BY MATT DAVIS

Academy Award nominated director Spike Lee is in New Orleans for the premiere of his new HBO documentary, If God Is Willing And Da Creek Don’t Rise, tonight at the Mahalia Jackson Theater. Gambit caught up with Lee over his second Arnold Palmer cocktail as he enjoyed some corn and crab soup in the French Quarter before the screening.

The following are excerpts from our interview, which will appear in the next issue of Gambit.

GAMBIT: How did it feel, asking Ray Nagin how he thinks he’ll be judged by history?

SPIKE LEE: Ray was kinda on edge, that interview, and it was really, we had Ray and we were supposed to interview Landrieu, and the only time Mitch could do it was right after Nagin, so were trying to keep them from seeing each other. We’d finished with Nagin, we were trying to get him to leave and he was staying in front! Someone must have told him that [Mitch] Landrieu was coming.

But for me that wasn’t the hardest question. The hardest question to ask him was to ask what he thinks about the most. And I think it was his best, when he talked about the eight hour window to call the mandatory evacuation, and he waited until the eighth hour, and I know…well, he didn’t talk about it, I didn’t ask him, I think that’s something that’s going to haunt him the rest of his life. It would haunt anybody. Because he knows, we all know that by waiting til the eighth hour, people are no longer here. That decision meant the difference between living and dying, and I give him, you know I respect, because he didn’t have to answer that, but he did.

When he got elected, he didn’t know the city was going to be 80% under water, there was no playbook, but I feel people’s problem with Nagin was really what he did in his second term, or what he didn’t do in the second term versus something that happens that he had nothing to do with.

…

Someone you’ve been critical of in the past was Larry Bird. Now Mitch is the first white mayor of New Orleans since his father, Moon Landrieu left office in 1978. Is Mitch Landrieu the Larry Bird of New Orleans mayors?

He can’t shoot like Larry. Or I’ve never seen him. I don’t know if he even plays basketball. But look, I like Mitch, I like his sister, but as he says in the film, he’s got a hard job. Right now New Orleans is on pace to have 203 murders this year, which by use of the population makes it the murder capital of the United States of America. Think about this: Greater New Orleans has 700,000, New York has eight million people. Eight million. They’re going to have more murders than New York City here, and New York City has eight million people! That’s, you’re talking about like, Iraq odds, I mean, crazy.

I know you interviewed [Tulane University homicide expert] Peter Scharf for the film.

Yes. He was very very informative. He’s the go-to guy for homicide. His figures he has are chilling, and it’s young black men killing young black men, and it’s not something that’s just owned by New Orleans. It happens everywhere.

SPIKE LEE, PHOTOGRAPHED FOR GAMBIT BY CHERYL GERBER

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In an era when Jon Stewart is an integral part of the news scene, it shouldn’t be a surprise that a satirist like Harry Shearer is the person who turns out a seminal documentary about an underreported aspect of the circumstances surrounding Hurricane Katrina and the federal floods. Judging from the images of the flooded city in the trailer for The Big Uneasy, one might assume it was another film about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It’s not. What Shearer has produced is a documentary about … engineering.

Opening with shots of street signs – Abundance, Arts, Humanity, Piety – Shearer segues into near-stock-footage of Carnival. “We all know what Mardi Gras is like,” he says over shots of Bourbon Street boobs, beads, and beer, before dissolving to the real Mardi Gras: the meeting of the courts, the Society of St. Ann, Indians, families on St. Charles Avenue.

It’s a neat metaphor for the central misunderstanding of “Katrina” itself – “Katrina,” in the American mind, being a hurricane that destroyed New Orleans, rather than a Cat 1 storm that overwhelmed shoddy defenses erected by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Shearer then goes on to show how Katrina left New Orleans largely unscathed, but through a series of animations (and a minimum of upsetting footage), he offers a timeline and explanation of the levee breaches, failures and collapses.

Using documents and some previously unseen footage, as well as new interviews with people like the now-controversial Dr. Ivor van Heerden, former deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center, and Maria Garzino, an unwelcome whistleblower at the Army Corps of Engineers, Shearer pieces together a damning report on the Corps, its disastrous civil engineering and the sad outcome for the New Orleans metro area. (A Corps spokesperson, Karen Durham-Aguilera appears in the documentary on the condition Shearer only discuss what the Corps is doing now and not bring up the past. “A disaster had occurred,” she intones blandly while recounting the catastrophe.)

This is neither light nor funny stuff, and Shearer doesn’t Michael Moore-it-up with theatrics and gimmicks, nor does he neglect the other factors that led to the federal flood. He introduces the country to the MR-GO, “a 75-mile ditch” and “the one cut that led to a thousand deaths.” He points out Hurricane Betsy flooded 20 percent of the city, while Katrina flooded 80 percent of the city 40 years later despite improved bulwarks, and explains why (answer: the disappearance of the wetlands).

The few lighter moments are provided by John Goodman in segments called “Ask a New Orleanian,” where he poses questions like “Why don’t they just pick up New Orleans and move it somewhere else?” and “Why are the New Orleanians sitting on their asses waiting for the government to bail them out?” Those questions are answered by a roundtable of locals that includes musician Philip Manuel, Gentilly activist and counselor Vera Triplett and Gambit’s own Clancy DuBos, who admits “It pisses me off.”

