So What's On Your Mind, Spike Lee?

It's hard to imagine that Spike Lee, one of his generation's earliest embodiments of do-or-die indie filmmaking, has never debuted a film at Sundance as a feature director. That will change when his new drama, Red Hook Summer, in which a young man from Atlanta spends a summer with his preacher grandfather in Brooklyn, bows Jan. 22 at the festival. THR sat down with the New Yorker on his recent trip to L.A. (wearing, of course, his Knicks regalia) to talk about Red Hook, a chat that also had Lee, 54, sounding off about what he sees as a dearth of influence among African-Americans in Hollywood, how working with Eddie Murphy for the first time is "going to be a motherf--er" and why you can't "bitch and moan" when making independent films.