Deep dive
Partners in fighting crime: David Jason (Jeff Goldblum) and Russell Stevens (Laurence Fishburne) stride out;
Allstar, Criterion Collection
EVEN THOUGH BILL Duke has notched up more than his fair share of memorable moments as an actor — he’s sweaty and unhinged in Predator, and his delivery of the line, “There’s one thing I don’t understand… the thing I don’t understand is every motherfucking word you’re saying”, in response to Terence Stamp’s Cockney ranting in The Limey, is a hall of fame moment — he always knew that he would need to have a back-up plan. And that back-up plan was directing.
All through the ’80s, when he wasn’t being stabbed by Arnold Schwarzenegger or killed by an alien, Duke was racking up quite the career directing episodes of TV. “I was the first Black director on Dallas,” he says. “There were not a lot of Black directors at that time doing major features.” But Duke kept plugging away. In 1991, he made his feature directorial debut with A Rage In Harlem, and that put him in the running to direct a Michael Tolkin and Henry Bean script that was then pretty hot. It was based on a book by former DEA agent Michael Levine, and had the unwieldy title of Deep Cover: The Inside Story Of How DEA Infighting, Incompetence And Subterfuge Lost Us The Biggest Battle Of The Drug War. In the end, the film was simply called Deep Cover, a film in which simplicity reigns, and which is now considered to be one of the great modern thrillers. And much of that is down to Duke, who took the source material and ran with it in a way that nobody quite expected.