Spike Lee on Monday invoked the ghosts of Italian neo-Realist greats Vittorio De Sica, Cesare Zavattini and Roberto Rossellini to 'bless' the film he is set to shoot in Italy next year.
Speaking at the Fiesole Film Fest, Lee said: "I call on the spirits of De Sica, Zavattini and Rossellini to help me".
"I hope they're looking down kindly on me and the film".
Lee, who will receive a career achievement award here Tuesday night, added: "I've never tried to imitate any director in my work. I'm drawn to those who can tell good stories, because that's what the cinema is for me: telling great stories".
Previous recipients of the Fiesole Masters prize include Ken Loach, Costa-Gavras, Aki Kaurismaki and Bernardo Bertolucci.
Lee is currently scouting locations for his film, which blends the experiences of the Second World War Afro-American 'Buffalo Soldiers' with a Nazi massacre of Italian civilians that took place in a Tuscan village.
Shooting is scheduled to begin next spring.
The film has the working title Miracle at Sant'Anna, the same as the 2002 book by bestselling African-American novelist James McBride on which it is based.
The director, who has charted multiple aspects of the African-American experience since his debut in the mid-1980s, is eager to tell the world about the segregated black soldiers who took on a crack SS Panzer division in western Italy.
"If we look at Hollywood productions we scarcely find a trace of the exploits of our coloured soldiers in the Second World War," Lee said.
The Italian Resistance helped the Buffalo Soldiers break through the German lines in the coastal area of Tuscany in 1944 - despite ferocious SS tactics exemplified in the murder of the village's 560 men, women and children.
In McBride's book, toward the end of World War II, four Buffalo Soldiers from the army's Negro 92nd Division find themselves separated from their unit and behind enemy lines.
Risking their lives for a country in which they are treated with less respect than the enemy they are fighting, they discover humanity in St. Anna di Stazzema - in the peasants who shelter them and in the affection of an orphaned child.
"Even in the face of unspeakable tragedy they - and we - learn to see the small miracles of life," according to the book's publishers.
