It’s a cool June day in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and seemingly everybody on DeKalb Avenue wants to say hi to Spike Lee. A woman smiles and waves as Lee and I squeeze past her flock of tiny children. People middle-aged or older and of various races—all of them, from the looks of it, old-school, no-bullshit New York types—nod our way. A couple of hipsterish white guys smile hello as we cross the street. A barkeep waves.

Lee, 61, breezes through it all, talking and walking at an athletic pace. He’s got on Nike track pants and a red-and-black jacket emblazoned with the name of his production company, 40 Acres & a Mule, whose South Elliott Place headquarters we’re headed to. We pass Fort Greene Park’s rolling hillocks, specked with sunbathers, Frisbee nerds, and the occasional kissing couple—most of them young, white. A black postman, face beaming as he crosses our path, waves and says, “Hey, how ya doing, Spike?” in a chipper, bushy-tailed voice.

“You’ll remember the park if you’ve seen the movie,” Lee says. He’s talking She’s Gotta Have It, his provocative debut feature from 1986 about the sexual liberation of a young black woman named Nola Darling. “Shot that in 12 days,” he says. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

When we meet, he’s 10 days into a 47-day shoot for Season 2 of Netflix’s TV adaptation of the movie. It’s filming just a few blocks behind us, in front of what was once Lee’s middle school. I came to talk to Lee about his new work. Somehow, I got a brief tour of his life—marking a 34-year career arc from the crisp, stylish black-and-white Nola Darling of the 80s to the 5K episodic version you can stream on your cell phone—with a quick detour through Lee’s adolescence besides. Back in 1985, Lee, three years out of N.Y.U. film school, shot the original for $175,000. The new show likely burns through more than that in a single day, if last season’s budget is any indication, a sign of Netflix’s deep pockets but also an indication of how much has changed in the last three decades in Fort Greene, certainly, and especially for Spike Lee.

Lee has made more than 20 features, including consensus classics like Malcolm X, whizbang moneymakers like Inside Man, overlooked curiosities like Girl 6, and contentious political agitations like Bamboozled. He’s made flashy studio pictures and crowd-funded art-house fodder, epic documentaries, Nike commercials, music videos, and teleplays, TV shows, TV movies, short films, a video game.

He’s lost money, made money, harnessed public outrage, caused public outrage. This summer, Lee will release a new movie, BlacKkKlansman, that’s poised to accomplish any and every combination of the above. Set in the 70s, the film spins the at times wickedly funny but ultimately terrifying story of Ron Stallworth, the first black detective in the history of the Colorado Springs Police Department—and the first, as far as Lee knows, to go undercover in the K.K.K.

Lee promoting his first film, She’s Gotta Have It, 1986. From The New York Daily News Archive/Getty Images.

The premise sounds like a comedy sketch—specifically, Dave Chappelle’s Clayton Bigsby, the blind black man who becomes a white supremacist. Unlike Bigsby, Stallworth is very much real, and so are the Klan members with whom he brushes shoulders, chief among them the leader of the organization: David Duke. It’s a story that, dancing along the knife’s edge of realism and satire, demands a director of great style and even greater imagination. If it hadn’t been a Spike Lee Joint, you’d probably cite him as an influence without even seeing it, so squarely does it tie into his artistic identity.