Spike Lee’s Vietnam War epic 'Da 5 Bloods' is his most ambitious film in years. LaneBrown reports on how it came together
Lindo and Peters in one of Da 5 Bloods’ flashbacks to the Vietnam War. These scenes were shot on 16-mm. film , and the actors weren’t de-aged to look younger. Photo: Courtesy of Netflix In a scene near the beginning of Spike Lee’s new Vietnam War movie, Da 5 Bloods, five black American soldiers sit around a radio tuned to an enemy propaganda broadcast, which raises what they have to admit is a pretty good point: African-Americans are far overrepresented on the front lines in Vietnam.
Da 5 Bloods is Lee’s most ambitious film in years, borrowing the setup from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to frame a story about U.S. racism and imperialism, with tangents and footnotes spanning the entire history of African-American patriotism up to Black Lives Matter. Lee credits the success of their partnership to the fact that both he and Willmott are film professors — Lee with NYU’s graduate program and Willmott at the University of Kansas — and have a natural shorthand. Willmott cites their shared belief that “most people get their history from movies, not books, which is not necessarily a good thing — but it may be true, and it makes films like this important.
If another director had shot The Last Tour with its original script, it would have been “more of an adventure film,” says Willmott. But Da 5 Bloods is a genre-blending, sensory-overload experience on par with Lee’s finest, combining buddy comedy, heist thriller, Expendables-style old-guy action movie, explosively violent war film, and touching drama, all without breaking any seams .
The Cast To play the Bloods, reuniting after almost 50 years apart, Lee reconvened a few of his own former collaborators: He’d previously directed Lindo in 1992’s Malcolm X, 1994’s Crooklyn, and 1995’s Clockers; Peters in 2012’s Red Hook Summer; and Whitlock in five movies, including BlacKkKlansman and 2002’s 25th Hour. Da 5 Bloods is Lee’s first film with Lewis, a Broadway veteran and longtime friend, as well as Boseman, now one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.
“Here’s the thing,” says Lee. “I knew there was no way in hell I was going to get the budget that Martin Scorsese got [to de-age] De Niro, Pacino, and Pesci in The Irishman, and it was a lot of money. And I dislike when films get different actors to play younger versions of the main characters. Also, makeup or prosthetics would’ve melted in the 100-degree heat.”
The Production Production designer Wynn Thomas has worked with Lee on 13 films, including the director’s small-budget debut and one sweeping, three-and-a-half-hour biopic , but he says Da 5 Bloods is something new: “It’s like when David Lean, who had been doing urban British dramas like Great Expectations, made The Bridge on the River Kwai and transitioned into the more epic style we know him for.
That same local crew spent two months re-creating the ruins of Vietnam’s My Son temples for an action scene near the end of the film. “Obviously we couldn’t shoot the real temples” — which were mostly destroyed by U.S. bombs — “so we had to build our own. We found a space the size of two football fields next to a suburban market, behind a bunch of commercial buildings,” says Thomas.
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