Among the Facts of Life We've Learned at Press Tour: The hotter the celebrity, the faster they'll need to scoot after their press conference.
So props go to Claudine Mulard, a writer for the French newspaper Le Monde, who managed to stop Spike Lee in his tracks Wednesday afternoon as Lee was backing out of the ballroom with several of us in tow, all firing questions about his upcoming HBO documentary about New Orleans, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts."
How'd she do it?
Soccer.
Was Lee unhappy, she asked, with the outcome of Sunday's World Cup final, in which Italy beat France, but only after French player Zinedine Zidane was expelled in the game's final minutes after head-butting Italy's Marco Materazzi?
Lee immediately stopped and began to respond, but then noticing that Mulard carried neither a recorder or a notebook, sent her back to get one, and then waited patiently -- answering more questions about his HBO documentary -- while she retrieved a tiny video camera.
Finally, after he'd made sure she was properly equipped, he began to hold forth on the World Cup.
"So Brazil is my team," he said. "But when France beat 'em, I went to France, because I'm good friends with [player] Thierry Henri...so I took my son, who's 9 years old, to two semifinal games," took him back to New York, then flew back to Europe for the final.
Where'd he stand on the head-butting incident that got Zidane expelled?
Its the oldest trick in the sport if were going to win, we have to get the No. 1 guy, and were going to do anything we can to get him on the pitch. And Zidane has a history of going crazy, Lee said.
While he tends to believe Zidane's story that Materazzi had insulted his mother and sister -- "they were doing that stuff, I feel, the whole game" -- that wasn't the way to handle it, Lee said.
"Youve got to be smart. F--- him up after the game, after youve got the gold cup, he said.
They set him up, and he fell for it.