A celebrated auteur helms a Netflix feature which has extensive scenes set in the life of its main characters several decades earlier. It’s both Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” and Spike Lee’s upcoming “Da 5 Bloods,” but one big point of difference though is that Lee will not be employing digital de-aging technology in his movie.
“Da 5 Bloods” follows a group of Black Vietnam veterans in the modern-day who go back to the Southeast Asian country to honor their fallen leader and also maybe find a buried cache of gold they hid along the way back when they served.
Lee’s film frequently cuts back and forth between the present time and the Vietnam era. Without a major budget for de-aging, Lee decided to use the over 50s actors as themselves in the flashbacks without the use of CG or make-up enhancement. He tells The New York Times: “I was not getting $100 million to de-age our guys. I think we were able to turn a negative into a positive.”
The film also has Delroy Lindo playing an avid Trump supporter in the movie, not something you see much of in films focused on People of Color. Lee explains the inclusion: “My mother taught me at an early age that black folks are not a monolithic group. In order to make the story dramatic, I said, ‘What would be the most extreme thing we could do with one of the characters?'”.
Lindo says it was a problem for him at first and he even tried to talk Spike out of it and just make him a conservative character. However: ” I think there are some black people who are so deeply disgruntled, because of very real disenfranchisement, that they’re ready to believe someone like Trump might be able to help them.”
“Da 5 Bloods” arrives on Netflix on June 12th.
