Inside Man: the secret history of Spike Lee’s film

The creation of the film starring Clive Owen, Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster took several years.

Arte dedicates its evening to Jodie Fosterfirst by reprogramming Inside Man (2006), then via a documentary devoted to her successful career as an actress and director. Jodie Foster: Hollywood in the skin is already visible in replay on Arte.TV.

Jodie Foster: “It’s as if my whole life as an actress had been my film school”

Spike Lee plunges us into the twists and turns of a heist that is much more complex than it seems with Inside Man. A heist film that is ultimately not one, it recycles the codes of the genre in the service of a political message that is as assertive as ever coming from the most politicized of New York filmmakers. Carried by a casting led by Denzel Washington, Clive Owen And Jodie Fosterit remains one of the most popular and accomplished films in Lee’s filmography, bringing him his biggest theatrical success with more than $180 million in revenue.

Celebrated for its twisted storyline and clever twists, Inside Man is also the fruit of a long story, which began in total anonymity and which, several years later, resulted in one of the most significant films of the year 2006. A look back at the production of one of the classics from the filmography of Spike Lee.

Russell Gewirtz, an iconoclastic screenwriter

The genesis ofInside Man begins at the initiative of a beginner screenwriter, Russell Gewirtz, a young thirty-something with a unique journey. A graduate in computer science before taking the New York bar exam, he ran the family business specializing in clothing for several years. At the end of the 1990s, when he imagined the first ideas which would lead to the script which had become so famous‘Inside Manhe decides to give up everything and, with the jackpot recovered during a real estate transaction, decides to travel around the world while putting an end to his screenplay, which he writes self-taught by studying certain already existing screenplays .

In an interview dating from 2006, Gewirtz looked back on the unconventional genesis of the film’s screenplay, developed over its different stages: “Five years ago, I was writing this thing while living as a drifter. I stopped in very beautiful places like Miami, Brazil or the south of France. I wrote the story without knowing if I was really going to become a screenwriter or not. I’ve never read a book about it. I just hoped I wasn’t wasting my time. I put everything I had into it. But I didn’t ask myself whether I wanted it to be a $50 million or $500,000 film. I just wanted it to be one or the other“.

In the summer of 2002, Gewirtz was on the Mediterranean coast when he found his friend, the producer Daniel M. Rosenberg. Seduced by the project, Rosenberg helped him retouch the script and find a studio interested in the project. This studio will be Universal, through the producer Brian Grazer and its subsidiary Imagine Entertainment. The project, which was still called at the time The Inside Manis retitled so as to make the definite article disappear.

A project created for Ron Howard

When Brian Grazer comes to the head of the project, the name of Spike Lee however, has not yet come up in studio conversations. Imagine Entertainment is in fact not only Grazer’s baby, but that of its co-founder, the filmmaker Ron Howard. Very interested at first in Inside ManHoward, however, quickly had to throw in the towel due to a scheduling conflict. Russell Crowewho has just committed to From the shadow to the lightabsolutely wants him to lead it.

For several weeks, Brian Grazer will make the rounds of free directors, while Gewirtz’s script is for its part refined by a few luxury script doctors like Menno Meyjes (The color purple, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) And Terry George (In the name of the father, Hotel Rwanda). At the same time, Meyjes in turn refused to direct the film on which he collaborated.

It will ultimately be a meeting with Spike Lee which will decide Grazer to offer him the direction of the film. For several years, the two men have discussed possible collaborations, including a James Brown biopic (Get on Upreleased in 2014) which, ironically, took more than ten years to be produced… before Grazer fired Lee and replaced him with Tate Taylor. It will ultimately be Inside Man which will push the two men to work together. Grazer remembered this meeting at the time of the film’s release in these terms: “The time we met, Spike said to me: ‘We’ve had a few bad encounters and false starts, but I promise you it will all end well.’ He looked me straight in the eye, grabbed my arm and said, ‘Let’s work together.’“.

The best of fake heist films

Seduced by the guidelineInside Man, Spike Lee finally landed the directing of the film, which a few years later would become his biggest commercial success (and which still remains so to this day). “Russell Gewirtz had written an original and intriguing variation of the heist film“, he explained in an interview with journalist Emanuel Levy in 2006. “I liked the script and really wanted to direct it. Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon is one of my favorite films, and this story was a modern variation on those kinds of films.“.

Spike Lee – Denzel Washington, the reunion

Inside Man marks the fourth collaboration between Spike Lee and one of his favorite actors, Denzel Washington After Mo’ Better Blues, Malcolm (which earned the actor the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the Berlinale and an Oscar nomination in 1992) and He Got Game. In Inside Manhe is Detective Keith Frazier, the police officer in charge of negotiating with the robbers and defusing the bank robbery.

A particularly logical choice given the actor’s taste for good guy roles, but which could have been quite different. Indeed, when Spike Lee approached his long-time friend to ask him to play in Inside Man, he offered him the choice between the two main characters: Frazier and Dalton Russell, the leader of the robbery team. The reasons for Denzel’s decision, as Lee recalls in an interview for the Total Film site, had also almost pushed Clive Owen to refuse the role. “When you’re dealing with someone like Denzel, you don’t tell him what role he should play. So I said to him, ‘Look, there are two roles in this movie: the bank robber and good guy.” He said, ‘Spike, I owe the cop, you don’t see the other guy’s face in the whole movie!’ And in the end, when I offered the role (of Dalton Russell) to Clive, the first thing he said to me was: ‘Spike, I want to do it, but you’re not going to see my face the whole movie!”

The script will therefore be rewritten in order to reserve several scenes on screen where Russell will appear openly. A solution that reassures Clive Owen and convinced him to accept the role: “Performing entire scenes where you are masked, hidden behind glasses or a hood, is very strange because acting relies a lot on intention, and intention often comes through the look. And to suddenly be deprived of it with this gaze barrier was very disarming“.

The cast of Inside Man is an opportunity to attend other meetings between regulars of the cinema of Spike Lee since Christopher Plummerwho plays the boss of the robbed bank, was already in the casting of Malcolm X while Chiwetel Ejioforwho plays Frazier’s partner here, was present in She Hate Me. And he also has the luxury of winking twice at A dog’s afternoonthe reference film of Spike Lee by offering two cameos to two actors in Lumet’s film. Marcia Jean Kurtz In each film, he plays one of the robbers’ hostages while Lionel Pinawho played a pizza delivery man in the 1975 film, stars in Inside Man a police officer… who brings pizzas to his colleagues.

The story ofInside Man : A cop, accused of having embezzled a drug dealer’s money, is responsible for arresting an ingenious bank robber, whose new heist turns into a hostage-taking. Very quickly, he suspects that the heist is not motivated by money. The intervention of an ambitious negotiator will complicate the situation.

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