Spike Lee's Oldboy is and isn't a remake. Lee and screenwriter Mark Protosevitch are up-front about drawing directly from the 2003 South Korean thriller. But that film was originally a loose adaptation of a comic by Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi. Lee and Protosevitch significantly altered the story of a callous businessman (Josh Brolin) on a quest to find out why he was imprisoned in a hotel for 20 years. We talked to Lee last week about his approach to the material, movie violence, spirituality, faked space landings, and if we'll ever see an Inside Man 2.

ESQUIRE.COM: I was re-watching Girl 6 the other day...

SPIKE LEE: Why were you doing that?! [Both laugh]

ESQ: I like it! I was struck by the way you shot Theresa Randle and her clients with different kinds of cameras. And there's a line — I think she's talking to your character — where she says, "Oh, it is reality, these conversations that I have." So those conversations take place in a separate, but parallel reality. I thought of that as I watched Oldboy because it's a separate version with small, but noticeable differences. How did you approach this material?

SL: Thank you for the question, but we have to start at the beginning. Before Josh Brolin signed his name on the dotted line, he went to [Chan-wook] Park, the director of the original Oldboy, to get his blessing. And Park gave it to him, but he said, "Please make your own film." That was my thinking from the beginning. So when Josh told me that story, I said, "Let's go." That's why I don't use the word "remake," I use the word "re-interpretation." Because there is a way to respect the original source, and still not make it the same. John Coltrane did that with "My Favorite Things." We've heard people sing "My Funny Valentine" before, but Miles Davis plays it differently. We've heard eight trillion versions of "The Star-Spangled Banner," but when Jimi Hendrix did it — Whitney Houston, Marvin Gaye — it's different. And that's the mindset we had with this film.

ESQ: One of the best examples of how it's "re-interpretation" instead of "remake" is the famous hammer fight scene. Yours goes up and down to two separate floors rather than across the one in the original. How did you pre-visualize shooting that?

SL: Right. It was very simple [laughs]. It just couldn't be on one level. We have three levels. We did that with a Technocrane. Josh worked his ass off with the stunt guys for many weeks. That camera move was very, very, very, very intricate. So that is a great example. Thank you for that. I wanna use that!

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ESQ: I'm really curious about the violence in the film. I feel, in some ways, it's actually more explicit than in the original film, which is surprising. Do you think there's a difference between the effect of CGI and squib-pack blood?

SL: No, I don't know that that's true. I'm very careful about how I portray violence in my films. I do believe that violence, especially violent video games, are not a good thing for young kids. Josh feels the same way. So we were careful about the way we portrayed violence. At the same time, we didn't want to... move away from it. But we did not want it to be cartoonish.

ESQ: The most brutal scene in the film is also maybe the least explicitly violent, and that's the ending. In light of the earlier scene where we see that sign that says, "Guns don't kill, people do," or when Joe [Brolin's character] mocks his boss for being "primitive," the ending seems to be Joe realizing who he really is. Is that fair?

SL: You got some insights here, that's good! [Laughs] Well... I think that there's a thing called atonement. And when you've been locked up for 20 years, you've got a lot of time on your hands, a lot of time to think about your missteps, your faults, your errors, and be honest with yourself. And at the end of the film, he feels that he must atone — for the person he was before he got locked up.

ESQ: You don't think that there's a kind of continuity between Joe before, and Joe later, in that his actions still define him? He's still that person, just now he sees that, and chooses to stay...

SL: Mm, I disagree. He's changed. He has to change. If he didn't change, he would not have made that decision at the end of the film. And another reason why I think he's changed: Because now, he's at peace. He's at peace because... Well, I don't want to give away the whole thing, but he's at peace.

ESQ: You used the word "atonement." In a lot of your films, religion is represented by troubled men of faith, like Ossie Davis in Jungle Fever or Reg E. Cathey in Red Hook Summer. These men are defined by their hang-ups, their insecurities. Does Joe's journey have a spiritual dimension to it?

SL: Oh, yes, definitely so. He runs the gamut. And I'd like to add to your thesis, sir, if I may. A spine to my films that's become more evident to me is that many are about the choices people make, and the reverberations of those choices. You go this way, or that way, and either way, there's going to be consequences.

ESQ: You put the question "Who is your enemy?" in my mind by showing Joe in an early scene making a list of people that might have imprisoned him. And that's mainly because in the background, there's footage from 9/11, and there's also the "Mission Accomplished" speech playing in the background. And at the end of the film, Sharlto Copley's character says, "It's amazing what people believe when they see it on TV." Do people experience major news, or reality in general, differently, especially now that the Internet and social media specifically are as pervasive as they are?

SL: It wasn't a great movie, but there's a movie called Capricorn One...

ESQ: The Peter Hyams film.

SL: The premise is amazing: They fake a Mars landing. I had a great-aunt... We called her "sister," my grandmother's sister. And we were all watching TV on the day when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. We said, "Sister, there's a man on TV, and he's on the moon!" She said, "There ain't no man on the moon, I don't care what's on the television!" [Both laugh] "A man is not on the moon!" And with technology today, it's not hard to fake something, like with H.G. Wells. It can be done again.

ESQ: My roommate's going to kill me unless I ask you this, so: Any chance of an Inside Man 2?

SL: I want to make it! I want to make it.

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Simon Abrams Simon Abrams is a film critic and author based in New York.

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