As Spike Lee will tell you, when you’re in Venice, Italy — “one of the greatest cities on the Earth” — the last thing you want to do is be stuck inside watching television. But five years ago that’s precisely what the filmmaker was doing.
There for the Venice Film Festival, Lee heard about Hurricane Katrina, turned on his television and sat there stunned, looking at the images.
That led to him creating the four-hour Emmy-winning documentary “When the Levees Broke” for HBO. Five years later, Lee and his co-producer Sam Pollard were trying to decide when to return to New Orleans to recap what had happened since Katrina. “We knew, even though we had finished ‘Levees,’ the story was still evolving in New Orleans and the gulf,” Lee said. “And so for whatever reasons, we decided that five years should be it. And our first day of shooting, we’re in Miami shooting the Super Bowl.” It was a magical football season for the New Orleans Saints.
People everywhere thought it was fate that one of the NFL’s worst teams and much-maligned franchises — a team that didn’t even have a home stadium for a period of time, thanks to Katrina — had managed to turn things around and make it to the Super Bowl. Winning it, people thought, was sublime. For his part, Lee thought he was filming the end of his follow-up documentary right there on the first day of shooting.
“But BP cut some corners, went around safety regulations,” Lee said, sighing, in reference to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the gulf. “The thing blew up. Eleven people died. And it changed the whole outlook of ‘If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise.’ ” That’s the title of Lee’s newest documentary, which will air on HBO in two parts, Monday and Tuesday nights.
For Lee, the BP spill changed the narrative in all the wrong ways. The documentary was already going to focus on work that was left to be done in New Orleans — including the lack of housing, the crime and police corruption. But to have the region suffer another disaster just seemed to be piling on. And he remains angry about it, believing both the Katrina catastrophe and the BP oil spill were preventable.
“If you connect ‘Levees’ with this, for me the big connective tissue is greed,” Lee said. “It was the greed of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, who cut corners in the construction of the levee system, where they’ve been building it since the 1950s, (that) led to the levees toppling and, consequently, New Orleans being 80 percent underwater.
“It was greed again that reared its ugly head with BP, who did not want to buy this blowout protector — I don’t know if that’s the correct term — which only cost half a million dollars. But to them, they were behind schedule.”
Lee tackles everything from Haiti to black-on-black crime in New Orleans; he taps into progress made outside of government aid there, remains convinced that tearing down projects unaffected by Katrina was an opportunistic act of displacement and still seethes about BP’s cleanup effort in the gulf.
“Right now, out of the woodwork, all these scientists are saying that we just had the biggest oil disaster in the history of the world, and now all of a sudden, abracadabra, presto change-o, 75 percent of this oil has disappeared?” Lee said, incredulous.
“Where the (expletive) did it go to? I don’t care how many scientists BP buys, that oil did not disappear.”
