‘I don’t put anything past the government’
Special to the NNPA
NEW ORLEANS – At the New Orleans arena recently, before a crowd of 7,000 Hurricane Katrina survivors, filmmaker Spike Lee premiered his new documentary, When the Levees Broke: a Requiem in Four Acts, which aired this week in two parts on HBO and will be shown in its entirety on the August 29 Katrina anniversary.
The movie tells the story of the destruction and suffering wrought on August 28, 2005 and the chaos resulting from lackluster emergency response and political disagreements. Speaking to the media prior to the screening, Lee defended several controversial scenes in the film, including his decision to air the conspiracy theory that the levees were dynamited.
“I am 49 years old. Besides being a filmmaker, I do read history. And, as an African American in this country, I don’t put anything past the government,” Lee said.
“I started from the beginning, when I was taught, starting in first grade, about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. They didn’t tell me that the first president of the United States owned slaves. That got left out.”
Lee also explained his decision in terms of craft.
“As a filmmaker, why should I edit those people who swear on a stack of Bibles that they heard an explosion? Now, we have other people coming [on screen] to say, ‘Well, they might have heard something else,’” Lee said.
“But, it would not be my duty as a filmmaker to let these people who for years have not had a voice be denied. They should have an opportunity. If they heard something, I put it in the film. It is left up to the audience to make up their own mind.”
Lee also responded to criticisms levied in the New Orleans Times-Picayune that the film ignores the plight of predominantly white neighborhoods in New Orleans, like Lakeview, which were heavily flooded.
“This is a very diverse film,” he said.
“For anyone to say that it only pertains to black people, then you must have been sleeping for four hours. I think we captured the spirit and the diversity of this great city, and it’s reflected in the film.”
More than 23 minutes of the four-hour production concentrate on the failures of the Bush administration in its response to the hurricane. Some instances rely on humor, as the movie chronicles two friends who vent their frustration in a chance meeting with Dick Cheney by telling the vice president what he could do to himself using some colorful metaphors. Others focus on tragedy, including a man who was forced to leave his dead mother under a tarp in the lobby of the Convention Center in the wake of seemingly uncaring federal officials.
Yet, the movie spends little time exploring the mistakes of Mayor Ray Nagin, who emerges as a sympathetic figure. Critics also claim the film glosses over many of the errors of Gov. Kathleen Blanco and other state officials, including the Orleans Levee Board.
Lee disagrees.
“There is blame to go around. They have been building these levees for 40 years,” Lee said.
“You pick somebody that you want to hang.”
Nor does the filmmaker believe that a four-hour film will prove too daunting for viewers.
“For the last nine years, I have been a professor of film at NYU. I have seen four-hour epics that passed like this,” Lee said, snapping his fingers, “and I have watched 90-minute films that seemed like an eternity.”
