Spike Lee and HBO return to New Orleans

Spike Lee and HBO return to New Orleans
August 7, 2010
Robert Bianco
USA TOday

Spike Lee is back in the Big Easy.

The filmmaker's latest work, If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise, brings Lee back to the city and the subject he explored in his Emmy-winning 2006 film When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. For two nights and four hours on HBO starting August 23, Creek examines life in New Orleans five years after Katrina, as the city is whipsawed between the high of a Super Bowl victory and the ongoing, disastrous low of the British Petroleum oil spill.

Lee says he was done shooting the documentary, which was supposed to conclude with the Super Bowl victory, when the BP oil rig blew up. "We had to rethink and re-configure. ... We had to rethink everything. But we're done now."

The oil spill is not New Orleans's only problem, or Creek's only subject. The documentary also tackles the problems the poor have faced in their attempts to return home, particularly after the city tore down its largest public housing development -- even though it was not damaged by Katrina. "I think the plan was to get these poor black people out of the city from the get-go."

The show also looks at the New Orleans police department, including the a federal investigation into accusations of abuse and murder, and travels to Haiti to examine the correlation between New Orleans and that island's earthquake. And it travels to other spots on the Gulf Coast, including Mississippi.

The connective tissue between all these subjects and both films, he says, is "greed." Greed in building the levees as cheaply as possible. And now greed from BP, which ignored safety precautions because it was behind schedule. "Any time you try to cut corners, it's going to bite you in the butt later on," Lee says.

Lee does not believe the reports that say the oil has mostly dispersed. "I don't care how many scientists BP buys, that oil did not just disappear."

And that oil fuels one of his greatest fears, he says: that a still-on-its-heels New Orleans might get hit by another hurricane that would spread the sludge across the marshes and into the city's water system. "Time after time (the people of New Orleans) get knocked down, but they put one hand on the rope and pull themselves off the canvas. But they're only human beings."

They've survived a lot, and may still have a lot left to survive. And that's the message of the title. "It's hope -- and cross your fingers, too."