Once Hollywood's enfant terrible, Spike Lee is now directing blockbusters and TV shows. But, he tells Stephen Armstrong, he is still fighting for black cinema

The current thinking has it that Spike Lee has mellowed. This, after all, is the man who once argued so much with an interviewer from US Esquire that the magazine ran its piece under the headline "Spike Lee hates your cracker ass". He approached conversations as combat and Hollywood as the shyster promoter, overseeing the big-money bout for its tidy 10 per cent. At the age of 50, however, he has to all appearances made his peace with the system. His heist flick Inside Man (2006), a mainstream offering starring Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster, took a healthy $200m worldwide. He started working in television - shooting the pilot for James Woods's legal drama Shark, among other projects - and in June he announced he would be directing Clive Owen in a Broadway revival of the PoW play Stalag 17.

"You get older and realise you can't rant and rave 24/7," he says, smiling, when we meet at a New York hotel. "You have to pick and choose what you rant and rave about." In contrast to former labours of love such as Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X, Lee's recent work has had a more practical bent; Ron Howard offered him the director's chair on Shark after the success of Inside Man, and he was happy simply to turn up and take the money. "I don't mind being a director for pilots," he shrugs. "You're paid very well, you set the style, the look, the tone, and you leave."

Even within the confines of this network genre show, however, you can see his expert hand at work. The pilot feels edgier than subsequent episodes, though the scripting and performan ces are essentially the same. When I point this out, Lee seems slightly surprised. "TV people are much more hands-on, especially in the edit," he says slowly, thinking aloud. "You have your cut and then they say, 'Thank you very much. We'll see you later' - because they want to cut, cut, cut every millisecond. They're paranoid that if you hold on a shot for more than five seconds someone's going to switch the channel."

Nevertheless, Lee has found it hard to get his own TV projects off the ground. Around the same time as he was shooting Shark, he was talking to NBC about a drama called NOLA (New Orleans, Louisiana). He thought he'd written a poignant, relevant and funny script; NBC felt otherwise. "They never really tell you the reason," he sighs. "You never get the real reason."

He is full of praise for HBO, which funded and backed his epic, post-Katrina documentary about New Orleans, When the Levees Broke, which is still picking up awards almost a year after it was made. "HBO gave me wonderful freedom," he says, sounding proud. "It would not have been the same animal without them. The profanity, the images, the way we went after Bush and Condoleezza Rice - studios and networks would have changed all of that."

Once the conversation turns to New Orleans, the mellow Spike starts to melt away, and it becomes obvious that Shelton, the angry kid from Brooklyn who earned his nickname for being so damn feisty, is still lurking underneath. "What really gets me is that Levees was pretty much all the follow-up reporting there has been." He leans forward, sighs again and rubs his hands across his face. "I talk about it as much as I can and we're going to do a follow-up, but that's about it. I was in Venice for the film festival when Katrina hit and I spent the time in my hotel zipping back and forth between BBC and CNN. It was a great education. I've seen overseas how the war is covered differently. And a lot of that BBC footage ended up in the documentary; that stuff was shown. But they did not want those images to be seen on American television - the same way you are never going to see coffins coming back from Iraq. The US government, in cahoots with the media, determines what the public can see and what they can't see."

I wonder to what extent the situation might change if Barack Obama became the first black president of the United States. Lee pauses. "It's interesting that in the last Democrat debate New Orleans never came up," he says finally. "It didn't even come up." But would a black president make a difference? "A black president, or Obama?" he shoots back. "I mean, Condoleezza Rice could be president - she's African American. And that would be horrible." OK, I concede, I meant Obama. He smiles, enjoying his own footwork, then relents. "Obama has the following, but does he have the experience? He can certainly speak well. But look, I'm not going to come out and endorse anyone at this time."

Lee clearly feels he can't just line up with black America, for better or for worse. For instance, he is annoyed that virtually the only black star who spoke out about the government's handling of the New Orleans disaster was the rapper Kanye West. "I would say what [West] did was a heroic act," he says. "It was spontaneous. There were a lot of other people who had the opportunity, and who had microphones and a camera in their face but who chose to stay mum. I think that is indicative of the climate in the US - people are afraid to speak out, because the administration's knee-jerk reaction is to brand them unpatriotic.

