Spike Lee is angry. He’s also in an exceptionally good mood. This is not as contradictory a combination as it might sound. The director of Malcolm X and Do the Right Thing relishes the opportunity to vent his frustrations about the iniquities of American society. And his latest film, an authoritative and exceptionally powerful documentary called When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, gives him a platform to do just that — four hours and fifteen minutes’ worth, to be precise.
It is almost a year to the day since Lee sat in a Venice hotel room watching the horror of Hurricane Katrina unfolding. “I couldn’t believe it. All these people in distress and the Government had left them hanging.” Now he is back at the Venice Film Festival with a film about the disaster, its human cost and the spectacular incompetence that both preceded and followed it. He thinks it’s one of most important films he has made and the response in Venice would seem to concur. It is the only picture in the festival that has unified critics in an unqualified positive response. “When we were doing this film, people kept saying, ‘Spike, you gotta tell our story, you gotta tell our story.’ And I feel we delivered on that promise.”
When the idea for a film about the plight of the people of New Orleans first came to Lee in his Venice hotel room last year, it was before the full extent of that plight had become clear. Lee approached HBO and the company agreed to back the project. Originally planned as a two-hour television documentary, the film doubled in both length and budget, growing organically as Lee repeatedly returned to the city to find that the initial mishandling of the disaster still hadn’t been rectified. “You go to many areas of New Orleans, there is still no gas, still no electricity. No services. It’s like nothing has changed. Only 25 per cent of the original population lives there now. The other 75 per cent are spread out over the rest of the United States of America. The levee system is still bulls***. Thank God Hurricane Ernesto turned and went up the East Coast. If that had hit New Orleans, that would have been it.”
In what Lee describes as “an epic editing job”, the film was assembled from more than 500 hours of footage. “I conducted 100 interviews. We had archival footage, newsreel footage.” The resulting film is told through the voices of the engineering experts, meteorologists, politicians and, most memorably, the articulate, angry people of New Orleans. It is a magisterial piece of film-making, sober and measured in tone. Lee himself is largely absent from the film, although you are left with no doubt that the director of the documentary is no fan of the Bush Administration.
In person, he’s more candid. “I wanted to vomit. I didn’t have the stomach to watch,” he says of the President’s recent tribute to the bravery of the people of New Orleans on the anniversary of Katrina. He’s equally open about his fascination with conspiracy theories. “Since 9/11, we buy into the whole scare tactic. Every time Bush is losing approval points, somebody is arrested somewhere around the world and it’s a potential threat averted. Like the thing that just happened in London. I don’t believe that. And let me ask you a question. Do you think that British scientist committed suicide? As somebody on the outside looking in, him writing a note to his wife saying ‘I’m taking a walk in the park’ and then he’s dead? Not buying it.”
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Given that Lee believes that the US Government is guilty of indifference to the people of New Orleans and outright duplicity elsewhere, how optimistic is he that his emotive, stirring film can be an agent of change? Will this documentary help to save a drowning city? “Well, there’s a possibility. But you can’t guarantee it. I’ll give you an example. When I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 I thought no way in the world would George Bush be re-elected. And look what happened. You can never tell.”