Spike Lee has helmed over two dozen feature films (plus multiple documentaries), but he says there’s one movie that fans talk to him about more than any other.
Lee, 68, opened up about his life and career in a conversation with former first lady Michelle Obama and her brother Craig Robinson on the Sept. 3 episode of their podcast IMO. Obama, 61, asked what his favorite film is that he’s made. Lee said we wanted to “turn[her] question around.”
“When people come up, total strangers come up to me, more people say Crooklyn than any other film,” Lee shared. “More than Do the Right Thing, more than Malcolm X.”
“It’s just that family,” Lee said of the movie’s appeal.
The semi-autobiographical film, which Lee wrote with his siblings Joie and Cinqué, shows a family in the Bed–Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, during the summer of 1973. “Delroy [Lindo] played my father, and Alfre Woodard played my mother,” Lee said, and he thought viewers related to that dynamic.
“My mother had to be the tough cop, ‘cause my father’s like, ‘Daddy, can we jump off the window?’ ‘Oh yeah, go ahead, but just don’t hurt yourself.’ She was forced to be the cop, and so we grew up sometimes not liking our mother because she loves to do nothing,” he said.
Of him and his siblings, he said, “We were crazy. We were just wild Brooklyn kids, and my mother had to be a disciplinarian because otherwise… it would not have been good.”
Lee said he felt bad that “we saw all our mothers as the bad, the sheriff” because they wouldn’t let their kids “do nothing.” “So you mad at her and she’s holding it down for everybody,” he said.
Lee was born Shelton Jackson Lee and given the nickname Spike as a kid. He was the eldest of five children. His mother, Jacqueline Carroll, taught at a private school, and his father, William James Edwards Lee III, was a composer.
Crooklyn centers on Troy Carmichael, played by Zelda Harris, who is based on Lee’s only sister, Joie, who wrote the original screenplay for the film. In the movie, Troy is also the only girl in a loud and boisterous family.
Lee’s family has influenced his movie career from the start. “My mother was a film fanatic,” he told PEOPLE in 2020. “She passed on her love of films to me. My father hated Hollywood films, so he wasn’t going with her. At that time, I didn’t know I wanted to be a filmmaker — I was just my mother’s movie date.” His mother died of cancer after his sophomore year of college, and he decided to become a filmmaker shortly after. His father died in 2023 at age 94.