Spike Lee’s Tribute to Prince at the Oscars

The day that Prince died in April 2016, Spike Lee threw a celebration of his friend’s life. On a brick townhouse-lined street in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, hundreds of people gathered in the street, as Mr. Lee blasted song after song from the steps of his building. He played deep cuts and greatest hits, as neighbors wept and sang along into the night.

Nearly three years later, Mr. Lee is honoring Prince Rogers Nelson again, bringing a man he calls his brother into the spotlight as he celebrates his movie “BlacKkKlansman.”

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On the Academy Awards red carpet tonight, Mr. Lee wore a custom-made gold, diamond and opal necklace in the form of the symbol Prince adopted as his name. It was made by the jewelry designer Amedeo Scognamiglio, and was paired with an all-purple Ozwald Boateng suit and gold Jordans made by Tinker Hatfield (and commissioned for Mr. Lee by Michael Jordan himself).

“I told Ozwald to make my pants high-waters so they see the Jordans,” Mr. Lee said in an interview a few days before the Oscars, in remarks adorned by profanity and punctuated by excited laughter. “I don’t care what nobody’s wearing. I win the Oscar on the red carpet. Men, women, I don’t care if they’re wearing 15-inch heels. They can’t be messing with the Jordans I’m going to be wearing. I’m going to be as clean as the board of health. I’m going to be sharp as a razor.”

Mr. Scognamiglio first met Mr. Lee about a year ago and the two have become friends; the director can often be seen sporting the artisan’s oversized jewelry.

“My business partner and I, we like to design very chunky pieces, big looks,” Mr. Scognamiglio said. “We don’t do dainty.”

Still, when he was making Mr. Lee’s necklace — the outsized 18-carat gold pendant is framed in diamonds, and has a 17-carat fire opal at its center — he thought it might be running too big. He called the director to ask his opinion. “Make it bigger,” he said Mr. Lee said. “Make it bigger.”

Mr. Lee and Prince first met when the musician, impressed by the director’s 1986 debut feature film, “She’s Gotta Have it,” flew him out to Paisley Park in Minnesota, around the time that Prince was working on the film “Graffiti Bridge.” There was an immediate sense of understanding between the two men. They remained close, despite not seeing each other very often.

“It might be six, eight months before we talked but when we talked it was like, we see each other,” Mr. Lee said.

The last time he saw his friend was after a performance of the musical “Hamilton,” Mr. Lee’s seventh time seeing it. After the show, Mr. Lee said he went backstage and cast members told him that they were going to an after-party hosted by Prince.

“It was a book party, so he invited the whole cast of ‘Hamilton,’” Mr. Lee said of Prince. “So I get there and it’s just him and a D.J. And Damaris Lewis, who was dancing. And that was the last time I saw him. We sat and talked like an hour and then he got up on stage and played for like another two hours and he was giving me shout-outs on stage, stuff like that.”

Mr. Lee believes that the musician’s spirit helped him to find the version of “Mary Don’t You Weep,” sung by Prince, that plays at the end of “BlacKkKlansman,” as scenes from the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., conclude the film. (The film represents the director’s first chance to win an Academy Award for either Best Picture or Best Director.)

The song was recovered by Troy Carter, a friend of Mr. Lee’s who is an adviser to the Prince estate (and who also used to manage Lady Gaga). Mr. Carter called Mr. Lee and told him that among the thousands of disorganized cassettes that the musician had left behind, one had been found that featured just Prince and a piano.

“I said to myself, this is it,” Mr. Lee said. “What could be more fitting than to have a Negro spiritual sung by Prince, just him and the piano in this movie.”

He does not think that finding the tape was a coincidence.

“It was not a mistake,” he said. “Prince wanted me to have that song in BlacKkKlansman. People can say I’m crazy, smoking crack, which I don’t. Or eating the mushrooms, which I don’t. I’m telling you, on my mother’s grave, he wanted me to have this song.”