Mookie and Buggin’-Out again collectively once more. We like to see it. Filmmaker, artist, tastemaker, and thespian Spike Lee has reunited with “College Daze” and “Do The Proper Factor” brethren Giancarlo Esposito in a current spot for Fiat’s new all-electric Fiat 500e. The industrial is entitled “Italy in America” and sees Esposito, whose father hails from Naples, introducing Lee to “la dolce vita”. In a current interview with The Hollywood Reporter marking the reunion, Lee and Esposito mirrored on their friendship and collaborations, their shared appreciation for Italian tradition, and numerous movie tasks on strategy.
“This can be a pure match,” Lee stated of working with Esposito on the venture after years aside. “Once you’re shut, particularly on this trade, there could be Spike the love, however there are schedules and delays that forestall working collectively once more. However we’ve a bond. It’s been introduced that I’m going to do my new movie with [Denzel Washington], the fifth one after ‘Mo’ Higher Blues’, ‘Malcolm X’, ‘He Obtained Recreation’, ‘Inside Man’. ‘Inside Man’ was 16 years in the past, however for Denzel and I, it was like yesterday. That’s the identical factor right here with my brother.”
Talking on how his mother and father met and fell in love whereas working on the Teatro di San Carlo in Napoli and the way he was raised in Rome, Esposito added, “This [commercial] was a no brainer for me to signify my Italian people who find themselves simply completely unbelievable human beings and really nice with every thing from cars to leather-based purses to music. To me, once more, they signify the most effective elements of me.”
“The Lees, we had been the primary Black household to maneuver right into a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York known as Cobble Hill,” Lee stated when requested about his personal connection to Italian tradition. “It was largely Italian People, proper by the dock. The dock staff purchased properties in Cobble Hill, so we had been the primary. A variety of the stuff you see within the movie ‘Do the Proper Factor’, and later in ‘Summer time of Sam’, got here from my experiences rising up being the one Black household in an Italian American neighborhood in Brooklyn.”
Because the dialog turned in the direction of Giancarlo’s involvement in Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming sci-fi epic “Megalopolis,” Esposito known as it, “Actually an unbelievable expertise. One of many highlights of my profession. I labored with Francis again on ‘The Cotton Membership’. Working with him on ‘Megalopolis‘ all these years later simply confirmed his imaginative and prescient for the world. It’s a really, very particular movie. I discover him to be a genius.”
Watch the Spike Lee-directed spot for Fiat under.