Spike Lee's 'Requiem' for New Orleans - Newsweek Entertainment - MSNBC.com

Spike Lee's 'Requiem' for New Orleans - Newsweek Entertainment - MSNBC.com:

By Allison Samuels
Newsweek
Aug. 21-28, 2006 issue - Spike Lee is a proud New Yorker—he lives for the Yankees, dies for the Knicks and bleeds for all things Brooklyn—but for the past year, his heart has been in New Orleans. To make his new four-hour HBO documentary about Hurricane Katrina, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts," the 49-year-old director visited the Gulf Coast region nine times and interviewed more than 100 people, including the mayor of New Orleans, the governor of Louisiana, Sean Penn, Soledad O'Brien, Kanye West, engineers, historians, journalists, radio DJs—even the guy who spotted the vice president during a post-Katrina photo-op and told him, "Go f--- yourself, Mr. Cheney." But the voice you'll remember best belongs to a 42-year-old woman named Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, a survivor from the city's obliterated Lower Ninth Ward and one of the rawest specimens of classic Nawlins spitfire you'll ever find.

In Lee's devastating film, LeBlanc is a frequent, and frequently hilarious, presence, a fuming Greek chorus of one who still can't believe that, for nearly a week, her country left her and her neighbors for dead. "There were two things I asked Spike when we first met," says LeBlanc, sitting in a lawn chair outside her government-issued trailer home in New Orleans—the one she finally received four months after applying for it. "First I asked him, 'Are you going to tell the whole story and make it clear that all black people aren't poor, ignorant looters?' And then I asked if I could cuss." She laughs. "When he said yes to both, I said, 'Hot damn, we've got a deal!'" More>>>