Spike Lee calls Donald Trump a ‘motherf*****’ for not standing up to Nazis during promotion of new film ‘BlacKkKlansman’ at Cannes
Adam Driver, who is also presenting ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ at Cannes, said dressing up in a KKK robe “doesn’t really feel good”
Film director Spike Lee launched a searing attack on US President Donald Trump at Cannes on Tuesday for not standing up to white supremacists in America, after premiering his new movie, BlacKkKlansman, an indictment of “global” white nationalism, to a standing ovation in Cannes.
Shaking with rage, Lee said Trump’s refusal to condemn the deadly far-right protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August would be Trump’s “defining moment” as president.
“That motherf***** was given a chance to say we are about love and not hate and that motherf***** did not denounce the motherf****** Klan, the alt-right and those Nazi motherf*****,” he told a news conference after the film screened at the world’s top film festival.
Lee, 61, tells the extraordinary true story of Ron Stallworth, the first African-American on the Colorado Springs police force who managed to infiltrate the highest levels of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s.
This film to me is a wake-up call … we are on the right side of history
The police officer, played by John David Washington, son of two-time Oscar winner Denzel Washington, conducts much of the investigation on the phone and enlists the help of a white Jewish officer (Adam Driver) when it is time to meet the Klansmen face to face.
The final scene includes chilling footage of the nationalist march in Charlottesville in August, when a counter-demonstrator, 32-year-old Heather Heyer, was killed and several others injured when a car ploughed into people opposed to the white nationalists. Trump is later seen on camera blaming “both sides” for the bloodshed.
Lee dedicates the picture to Heyer’s memory – “Rest in power” – and will release the film on the first anniversary of the Charlottesville protests.
“This film to me is a wake-up call,” Lee said. “We’ve gone for the okey-dokey, walking around in a daze, and stuff is happening and it’s topsy-turvy and fake has been trumpeted as the truth.”