Outside Man.(Spike Lee)

One morning last June, Spike Lee arrived early at the Sony Pictures Studios, in Culver City, California, to record the score for his new feature, "Miracle at St. Anna," a Second World War film about the U.S. Army's 92nd Division, an all-black unit that battled the Nazis during the Italian campaign. Lee was joined in the studio's control room by his music-recording team, six men and one woman. A large window overlooked the cavernous soundstage where Judy Garland recorded "Over the Rainbow," in 1938, when the lot belonged to M-G-M. A ninety-five-piece orchestra that Lee had engaged had not yet arrived.

A month earlier, at a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, Lee had sparked a very public feud with Clint Eastwood when he accused him of having omitted black soldiers from his two recent movies about Iwo Jima, "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima." (Historians estimate that between seven hundred and nine hundred black servicemen participated in the battle.) The spat had quickly escalated. Eastwood told the Guardian that he had left the black soldiers out because none had actually raised the flag, adding that "a guy like that should shut his face." Lee shot back, telling ABCNews.com that Eastwood sounded like "an angry old man," and that "the man is not my father and we're not on a plantation either."

Lee's remarks appeared online three days before he began recording the score for "Miracle." Lee sees the movie, the first by a major American director to treat the experience of black soldiers in the war, as redress not only for Eastwood's Iwo Jima pictures but for an all-white Hollywood vision of the Second World War which dates to the 1962 John Wayne movie "The Longest Day"--and before. "This is the same shit they were doing back in the forties, fifties, and sixties," Lee had told me a couple of weeks earlier, in New York. "Really, until Jim Brown was in the 'The Dirty Dozen,' in 1967. 'Home of the Brave' was a great film with a great African-American character in it. But if you look at the history of World War Two films we're invisible. We're omitted."

As the orchestra began to gather on the soundstage, Lee scribbled notes about the score on a yellow legal pad. He is five feet six, with a barrel chest and a pigeon-toed walk. His baleful, half-hooded eyes peered out from behind tortoiseshell frames. There was a diamond stud in his left earlobe. He is fifty-one, and when he briefly removed his Yankees cap a small bald spot was visible at the crown of his short Afro. He wore an orange T-shirt with a picture of Barack Obama and the word "REPRESENT," and new Air Jordan sneakers with pastel-blue stripes around the soles and gingham details. Lee is a Knicks fan, but he was wearing the sneakers in honor of the Lakers, who that evening were playing in Game Three of the N.B.A. finals. "Going to the game tonight," he said to Marvin Morris, the movie's music editor, a mountainous African-American man who sat beside him at the table. "I gotta come correct!"

It's been more than twenty years since Lee's debut, the 1986 movie "She's Gotta Have It"--a breezy sex comedy about a liberated African-American woman and her three male suitors--and he remains Hollywood's most prominent black filmmaker. He has directed eighteen features, three of which ("Do the Right Thing," "Jungle Fever," and "Malcolm X") have earned him a reputation as a filmmaker obsessed with race. Releasing movies at an average of nearly one a year, Lee has maintained a pace matched, in this country, only by Woody Allen. Lee is the artistic director of N.Y.U.'s graduate film program, where he teaches a master class in directing. He also makes music videos and TV commercials (he has done spots for Converse, Jaguar, Taco Bell, and Ben & Jerry's, among others) and has made two superb documentaries: "4 Little Girls," about the 1963 bombing by the Ku Klux Klan of a black church in Alabama, and "When the Levees Broke," about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He is able to accomplish so much in part because he often rises at 5 A.M. "You want to get a lot done, you gotta get up in the morning," he told me. The rest, he says, is "time management." But Lee's output also reflects the unusual fecundity of his imagination. "Spike was the idea man," Herb Eichelberger, who taught Lee in an undergraduate film course at Clark College (now Clark Atlanta University), in 1977, told me. "He was a good writer, and he would explore those ideas and turn those ideas and nurse those ideas and turn them into full-blown mini-epics."

Terence Blanchard, the score's composer, arrived in the control room, and Lee stood up to greet him. A heavyset African-American from New Orleans, Blanchard has known Lee for twenty years. He played trumpet on "She's Gotta Have It," "School Daze," and "Mo' Better Blues," and in 1991 Lee hired him to be the composer for "Jungle Fever." Blanchard has scored all but two of Lee's films since. Unlike most directors, Lee includes the composer in the process from the start, often before a script even exists--"from the inception of ideas," as he puts it. During shooting, Lee sends Blanchard the dailies, and once a rough cut is assembled Blanchard travels to New York, where he and Lee watch the film and discuss where to put music. Blanchard then creates musical sketches and themes, which he sends to Lee. "Once I O.K. that," Lee says, "Terence sits down and writes the music." Blanchard later told me that Lee is unusual for his love of highly melodic scores that can almost stand on their own in live performance. (Lee's emphasis on the music results in scores that often clash with the dialogue, making it difficult to hear the actors. "Of course you want people to understand the dialogue," he told me. "But the human brain is wonderful--with the correct score and the correct mix, the brain can multitask and hear the dialogue and the music at the same time.")

Before Lee and Blanchard could get to work, a Sony studio employee approached carrying a cardboard tube that contained a poster of "Miracle at St. Anna." He wanted the men to sign it, so that it could be mounted in the hallway next to posters for other movies whose scores had been recorded in the studio.