Spike Lee Returns to New Orleans for ‘If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise’

story by the New York Times
written by Dave Itzkoff
photo by AP/HBO

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. So 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, starting with the Super Bowl victory of its underdog New Orleans Saints football team.

Instead, Mr. Lee’s new documentary, “If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise,” which HBO will show on Monday and Tuesday nights, and which Mike Hale has reviewed, 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 ArtsBeat 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. I was very happy that Michael Brown agreed to do an interview. After “Levees” came out, I was having a meeting at the Regency hotel and he happened to be staying there. So we talked and he said he wished he could have defended himself. I said, we were trying to get in touch with you but never heard back from you. So we exchanged numbers and when this happened he agreed to do it. His interview’s very important, because he says that [former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael] Chertoff didn’t know what the hell he was doing. And also I felt bad for him. Because even when we were doing “Levees,” my instinct told me that Michael Brown was the scapegoat. He’s the guy that took all the bullets.

Q.Did you try to speak with Chertoff for this film?
A.Yeah. And: no. Never heard back. The only person I heard back from was George Bush, who said he couldn’t do it. I think it was a phone call. I was told by the research department: “No. It’s not going to happen.” It was something like, he’s busy writing his memoirs. But we understood that. I wasn’t betting on getting those interviews. [Laughs.] I knew those were a 100-to-1 long shot.

Q.Do you think they’re turning you down because of who you are?
A.I think some people think that I’ve already had my mind made up and therefore they can’t win. But I disagree with that. I think that I’m a very fair documentary filmmaker. And at the same time, I’m going to ask some hard questions. For them, it’s a no-win situation, so I didn’t expect them to say yes.

Q.You were just in New Orleans for the debut of the film – how did that go?
A.Yeah, it was Tuesday night. Of course that’s like a hometown crowd, but it went great. We only showed two of the four hours – we showed the first hour and the last hour, which deals specifically with the BP oil disaster. But people love it.

Q.Do people there feel like the oil-spill disaster is now behind them?
A.No. People are not believing that 75 percent of the oil has disappeared. No one with any intelligence believes that. Only the most gullible person could believe that on one hand we had the world’s greatest oil spill – on the other hand, a couple days after it’s capped, 75 percent of the oil has disappeared? No thank you. Don’t believe it. One day, five, 10, 15 years from now – maybe sooner – we may find out that dispersant they used was more harmful than the oil. And they were using a ton of that stuff.

Q.Do you think you might go back to New Orleans and make another documentary there?
A.I’d like to, but I don’t want to be spurred on by another hit. These things, Katrina, the breach of the levees, and now this, the greatest oil spill in the history of the world, that’s a lot for any place to take in less than five years. That is a lot. And I know, and they know, they’re very resilient, strong, fierce proud people. But they’re still human beings nonetheless, and another one would really hurt. We don’t know how the story’s going to end, because it’s not over yet. That oil is still there. And we’re not through hurricane season yet. We’ve been lucky so far.