Shelton Jackson “Spike” Lee was born March 20, 1957.

With a long varies career that has spanned independent films such as his debut She’s Gotta Have It (1986), to mainstream, big-budget films including Inside Man (2006), Lee has often examined social issues, gained acclaim and courted controversy.

In his Contemporary Film Directors series book Spike Lee Todd McGowan writes:

Spike Lee is a filmmaker of excess. Excess characterizes each of his films, through unconventional shots, extreme characters, improbable scenes, and many other ways. Lee’s films employ these types of excess to intervene in critical issues that trouble the contemporary world—the question of the subject’s singularity, the role that fantasy plays in structuring
our reality, the political impact of passion, the power of paranoia in shaping social relations, the damage that the insistence on community inflicts, the problem of transcendence, and the struggles of the spectator.