Forty years ago, Spike Lee "sho nuff" made his landmark debut with the low-budget indie classic She's Gotta Have It. She's Gotta Have It is centered around Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), a free-spirited and enigmatic artist living her life proudly in her singledom. After Lee's first attempt at a feature, 1984's The Messenger, fell apart, the ambitious filmmaker raced into making She's Gotta Have It. “Spike didn't want to be waiting around, so he wrote She's Gotta Have It, I believe, in two weeks,” Dickerson reveals. Tracy Camilla Johns in 'She's Gotta Have It'She's Gotta Have It was filmed in Fort Greene, Brooklyn — a cinematically underrepresented neighborhood at the time — in just 12 days across two six-day weeks.