Barry Alexander Brown and Spike Lee go way back, back to the 80s. They’ve worked together and undertand each other’s language. For BlacKkKlansman, Lee’s latest joint, that familiarity helped Brown edit the film to Lee’s exacting standards.
Based on a true story, the film balances humor with gut-punching drama. Ron Stallworth was an African-American Colorado Police officer who infiltrated the KKK. Through this lens, Lee frames the brutal reality of racism and the history of the KKK. He bookends the film with scenes from Gone With The Wind and footage of the Charlottesville protests where Heather Heyer was tragically killed. The film is by no means an easy watch, but it’s Lee’s excellence as a storyteller to tell things as they are. Brown talks about genre lines and editing the film to get it ready for Cannes.
Read our chat below:
You and Spike go way back, tell me a little bit about your relationship and how that’s evolved over the years.
We’ve known each other a really long time, going all the way back to the Summer of 1981. That’s a full 37 years we’ve known each other. We knew each other and liked each other and we knew what we thought of movies even long before Spike made She’s Gotta Have It.
It’s been a great friendship. Right away, we had a very similar way of looking at and thinking about movies and thinking about entertainment and politics. There’s this other thing that’s hard to describe which is the way we fit together creatively. We came along together in terms of making movies, understanding movies and how they work and learning about that.
Sometimes, you get incredibly lucky and you meet people before anybody is anybody and you look at the history of movies and it seems to have happened quite a lot.
Given your relationship, what did he tell you about BlacKkKlansman?
We see a lot of dailies together so, in the process of doing that, I get the sense of what he likes and what he doesn’t like and what he thinks is going to work and what isn’t going to work. After that, it’s him trusting me to put something together and at least put the movie into a ballpark that he wants it to be in to where he can tweak it. In this case, I was pretty close in terms of what he was looking for.
When I showed it to him on January 8, he was really excited and he felt really confident about making the run for Cannes. We also had to show the film to Cannes in early March. We had to have a locked picture, a score and work on the sound editing. We were running to complete this movie really quickly. Once they say yes, you’ve got to run.
Let’s start at the end, that ending with Charlottesville. Trump was not in the original screenplay. What was the original ending?
The Trump and Charlottesville were not in the script. The original ending is what you see there. Patrice and Ron come down the hall and they see the cross burning, that was supposed to be the ending. They had foiled the bombing but the KKK continues.
With Charlottesville, you get to bring the whole story into the present. What was surprising for us in gathering the footage was that I was aware that David Duke had been there, but I don’t know how I missed that the footage of him speaking at McIntire Park and what he said. Topher Grace did such a great job of playing Duke, that you see the present footage and think, “This is the same guy 45 years later.” But that footage also ties the Klan to Donald Trump. You couldn’t have scripted it better.
At the beginning, you have Gone With The Wind and the scenes with Alec Baldwin, you’re not sure what we’re in for. What tone did you want to set with that opening?
My first cut of it was really straightforward. Spike said, “I want to show the artifice of this.” Baldwin just in doing his piece was stuff he did as an actor trying to get a line right trying to get the word right. Spike saw that when we were shooting that and said, “This is what I want to show.”
What you see is that this is not someone speaking from the heart, this is artifice and getting the right words. When Spike said, “Use the stuff Alec is doing with all that.” When he gave me that permission, I ran with the ball and had fun with it. Sometimes you don’t know if you have permission to have fun and I did, but we also wanted to show that this is manipulation.
We do have fun. When it gets dark, it’s really dark and when it’s funny, it’s hilarious. How did you strike that balance?
I think for both of us, we like humor. If you look at the body of the work, there’s a lot of humor in it. For both of us, we just like to laugh. We don’t have a fine line in terms of genre, we don’t say, “This is a drama, we can’t have laughter” and vice versa. I think I can speak for Spike here too, this is a movie that stands on its own and we are going to play with being funny.
We did pull back on some of the humor towards the end of the film. We had to get serious. There were some other pieces there that were funny, but it didn’t feel right to have something funny as we’re heading towards that big climax and so we pulled back on some really funny pieces because it would break the tension and once it broke, we’d have to rebuild again.
I know you’ve spoken about this a million times, but the Harry Belafonte scene juxtaposed with the KKK initiation scene. Was it always going to be that way?
That was created in the rewrite of the script. It wasn’t in the original script. In the script, there were bigger blocks of dialogue and blocks of the initiation and my job was to really marry it and try to make it one and emotionally make it one.
I had the luxury of all the footage so I could look at it and say this goes here and this goes here. So, you have Belafonte talking and then cut to the KKK men, the three standing up as Duke is sprinkling the holy water. Belafonte then says, “All I could do was hide and hope they wouldn’t find me.” Cut to Adam Driver as Zimmerman and you hear, “All I could do was watch.” That’s exactly what he’s doing at that moment, he’s watching and hoping they don’t find him. He’s doing that in terms of the action. He looks up at Duke.
Again, it was about making it one emotionally and they’re very different emotions because you have the Klansmen watching The Birth Of a Nation and cheering and cheering. Cut to Belafonte and you have the story about the burning. That moment is all about power and the power of Birth of a Nation and how Woodrow Wilson responded to it. It’s something that doesn’t take me a long time to cut, but you do have to refine it.
The first cut was pretty fast and I wanted to see how the pieces all fit together.
Did it change after Cannes?
Not at all. I thought it might because we were moving so fast. I thought we would lock it for Cannes and come back to New York and make some small sounds changes. I had a pen and paper during that premiere thinking Spike would be giving notes, but it didn’t happen.
