Spike Lee is at work on the opening scene of his new movie in a cramped third-floor apartment in Harlem. It's a somewhat familiar spot for the director, famous for chronicling New York City life in films like She's Gotta Have It, Do the Right Thing, and 25th Hour. But there are hints on this chilly January day that his latest project is a rather different beast. On the wall hangs a World War II propaganda poster featuring black boxing legend Joe Louis. He's in uniform, amid the words ''Pvt. Joe Louis says, 'We're going to do our part...and we'll win because we're on God's side.''' A black-and-white framed photograph of four African-American men sits on a corner shelf. These men, too, are in military garb and standing at attention in front of a giant American flag. Someone wandering in off the street might get the idea that the director was making some kind of war movie.
And they'd be right. Miracle at St. Anna stars Laz Alonso (Stomp the Yard), Derek Luke (Antwone Fisher), Omar Benson Miller (Get Rich or Die Tryin'), and Michael Ealy (Barbershop) as members of the U.S. Army's 92nd Infantry Division, a real-life segregated unit that fought German troops in Italy after the country had switched to the Allied side. The four men become separated from their fellow ''buffalo soldiers'' during a battle at the Serchio River and wind up in a village behind enemy lines. There they await orders while interacting with the traumatized local civilians and wary Italian resistance fighters.
Two of Lee's uncles served in WWII, and the director is clearly thrilled to put his mark on a genre that, until now, has been almost lily-white in casting. ''I loved, growing up, to see Jim Brown in The Dirty Dozen,'' says Lee, 51. ''But there's really been a bad job of documenting the contribution African-Americans made to this country.'' Still, he didn't really intend for Miracle, an adaptation of James McBride's bestselling 2002 novel, to be his next project following Inside Man. After the director scored a double in 2006 with that $89 million-grossing caper and his acclaimed Hurricane Katrina doc When the Levees Broke, he hoped to use his new box office clout to raise money for either a biopic of soul legend James Brown or a film about the 1992 L.A. riots. ''Somehow I got the crazy idea that since Inside Man was my biggest hit ever and had done boffo on DVD, it would be easier to get my next film made,'' Lee says. ''And I found out that that wasn't the case. Now, if I want to do another bank heist film? Man, you wouldn't believe how many bank heist films I got offered after Inside Man. So frustration set in. I said 'F--- it, let me go to Italy.'''
NEXT PAGE: ''There was a certain day where, if my good friend [Disney Studios chairman] Dick Cook had not called and said, 'We're in,' the plug was going to be pulled.''
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