Credit: Spike Lee
October 21st, 2026 · 12:15am BST
Hollywood has long operated on the promise that if a director delivers a commercial hit, they’ll earn the freedom to pursue something more personal. It’s the familiar ‘one for them, one for me’ philosophy, a supposed compromise between artistic ambition and box-office success.
Unfortunately, the reality is rarely so straightforward. Just ask Spike Lee, who discovered that playing by Hollywood’s rules doesn’t necessarily mean getting what you want in return.
Some directors have successfully finessed long-term passion projects out of previous commercial successes. Martin Scorsese’s long-gestating religious epics – The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun and Silence – each only got funding after a box office hit. Considering Scorsese has long been a friend and mentor to Lee, it makes sense that Lee thought he could do the same.
Inside Man was a smash hit in 2006 and is still Lee’s highest-grossing film with a box office of $184.4million. A fresh take on the heist movie starring Denzel Washington at the peak of his powers, it proved that an iconoclast like Lee could make a big studio popcorn flick with mass appeal. Lee saw its success as his ticket to making one of his two dream projects: a biopic of ‘Godfather of Soul’ James Brown, or a drama about the 1992 LA riots.
Despite Inside Man’s success, neither project got off the ground. No studio was willing to put up the budget necessary to do either justice. “I got an offer, but it was not enough,” Lee told The Guardian. “I was very frustrated with Hollywood, so I said, ‘fuck it’, and went to Italy.”
Instead, Lee turned to adapting James McBride’s novel Miracle at St Anna, about four American soldiers from the all-Black 92nd Infantry Division who get trapped behind enemy lines during World War II. Set primarily in a small village in Tuscany, the fictionalised story spotlights the contributions of Black soldiers during the war and recreates true historical events such as the 1944 Sant’Anna di Stazzema massacre.
Lee approached Roberto Cicutto and Luigi Musini, two Italian producers who had handled the Italian distribution of his previous films. It was July 2007, and he told Cicutto and Musini he wanted to start shooting in October. They had three months to raise $25m, and the final budget ballooned to $45m.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
“They said, ‘Spike, you’re crazy’, but I said, ‘If we don’t do this film now, it’s never getting done,’” Lee recalled. “We willed this film into being.”
Miracle at St Anna was a box office bomb, grossing just over $9m – about $175m less than Inside Man. Critics found it clunky and overlong. If Lee had ever had a chance to use the ‘one for them, one for me’ system to make his James Brown biopic, it was gone.
The James Brown biopic did eventually get made, just not by Lee. In 2014, Tate Taylor directed Get On Up, with Chadwick Boseman as the ‘Godfather of Soul’. For Lee, it must have been a bitter sight: the film he had fought for, made by someone else. But a year later, BlacKkKlansman won him his first competitive Oscar. ‘One for them, one for me’ may never have worked for Lee, but he found his own way of getting the ones that mattered made.