"Many people have not been sophisticated enough to see past that and are being too careful what they say, for fear that it's going to affect their career, and their bottom line."

The son of a jazz musician and a schoolteacher, Lee grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in a home where freedom of expression was valued intensely. His anger at America's 21st-century creative lockdown is fuelled by the fear and silence from people who ought to be role models. "Today's media are used as a narcotic to put people into stupors," he says. "I mean, the most popular show right now is American Idol." He grins as he makes a sly aside: "I guess we could blame you British for sending us Simon Cowell, just like you sent us all your religious nuts."

Lee's greatest disappointment is that black cinema has not come closer to fulfilling its potential. "There is the exception of Denzel [Wash ington], or Will [Smith], or people like that, but for the most part if you are a screenwriter or an African-American director you are relegated to these ghettos: hip-hop shoot-'em-ups or lowbrow romantic comedy. It is very hard to find films that show the breadth of the African-American experience. That's why a lot of these films contain coonery and buffoonery."

Two decades into his career, Lee is still almost single-handedly trying to change that. He is trying to find funding for a new adaptation, announced in July, of James McBride's novel Miracle at St Anna, which looks at the role played by African-American soldiers who fought the German army in Tuscany during the Second World War. "This is the paradox," he told a press conference as he launched the project - "black people who were fighting for democracy but at the same time were second-class citizens at home."

He is clear about the reasons for the dearth of big-bucks black film talent, but torn about the solution. Recently, he had a James Brown biopic project turned down by every major studio. "It's the trilogy that has not been made," he says, laughing bitterly - "first Jackie Robinson, then Joe Louis, now James Brown. For me, it has been a wake-up call. I thought after the worldwide success of Inside Man it would be a little easier to make what I want, but I was mistaken. It all goes back to the gatekeepers. There are very few people in Hollywood - and these individuals are predominantly white males - who decide what you are going to see. And it's a problem. Many times when I go to these meetings, the only black person I see is the brother at the gate who lets me in. Even today, I will sit in meetings about James Brown and I'm the only black person in the room. These people in Hollywood don't see James Brown as the universal figure that he is; they only see him as the subject for a black film."

What puzzles him is how to get around these gatekeepers. Dreamgirls, he explains, got made only because of David Geffen - what DG wants, DG gets. Ali got made because it starred Will Smith, who is one of the biggest stars in the world. And so, Lee says, he is working it all out. For one thing, he's looking at means of finance from outside Hollywood, and thinking of setting up a film fund. "Lots of people are doing it with less track record than I have," he says with a shrug. The other way is to play the politician. "OK, so I shouldn't have had Denzel in Malcolm X talking about the white blue-eyed devils," he smiles. "Then maybe I could have got Jackie Rob inson, Joe Louis and James Brown made."

Maybe that is why people are under the impression Spike Lee has mellowed. He has learned to talk the talk, to shake the hands and take the cash from network TV to keep things ticking over. But those who love the artful polemics at the heart of Do the Right Thing and 25th Hour shouldn't worry too much. Lee is about as mellow as the Pacific Ocean: on a good day, it's as calm as a millpond, but when the wind starts blowing, you'd better head for the shore.

Spike Lee's pilot episode of "Shark" goes out on UKTV Gold on 24 September (10pm)

Spike Lee: the CV

1957 Born Shelton Jackson Lee in Atlanta, Georgia to Bill Lee, a jazz musician, and Jacquelyn Shelton Lee, a teacher. The family relocates first to Chicago and then Brooklyn, New York.

1982 Graduates with a Master's in Fine Arts from the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and soon establishes his 40 Acres and a Mule production company.

1986 His debut feature film, She's Gotta Have It, appears. Grosses $7m at the box office.

1989 Do the Right Thing earns Lee new critical kudos and two Oscar nominations. As well as producing, directing and writing, Lee stars as the pizza delivery man Mookie.

1992 Lee's biopic Malcolm X is released to great acclaim. Warner Brothers had initially approached Norman Jewison to direct, but Lee got the contract after campaigning for it on the grounds that a black director had to tell the story.

1999 Lee jokes that the president of the National Rifle Association, Charlton Heston, "should be shot". His remarks are quoted out of context and he becomes the target of widespread criticism.

2006 Release of the documentary When the Levees Broke: a Requiem in Four Acts, the first of his films not to be dubbed "A Spike Lee Joint".

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