Director Spike Lee has waded into the ongoing controversy surrounding Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago pastor whose provocative statements have proved a thorn in the side of Democrat frontrunner Barack Obama. Lee advises the preacher to do the right thing and keep quiet. "The more he opens his mouth, the more damage he does," he told the Guardian yesterday.

For good measure, Lee hinted at a political conspiracy behind Wright's recent, contentious attempts to justify his remarks. "It looks like he's being paid to keep talking," he said.

Wright has attracted criticism for sermons in which he invited God to "damn America" and claimed the US was "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today". This has prompted renewed media scrutiny of Obama's own views. The Illinois senator was a long-term member of the pastor's church. Wright officiated at Obama's wedding and at the baptism of his two children.

While Obama has attempted to distance himself from the pastor's views, the row shows little signs of dying down. Wright was accused of upping the ante earlier this week, telling a press conference that media attacks on him were also an attack on African-American church culture and warning Obama, "I'm coming after you."

"Jeremiah Wight needs to be quiet," Lee said yesterday. "If he loves Obama he needs to shut up right now. It makes me question his motives for talking. I'm starting to wonder whether somebody has been contributing to the building funds of his church. Seriously."

Lee, whose best-known films have frequently tackled the issue of race relations in the US, believes that Obama had hoped to survive the presidential contest without talking about race. "But now he's been forced to - by a combination of Jeremiah Wright and the Clintons," he said.

The director of Malcolm X and When the Levees Broke is an ardent Obama supporter. "I love him," he said. "He's a unifier. He's the one who can get us out of the situation we're in today, because this country is going to hell in a handcart."

Lee will be at the Cannes film festival next week as jury president of the Babelgum online film festival. He will also be promoting his latest feature, Miracle at St Anna, a story of black American soldiers in the second world war. He compares America's international standing now with its high water mark in the mid-1940s. "The way the US is viewed around the world is at its lowest point ever," he claimed. "But Obama will change everything."