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Spike Lee’s hip-hop version of “Romeo and Juliette”
Winner at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival for his opus on the true story of a black police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, director Spike Lee has put black American cinema firmly in the foreground. Now he’s back with an improbable project: an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play, “Romeo and Juliette”.
Par Anna Prudhomme.
In Brooklyn in the 1980s, Romeo meets Juliette against a backdrop of graffiti, breakdance battles and the first DJ sets. We already know the story, two young people fall head over heels in love with each other. To a hip-hop soundtrack, the rival families declare war, sharpened katanas in hand. This is the pitch of American film director Spike Lee’s upcoming film to be released by the production company Legendary Pictures.
The man behind the full-length feature movie BlacKkKlansman, accoladed at Cannes and for which he won Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, has attacked the graphic novel, Prince of Cats by American writer Ron Wimberly. A book that reinvents the tragic plot of Shakespeare’s play in a Wu-Tang Clan meets Jackie Chan-style romance.
To adapt it for the big screen, the 62-year old director and the graphic novelist worked hand-in-hand with Selwyn Hinds, scriptwriter and former editor-in-chief of the hip-hop magazine, The Source. In the meantime, we’ve got Spike Lee’s most recent movie Da 5 Bloods about the Afro-American veterans of the Vietnam war, to look forward to exclusively on Netflix in 2020.
