Spike Lee on the set of his HBO movie, "If God is Willing and the Creek Don't Rise."
Four years ago Spike Lee took his cameras to New Orleans to document the disaster wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, as told by the people still dealing with its calamitous effects.
|
|
The film Mr. Lee returned with was "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts," a four-hour HBO documentary that won a Peabody Award and three Emmys. As the fifth anniversary of Katrina approached, Mr. Lee went back to New Orleans this year, hoping to tell the story of that city's recovery and rejuvenation.
Instead, his new documentary, "If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise," whose first two hours were shown Monday on HBO and whose final two hours made their debut on Tuesday, ended up with a tone that is largely and eerily similar to its predecessor. As the new movie revisits many people seen in "Levees," who are still grappling with the fallout from Katrina, they are dealt a second disaster: the explosion of a BP drilling rig that flooded the Gulf Coast with oil -- and sent Mr. Lee and his team scrambling to rework what they thought was a finished film.
Mr. Lee spoke recently with Dave Itzkoff for the ArtsBeat blog of The New York Times about the making of "If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise," how it was altered by news events and some of the famous figures who still would not speak to him on camera. These are excerpts from that conversation.
Q. How long after "When the Levees Broke" did you decide to go back to New Orleans?
A. We knew even before we finished. It was just a matter of deciding when we'd return.
We saw the fifth anniversary's approach, so we said let's go back for five years. That was a fortunate decision or an unfortunate decision, depending on how you look at it. Our first day, we were shooting the Super Bowl. I had an NFL Films crew, which Roger Goodell was so kind to let us hire out, and my regular crew was in New Orleans watching people watch the game in this bar in Treme called Sweet Lorraine's. Then they rushed over to the French Quarter to film the celebration. We thought that we had the end of the movie, because not only did they win the Super Bowl, it's right in the middle of Mardi Gras.
Q. So at that point you thought you were making an uplifting movie about the city's recovery?
A. Definitely. We forget what they'd gone through. When you've been stomped on, kicked and all this other stuff, and something great like this happens to you, it uplifts everybody.
Q. What would have happened to your narrative if the Saints lost the game?
A. It wasn't going to happen. That was never a question. Peyton Manning, he might be the best quarterback in the N.F.L., but Peyton Manning, Unitas, Terry Bradshaw, Joe Montana, nobody was beating the Saints that day. They had a cause. If I was a betting man --
Q. If you were a betting man, you probably wouldn't be able to afford to make as many movies as you do.
A. No, if I was a betting man, I'd be able to finance a couple more. Because I'd have bet the house on the Saints.
Q. But the tone of the film changed because of the BP oil spill?
A. Everything changed after April 20. We'd finished shooting. We got our material, we're not making any more trips anywhere -- then the rig blew up and 11 people died. So me and Sam Pollard, my co-producer and supervising editor, said: "You know what? The last hour we have now, it has to be on the DVD extras." And we made eight or nine more trips down there. We were shooting as late as two weeks ago.
Q. In addition to revisiting many of the people from "Levees," you also talk to people who left New Orleans after Katrina and never returned. How did you find them?
A. When you're doing a documentary film, a lot of this stuff is detective work. So we knew, unlike the first one, we had to go to Mississippi. We knew we had to go to Houston. A lot of those people have found a better way of life, a higher standard of living. And many of those people want to return, but they lived in public housing which was knocked down. You have people who had to evacuate because of mandatory evacuation, and when they come back, now it's surrounded by barbed wire and they can't get back in. And the rents have quadrupled since then. And there's no jobs and they can't afford to pay their rent. So they can't come back.
Q. Were you there that day for the city council vote to tear down the public housing, which looks as if it almost turned into a riot?
A. Oh, no I was not. That was amazing. The pepper spray and people getting Tasered and put in Michael Stewart chokeholds.
Q. That's just something you don't expect to see in America.
A. Now that you mention it, look at those images from Katrina, of American citizens standing on top of their houses, holding up signs that say, help me, save me. Who'd have thought that would happen?
Q. Were there people you wanted to interview for this film but couldn't get?
A. We put in requests to Bush, to Cheney, to Rove, to Condoleezza -- she's in the film, but that's not anything. I asked her to do a quick "Who dat?" on the field before the Super Bowl. So she did that. We tried to get an interview with the Louisiana governor, Bobby Jindal. He was giving us some runaround. He didn't want to do it.
Click here to continue reading.
SOURCE: The New York Times
Dave Itzkoff