By the end of The Big Uneasy, Shearer has answered a lot of questions about the levee failures, and raised others. Defective pumps: do you remove them and leave the city with no protection while new ones are rebuilt, or do you work with what you have? Can Americans understand (or will they care) about the difference between Option 1 and Option 2 levees? And what of the cities protected by the more than 100 other levees in this country maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers? How safe are other places, and how will we know?

Shearer presents all this straightforwardly, but as a near-full-time resident of New Orleans, it’s clear where his sympathies lie, and his hurt and outrage are palpable despite his documentarian, dispassionate tone. Late in the movie, St. Bernard Parish president Craig Taffaro says, “We are members of this nation,” and in Shearer’s lens, it’s not a statement of pride, but of rebuke.

• The Big Uneasy will be shown simultaneously around the country in dozens of theaters on Mon., Aug. 30, including New Orleans’ Prytania Theater and The Theatres at Canal Place. Shearer will appear at a Q&A after the 7:30 p.m. screening at the Prytania.

In the days following Hurricane Katrina, spurious rumors spread about Antoine “Fats” Domino’s fate. He was, in fact, rescued from the rooftop of his 9th Ward home. His Steinway baby grand wasn’t so fortunate. It has been preserved — sort of. It will sit in the entrance of the Presbytere, where it was installed today, and be the opening piece in the Louisiana State Museum exhibit “Living With Hurricanes: Katrina & Beyond,” which is slated to open Oct. 26. (Photo courtesy of the Louisiana State Museum/Mark Sindler.)

U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral Paul Zukunft says all cleanup operations in the Gulf are being “held hostage” — all skimming, controlled burns and dispersant use has stopped, due largely to Hurricane Alex. Waves of 7 to 10 feet prevent skimmers to skim for oil — when seas rise beyond 3 feet, Zukunft says, the skimmers just end up gathering water.

Efforts to move the Helix Producer containment device in place, which was set to be up and running today, have also stopped. Seas need to be less than 4 feet to make the subsurface connection to the blowout preventer.

Closer to shore, where Zukunft says winds are at 25 knots, all skimmers have been brought in, and dispersant application has stopped, deemed ineffective against the winds and seas.

“Our large heavy skimmers can certainly stay out at sea by the spill site, but in terms of their ability to do any skimming, we really have to wait for those seas to come down,” he says. “For 36, nearly 48 hours of weather not conducive to skimming —  it looks like this weather will persist another 24 hours. Perhaps 48. As soon as it does subside, we’re prepared to immediately launch and resume our attack on this oil…

“At the same time we have oil moving to Chandeleur Sound, so I’m very concerned with the impact this oil’s going to have in the area,” he says. “Until this weather subsides all we can do is have everything ready … and (we’ll) remove this oil, once we have weather conducive to operations.”

Meanwhile, BP is now under fire for its reported lack of any hurricane response plan in the event of an oil spill or for any disaster of this scope. Zukunft says the Coast Guard has a plan, which he says he has been “intimitely involved” with its development — but it’s not ready to go public. “The only reason I’d be reluctant (to make it public) is because it’s dated. We’re possibly making revisions and updates to it,” he says. “As we bring in other equipment and newer technologies, if there’s a plan out in the public, it’s the equivalent of having last year’s phonebook, and everyone’s address has changed.”

The “fully integrated plan” is the product of several agencies working with the Coast Guard, including the Department of Defense and FEMA. It’s now in its third revision.

Well, he’s not quite threatening to “cold-cock” him, but Mayor Mitch Landrieu seems to have been mighty displeased with Chris Myers, the former WWL-TV sportsguy who made disparaging remarks about New Orleans earlier this week when he guest-hosted The Dan Patrick Show. Forgetting his Crescent City roots (and his manners), Myers — who couldn’t carry Jim Henderson’s jock — used Dan Patrick’s mic to express the following:

It’s a great country here. We have disasters … issues when people pull together and help themselves and I thought the people in Tennessee, unlike — I’m not going to name names — when a natural disaster hits people weren’t standing on a rooftop trying to blame the government, okay. They helped each other out through this. And Mike Helton, president of NASCAR, Tony Stewart, among some drivers went from the race over to the middle Tennesee area where still a lot of hardworking, tax-paying, legal American citizens have been affected by the floods and are trying to rebuild their lives and they are helping out.

(Because, you know, we New Orleanians aren’t “hardworking, taxpaying legal American citizens.” Or something.)

Fox Sports president Ed Goren said yesterday there would be “internal discussions” with Myers, but that wasn’t enough for Landrieu, who wrote the following letter to Goren:

The comments made by Chris Myers are offensive and unacceptable and we are demanding an apology. I am especially disappointed in Chris because New Orleans, as he described, is a place he “once called home” … This is not Nashville versus New Orleans. And anyone who dares to draw such a comparison is being divisive and reckless.

Mayor’s full of some ginger. The whole letter is below.