the first place — and then why you decided to cut them?
Thank you for asking that question. First of all, just because somebody says it’s debunked does not mean it’s not true. The Warren Commission said the motherf---ing magical bullet did a 360-change midair and killed — that was the bullet that assassinated JFK! It defies physics. Bullets don’t do that. So just because somebody says “debunked” does not mean that it’s false. I mean, I was taught in school that that motherf---ing terrorist Christopher Columbus discovered America!
So where do you fall on that? Do you think those [9/11 theories] are true? Or do you think that they may be true?
I think that there’s things that need to be discussed. In all my work, I put the information out there, whether it be documentaries or feature films, and I leave it up to the audience to decide. Simple. They make up their own minds. People, before they come to my theaters, they’ve lived a life. They’ve been impacted where they grew up, the education — all those factors. So I don’t expect everybody to have the same reaction to the film. People today still stop me in the street and say, “Spike, who did the right thing in ‘Do the Right Thing?’ ” And I say, “Who do you think?”
I would not be the filmmaker I am today if just because someone says it’s not true you can’t do it.
Lee said the edits were forced on him.
So then why did you decide to make the cuts, ultimately?
Well, I really wasn’t given a choice, to be honest.
By HBO, or …
I wasn’t given a choice. But, that too shall pass. I’ll leave it at that.
Someone wrote that you may have actually “captured the collective psyche of the moment” in including that material because there is a big rise in so-called conspiracy theories because there’s a lot of distrust.
Yeah. I included people — scientists, architects — who aren’t buying the story that, especially the third tower [at the World Trade Center] crumpled to the ground — that has never happened before in the history of steel structures, ever, so I did not see harm letting people decide their own mind.
And what some of the media did, which I felt was truly not right, and some dirty, underhanded s---, was because I have this in the documentary, they’re aligning me with the motherf---ers that tried to overthrow the government at the Capitol. They tried to put me in the same bag as that! They said that what I was doing was the same as the insurrectionists and also the anti-vaccination people. That was just totally wrong. And that was done on purpose. And, in some way, they were successful. They aligned with me with the insurrectionists on January 6th and with the anti-vaxxers.
It's bizarre for the Post on one hand to create a "Fact Checker" project and insist that Truth is under attack, and then just allow Spike Lee to push wild conspiracy theories, and tout him for capturing a "collective psyche." Or a collective kookiness.
Sonny Bunch decried all this in the Post when the Lee controversy erupted last August.
