SL: The only reason we shot it on digital is because we didn't have the necessary budget to shoot it on 35mm film. We went to everybody, all the studios, and they didn't want to deal with the subject matter. Once we made the budgetary decision that we could not shoot it the way we wanted to, we chose mini-DV. We used multiple cameras - sometimes we had 15 of them rolling. We'd set up a shot, just turn it on and let the thing roll. Of course you spend a lot more time in editing, but for this story it worked out.

C: Though the story's a media satire, Bamboozled makes a lot of serious points about institutional racism.

SL: People ask me, "Do you think the film or TV industries are racist?" I think one has to understand that racism is interwoven into the very fabric of American society, so why should sports, business, film and TV not be affected by that? Because whoever works there has come up from somewhere.

C: Do you see any way forward?

SL: I think it's possible. It has to be more diverse in that rarefied air of the gatekeepers - the people who make decisions which TV shows get made, which TV shows don't get made; which movies get made, which movies don't get made.

C: What did you think of films like Warren Beatty's Bulworth and Jim Toback's Black And White, which try to tackle similar issues?

SL: I wasn't really a big fan. The scene I liked in Black And White was when Mike Tyson slapped Robert Downey, which was definitely unscripted. And with Bulworth, it was just unbelievable to me. This is just my own opinion, but to me, someone who looked like Halle Berry would not be with Warren Beatty - I think that's his own fantasy.

C: And Bulworth's prescription for harmony - "We've just got to keep fucking each other till we're the same colour"?

SL: What does that mean? I just wasn't a big fan.

C: About the montage at the end of Bamboozled, which shows how black people have been represented in America - why was it all old film and TV clips? Why didn't you bring it up to date?

SL: I didn't feel it was necessary, because there are movies that do that for me already - look at the black characters in The Legend Of Bagger Vance, The Green Mile, Family Man. I thought it was more important to deal with history, because there was a lot of stuff in those films that most people haven't seen. In the clips of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney putting on blackface - if you see that film on TV today in the US, they cut that out. We found a cartoon where Bugs Bunny was in blackface, and we wanted to include that, but Warner Brothers refused to let us use it. I don't think those clips should be buried. I think it's good we see this stuff. It's evidence of the misrepresentation of a people.

C: The film seems to make comparisons between gangsta rap and minstrel shows.

SL: I feel that gangsta rap is a 21st century form of a minstrel show, and the sad thing is, a lot of those guys don't even know it. Rap music is huge, all over the world, but a small percentage of the people that buy it are actually black. And with excessive use of the N-word, a lot of young white kids think it's OK to use that word, and they go call black people that word also.

C: Thus the reference in Bamboozled to your argument with Quentin Tarantino about use of the N-word?

SL: In that scene where Dunwitty [the white TV executive] is with Delacroix [the black producer], and Dunwitty says he knows the N-word better than Delacroix does - that's something Quentin Tarantino actually told me. I was in the Angelica Theatre, waiting with my wife to see The Blair Witch Project, and he came up to me and told me that he knows black people better than me. So I just laughed at him. That's where I got that line from, I didn't make it up.

C: How do you feel about white appropriation of black culture?

SL: There's nothing wrong with white people trying to appreciate black culture. The problems arise when you don't realise the distinction between appreciation of one's culture and appropriation of one's culture. That's the difference. And people like Dunwitty in the film, they try to appropriate black culture for their own gain. It's like a fantasy: "I wanna be a gangsta, yo, yo, yo!" or "I wanna wear my pants down below my ass!" But that's very easy, because they're not going to be stopped by the cops. They want to have it one way, but not the other.

C: It’s now twelve years since you made Do The Right Thing. Do you think anything's changed since then?

SL: Everything in that film still applies today.

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