Spike Lee

The guy on the phone says he's Spike Lee, but we're not so sure. Isn't the hugely talented artist/firebrand behind polemics like Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X supposed to be cantankerous, intense, and angry? Because this fellow sounds downright...giddy. ''It's been a big year,'' he says with undeniable pride. ''A very special year.''

In March, the director released Inside Man, a tidy bank-heist yarn about a crook (Clive Owen), a cop (Denzel Washington), and a shady businesswoman (Jodie Foster) that became his first blockbuster. ''It made $184 million worldwide,'' Lee says (the film grossed $88.5 million domestically). ''But it was not calculated. I was not like, Oh, s---, I need to do something commercial!'' Maybe not, but suddenly Lee is hot again, and being flooded with scripts. ''[It's as if] I've been rediscovered.'' He chuckles, ''Like I went away somewhere!''

But don't worry about Spike going soft. His second film in 2006, August's sweeping Hurricane Katrina documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, proved that the director still has a taste for confrontation. ''I did it as an enraged citizen,'' he says of the HBO project. ''More than that, though, I wanted the people of New Orleans to testify for the whole world to hear.'' Truly, no other document in any medium presented that tragedy and all its grief, frustration, and ire in more vast and vivid detail. Yet Lee is far from done with the subject: He hopes to return to the Big Easy for a TV drama that is currently in development for NBC Universal. Also in the works are an Inside Man sequel, a drama about L.A.'s Rodney King riots, and a birthday: his big five-oh this March. ''I'm a more mature human being,'' he says. ''But I still feel young. Kurosawa was making films at 85, so I'm not looking to slow down. Not ready to slow down at all.'' —Joshua Rich