Spike Lee's Gotta Have It: A Look At The Making Of The Film

I begin this blog after reading Spike Lee’s excellent book Spike Lee’s Gotta Have It, which explores the making of Lee’s first feature, She’s Gotta Have It.

I’m a big fan of books where directors detail their process during the making of a film. Anything that talks about the making of a film are something that I try to get my hands on to read.

The Book

The book details the trials and tribulations of Lee’s journey to get the film made – from the initial seed of an idea, through the writing of the screenplay and the eventual shoot and post-production work. But that’s just where the real fun starts, as a large part of the book is devoted to distribution and securing funding for the film.

That last part is why I keep recommending it. Plenty of “how I made my film” books stop at wrap. Lee keeps going into the bit most film-school chats skip: who will show it, who will pay for the next week, and how you stay in the fight when the phone is quiet. If you are trying to build a filmmaker career rather than a single student film, that section is the useful one.

Here’s a great quote from Spike’s book:

“Don’t think that because you haven’t heard from me for a while that I went to sleep. I am still here, like a spirit roaming the night. Thirsty, hungry, seldom stopping to rest.” – Spike Lee

That line is the whole diary in miniature. Not a motivational poster. A note from someone who is still working when there is nothing glamorous to report.

She’s Gotta Have It (1986)

She’s Gotta Have It is Lee’s 1986 first feature: Nola Darling, Brooklyn, three suitors, shot as an independent film with a direct address to the audience that still feels like someone turning the camera around in a room. I am not going to recite budgets or box office. The film is the proof that the diary was attached to a real production, not a daydream. If you want a wider map of the work that followed, our best Spike Lee movies list is the next stop.

What The Making-Of Actually Teaches

I read these books looking for method, not mythology. Spike Lee’s Gotta Have It keeps returning to three jobs that are still the job.

Write. The diary is not a vibe. It is pages, revisions, a script that has to exist before anyone else will take you seriously. First features die in the “I have an idea” stage more often than they die on set. Lee writes through it. That sounds obvious until you notice how many of us would rather buy a new camera than finish scene five. If you are aiming at a low-budget feature, the cheapest production insurance is a script you can actually shoot in the locations you can enter.

Shoot. The book does not pretend that independent shooting is a montage of magic hours. It is scheduling, people who may or may not turn up, equipment that is good enough, and the decision to keep going on the days that look like a mess. You make the day. Then you make the next one. That is not romantic when you write it down in a journal, which is exactly why the journal is worth reading.

Hustle distribution. This is the part I wish someone had pushed at me harder when I was younger. Making the film is half. Getting it in front of an audience — festival, theatre, a buyer, a room that is not your friends — is the other half, and it has its own craft: letters, meetings, cuts people will actually watch, a refusal to disappear between phone calls. Lee’s quote above sits in that gap. The work continues when there is nothing to post.

You can feel, reading it, that distribution is not a glamorous add-on. It is another production department, except the crew is often just you and whoever will still take your call. That is uncomfortable if you only wanted to be “the director.” It is also the difference between a film that exists on a drive and a film that other people have actually seen.

None of that is a template you can photocopy onto your own city and your own year. The value is watching one filmmaker refuse to treat any of the three jobs as beneath him.

Why First-Feature Diaries Matter

I am biased toward this whole shelf of books. A finished director on a press tour will give you the legend. A diary written while the film is still in doubt gives you the temperature of the days.

First features are where the career either starts or stays a hobby. You can study twenty directors and how they made it and still miss the texture: the waiting, the small yes, the rewrite after a bad meeting, the cut that is not working. A journal keeps those in the record. It also keeps you honest about your own process. If Lee can write down the unglamorous bits, you can write down that you did not shoot this week.

I also like these books because they kill the myth that a first feature arrives fully formed. You see the idea change. You see the shoot threaten the idea. You see post-production become another writing pass. That sequence — write, shoot, hustle — is the same sequence whether you are in Brooklyn in the mid-80s or making something now with a smaller crew and a harder festival calendar.

There is a second reason. Distribution and money talk is usually locked behind “industry” voices. A first-feature diary puts it next to the creative notes, which is where it belongs. Funding is not a separate personality. It is part of how the film gets finished. The Aronofsky funding story on this site is a different path, same lesson: the film is not finished when the camera stops.

If you are in the middle of your own first long project, read one of these books slowly, alongside the work, not instead of it. Steal the habit of keeping a record. Steal the stubbornness. Leave the biography for later.

Other Filmmaking Books

There are, of course, lots of other filmmaking books out there. There are also plenty of non-filmmaking books that might help our filmmaking.

Here are some books by filmmakers that talk about the making of their films:
Rebel Without a Crew – Robert Rodriguez
Lynch on Lynch – David Lynch
Moviemakers’ Master Class: Private Lessons From The World’s Foremost Directors – Laurent Tirard
Something Like An Autobiography – Akira Kurosawa
Notes on the Cinematographer – Robert Bresson
The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema – Michelangelo Antonioni
On Directing Film – David Mamet
Making Movies – Sidney Lumet
The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography – Ingmar Bergman
The Films in My Life – Francois Truffaut

A brief correction on the first title: an earlier version of this list had Rodriguez’s book as Rebel Without a Cause (and spelled his name Rodriquez). The book is Rebel Without a Crew. Same Amazon link as above.

Rodriguez’s diary sits next to Lee’s for a reason. Different cities, different films, same useful genre: a first-feature record that includes the hustle, not only the shots.

Let me know below in the comments if you think I’ve missed out any great filmmakers on filmmaking books. Thanks for reading!

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