The man inside

The big shock of this year's Oscars was Crash scooping the Best Picture award

It was even more of a surprise for Spike Lee fans, who must have wondered why the judges were swayed by Paul Haggis's examination of racial tensions in the US when in 1990 they virtually ignored Lee's incomparably better Do The Right Thing.

Lee, however, is keeping any thoughts he may have on the matter to himself. What did you think of Crash? I ask, hoping for one of his famously polemical retorts. He just smiles and says: 'It was all right. I like Do The Right Thing better - but I'm biased.'

In fact, Lee seems remarkably chilled out about everything. Maybe it was his lunchtime massage. Or maybe it's because he's 50 next year and, having ridden out the critical highs and lows of more than two decades in movies, he can now categorically say he changed the face of US film-making - regardless of what the Academy might think.

His latest film, Inside Man, confounds expectation yet again. After the contemplative, post-9/11 drama The 25th Hour and the universally panned lesbian impregnation tale She Hate Me, Lee has finally gone Hollywood, with a big budget (almost £30million) heist movie.

'It's not really a conscious decision to go in this direction - I just liked the script,' explains Lee, who insists that Russell Gewirtz's debut screenplay was as instrumental in snaring Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster and Clive Owen as his own presence behind the camera.

There are, of course, still elements in Inside Man that are pure Spike. There are moments of quintessential Lee humour and a pointed dig at 50 Cent (Lee has said of gangsta rap: 'Thinking like that is genocide').

But above all, there's Lee's sense of a chaotic, diverse New York City permeating this intense stand-off between Owen's brilliant bank robber, Washington's troubled cop and Foster's shadowy, deal-making power broker.

Plus, in a post-9/11 world, there are flashes of the difficulties New York has in dealing with that diversity.

'How we deal with a specific element of diversity,' Lee corrects. 'So-called terrorists. Most Americans don't even know the difference between Sikhs and Arabs. They just call them towel-heads and that's that; they're terrorists.'

He is also keen to, as he puts it, 'bow in deference to the films of the past'. Lee holds a cinema study class for cast and crew before the cameras roll on all his films: this time, the programme included Dog Day Afternoon, Midnight Cowboy and The Thomas Crown Affair.

He's also well-known for nurturing talent in front of and behind the camera: Inside Man sees British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor in a substantial role as Washington's sidekick.