Spike Lee is about to release his latest movie BlacKkKlansman this week, and he dropped a gem about the film in a recent interview: an unreleased Prince song will be part of the film’s soundtrack.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, the award-winning director said that the movie’s end credits will be accompanied by Prince’s cover of the Negro spiritual “Mary Don’t You Weep.”
“I knew that I needed an end-credits song,” Lee said in the interview. ‘I’ve become very close with Troy Carter, one of the executives at Spotify [and a Prince estate advisor]. So I invited Troy to a private screening. And after, he said, ‘Spike, I got the song.’ And that was ‘Mary Don’t You Weep,’ which had been recorded on cassette in the mid-Eighties.”
Lee continued: “Prince wanted me to have that song, I don’t care what nobody says. My brother Prince wanted me to have that song. For this film. There’s no other explanation to me. This cassette is in the back of the vaults. In Paisley Park. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it’s discovered? Nah-ah. That ain’t an accident.”
BlacKkKlansman recently premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in France to a 10-minute standing ovation. The project is based on a true story in which a Black police officer teams up with his white colleague to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan.
The film premieres on August 10.
