Spike Lee on Bringing She’s Gotta Have It—and a Gentrified Brooklyn—to Netflix

“I have a love-hate relationship with New York City, and the love will always exceed the hate,” he tells Vanity Fair. “There are pros and cons gentrification in Fort Greene now, where I grew up. Garbage is picked up regularly, there’s a police presence, and the public schools are a lot better than when I went. The question is always: why did the neighborhood have to change for that to happen? And, then, the thing that is not really probed is: what happened when people got displaced?”

In the new Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It—an adaptation of Lee’s original 1986 film—the updated borough isn’t marked only by more upscale stores and the lack of graffiti on the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument in Fort Greene Park. The show’s main character, Nola Darling (DeWanda Wise), has had a bit of an upgrade as well.

Sure, she’s still an up-and-coming artist who isn’t shy about carrying on sexual relationships with three different men. But the Nola of 2017 is in a stronger position than 80s Nola, more confident that she doesn’t need a man to be successful, and better able to fend off the pleas of financier Jamie Overstreet (Lyriq Bent), vain model-photographer Greer Childs (Cleo Anthony), and funny bike messenger Mars Blackmon (Anthony Ramos), all of whom want to be her one and only.

That point of view isn’t an accident: women are in the majority on the series’ writing staff, including Lee’s wife Tonya Lewis Lee, his sister Joie Lee (who was also in the original movie and plays Nola’s mother in the series), and his daughter Satchel Lee. In fact, Tonya is the reason Lee resurrected his first feature film to begin with.

“She watches a lot of television. She thought that there’d be a place for it. So, I have to give her all the credit. I did not see it at all,” he says. Once she gave him the idea, though, “I didn’t have any doubts. I said, ‘Eureka! Let’s go.’”

Lee wrote the first and last episodes of Season 1, which are the ones that are most closely related to the film. But for the rest, he was open to suggestions, though he had the final say on story and dialogue. “We definitely did not want to be charged with the criticism that this whole thing was totally through the male gaze, which we talk about in the series,” he says. “A lot of the great stuff came out of the discussions with the writers in the room. People were encouraged to speak their mind, and it’s like on my film sets: if I like it, we do it, and if I don’t like it, [we] weren’t doing it.”

Because of the expanded landscape of a 10-episode series, he was able to augment Nola’s universe—exploring her work and desire to make it in the avant-garde Brooklyn art scene, as well as use her skills to anonymously respond when she’s the victim of a sexual assault. She also has more friends on the series: she’s best buds with the uber-sophisticated art curator Clorinda Bradford (Margot Bingham), and finds a new pal in Shemekka Epps (Chyna Layne), who waitresses at a club in Brownsville called the Hot n Trot.

Shemekka wants to make more money by dancing. Unfortunately, her boss, Winnie Win (Fat Joe), tells her she needs a bit more of a backside to get on stage. She debates whether she should get cut-rate fat injections, one of the writers’ room suggestions Lee ran with.

“Women are dying all over the world because of these bootleg, back-alley butt injections,” he says. “It’s on a bigger level where society, media, has with their power, and also some women’s lack of a knowledge of esteem, [where they] feel this could be fixed with a bigger butt.”

Wise, who was a drama undergrad at N.Y.U. —where Lee teaches—came to the director’s attention via some of his film students, but has also had starring turns in recent shows like Shots Fired and Underground. Her trajectory mirrors her character’s: “[Nola] is moving more fully into the woman that she believes she is. She’s confronted with just how transparent she is in her feelings, and her exchanges, and her interactions,” Wise says. “She is not allowing herself to be sidetracked, or thrown off course, whether it be by the men in her life, or her family, or her friends, or a literal attack, or an attack on her art.”

Since Wise appears in virtually every scene, Lee, who directed all 10 episodes of She’s Gotta Have It, trusted her enough to give her extensive sequences in which she says nothing at all. “There were moments where I was doing Spike Lee shit, and I knew I was doing Spike Lee shit, and it was the best,” she says. “Like, sitting on a stool and having them rig the rotation, and responding to a song. There are Spike Lee iconic cinematic forms, isms, that I had the opportunity to embody and actually experience.”

Another aspect an expanded runtime allowed Lee to explore was Nola’s relationship with Opal Gilstrap (Ilfenesh Hadera), a character who also appears in the film. While both versions of Opal are gay, Movie Opal never gets romantic with Nora; in the series, we find out not only that the two once had a long-term relationship, but that Opal is one of the few lovers Nola was willing to commit herself to.

“That film was from a male point of view—my viewpoint. So, I was concentrating on Nola and her three male lovers. I knew that I didn’t have time to add somebody else in the mix,” says Lee. Once the series got the go-ahead, though, he knew the first thing he wanted to expand was the Nola-Opal relationship. Given how taboo same-sex relationships were in the African-American community in the 80s, did he find that it was easier to go there in the present day? “Of course,” he says. “But was it, I mean . . . I wasn’t against it for Nola to be bisexual back then. We just didn’t have time for it—time or the money.”

Altogether, the series is a bit of a different look for Lee, though fans of his films will find comfort in its stylized dialogue, eclectic music selection (annotated with flashes of album covers after a song plays), and loving look at his hometown—even if it’s changed since the 80s. Wise put it this way: “My favorite Spike Lee is Brooklyn Spike Lee, and this is a return to Brooklyn Spike Lee. I feel like if you have seen the original, or you’re a Spike Lee fan, then we’ve got your back.”