Spike Lee Waffles on Violent Scene in Latest Film

It's a case of art imitating... well, other art.

Famed director Spike Lee (Do The Right Thing, She Hate Me) created a video game within his recent film Inside Man as social commentary on just how violent games have become. Then, in a fit of pre-release publicity, Lee expressed concern that someone might rip him off by taking the bloody bits and placing them into a real-world game.

"We found this small outfit that does animation and we thought of the most horrific things we could think of in a video game," he told Ireland On-Line

"We haven't seen a video game with the grenade in the mouth (that explodes). And the sad thing is somebody is probably gonna make a game out of it and take that as inspiration."

Lee is obviously not a fan of the GameCube remake of Resident Evil, then. Or, perhaps Turok's memorable Cerebral Bore weapon.

The director's quandary poses an interesting question about the perception of games as compared to other forms of media. Lee's quote implies that we get to see the grenade-in-mouth incident onscreen. So does Spike believe that this is perfectly suitable content for a film, but not a game? And is this attitude shared by other film directors?

For additional details on how Spike Lee's fictitious game, "Gangstas iz Genocide" was designed, check out this excellent piece by Sheigh Crabtree in the Hollywood Reporter.

(A nod to fellow GP correspondent Andrew Eisen for the game examples)

-reporting from the U.K., GamePolitics correspondent Mark Kelly