Spike Lee is heading to New Orleans to make a documentary examining whether race and politics played a role in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Spike watched television coverage of the disaster while he was in Venice, Italy, for the city’s film festival, and he’s since compared the New Orleans situation to the 1974 film Chinatown, which starts as a simple detective story, but becomes an intricate tale of corruption and greed.
He said, “People could not believe, especially the residents of the 9th Ward, that there wasn’t hanky-panky in the flooding. And what I thought about automatically was Chinatown, the great film by Roman Polanski. The whole subplot of the whole thing is about water in Southern California and how it was not delivered to the people who needed it.”
Spike plans to have the project ready for next year’s one-year anniversary of the hurricane.