It was only a year after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans that HBO aired the four-part documentary series “When the Levees Broke” — a sweeping and impassioned account of the human toll of federal negligence from the director Spike Lee. He returned to the subject four years later with a two-part series, “If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise.” A new installment — “Katrina: Come Hell and High Water,” out today, this time on Netflix — makes it a trilogy.
Timed to the 20th anniversary of the natural disaster and subsequent infrastructural breakdown that killed more than 1,800 people and displaced thousands more, “Come Hell and High Water” — a three-part series with episodes directed by Geeta Gandbhir, Samantha Knowles and Lee — catches up with many of the characters from “Levees” and “If God Is Willing,” including Phyllis LeBlanc, Gralen Banks and Shelton “Shakespear” Alexander. The intervening decades haven’t managed to dull the force of their memories, or the sense that the course of their lives was instantly and dramatically altered.
In a recent video interview, Alisa Payne, the producer and showrunner of “Come Hell and High Water,” discussed its creative challenges and new revelations as well as our readiness for the natural disasters of tomorrow. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
How did you get brought onto this project?
I co-own a production company called Message Pictures with Sam Pollard and Geeta Gandbhir. Sam was the producer of “When the Levees Broke,” and Netflix came to him with the idea of doing something for the 20th anniversary. When Spike got involved, it was a full circle for me because I had known I wanted to work with him ever since I saw “When the Levees Broke.” I just felt like it spoke to who I was as a person. It showed how a documentary could shine a light in real time on people suffering.
What was the shooting period for the series?
We got greenlighted in October 2023. That December, we were shooting because Spike had “Highest 2 Lowest.” Our last [shooting day] was in September of 2024.
You have a three-part series, three different directors, a large cast of interview subjects, tons of archival footage — what does a showrunner do in this context?
I’m over all the creative, talking with everyone who worked on the piece — all the directors, all of the crew — about our point of view, what do we want to say? I’m also the person who’s there to make sure that we are doing no harm and taking good care with our participants.
What was the arc of the story you wanted to tell? How did you define the parameters?
My son was 8 months old when Katrina happened, and one of our directors, Sam Knowles, was only 13. So something we understood was that there was a whole population of people who didn’t know what had happened. And so it was important for us to bring them up to speed. Episodes 1 and 2 [directed by Gandbhir and Knowles] take us through the storm and the neglect and people being dispersed throughout the U.S. And then Spike picks it up 20 years later in Episode 3. I always say that Episodes 1 and 2 do the setup so Spike’s episode can do the wake-up.
Spike’s episode has a different visual language than the other two — he’s using a lot of onscreen text and direct-to-camera monologues. How did you balance each filmmaker having an individual style with the need for it all to feel of a piece?
You meet everybody where they are at. They’re three entirely different, genius minds. You are not going to get it to be 100 percent the same across the board. And so we leaned into that. I leaned into that, Netflix leaned into that. You can’t tell Basquiat how to create his painting. You just have to accept it. The most important thing is that there is a shared point of view.
How did you go about tracking down the footage, and were there clips that felt like particular breakthroughs?
There’s a lot of work that has been made about Katrina, so it’s hard to get things that have never before been seen. One of the things that we did early was we took the production assistants who worked on set with us, and we had them go to our participants’ houses. And so we were able to find old photos, videos, etc. One that particularly stands out for me is footage of one of the housing projects — a mom or a young woman dancing with these two little girls outside. One of our participants, Adonika Landry, lived there and talks about how that structure was safe in the storm. There was no major damage, and yet they tore it down anyway as part of a land grab and relocated all of those people.
We also have the best archival producer, Cara Fitts, who was able to get screen tests and things that hadn’t aired from Fox and other networks. There’s one clip where Shepard Smith is on the side of the interstate with a young mother who had just had a baby five days before. He says, “All day we’re watching the police driving by, but no one is actually helping these people.” You see this Fox News personality struggling with what he’s seeing. He’s very emphatic and emotional about it, but he then has to catch himself and say, “I’m not criticizing the police.” And they never aired that. For us, moments like that were gold.
Episode 3 covers the “Make It Right” foundation, established by Brad Pitt, that built housing for displaced people but was later accused of incompetence and became the target of lawsuits. How did you approach that story?
Spike covered “Make It Right” in “If God is Willing,” and I think he had heard in the last few years that it had become a problem. My true feeling is that Brad got involved because he wanted to be really helpful. But, unfortunately, there were problems with materials, mismanagement of moneys and other things. People who were hopeful that this was going to change their circumstances ended up in situations with homes that became problematic — leaky floors, dangerous conditions, etc. People were getting sick. The houses could not withstand the test of time.
Did you reach out to him?
No, we did not. I think it’s far less about Brad Pitt. Like I said, I think he was trying to do something good by using his celebrity to try to help. For us, it was really about the fact that, as we see throughout the piece, it was everybody but the government who was trying to do the right thing for the people.
What do you understand about what happened with Katrina today that you didn’t understand 20 years ago?
I always had suspicions, but here we have it substantiated. We have Soledad O’Brien, who was a media darling on CNN, saying, “The news coverage was biased, racist, and it was untrue.”
The documentary shows how a lot of people left New Orleans and never came back. What were your takeaways when you were shooting about what has been lost or how the city has changed?
So the city used to be 80 percent Black. I think it’s 60-something percent now. You see that a lot of these homes were never repaired. You see schools that are still boarded up, or you see schools that have been turned into luxury apartments. You see a lot of gentrification happening. The housing projects have been knocked down, and they pushed those people into other neighborhoods, out of places where they had generational family connections. So what is lost? The culture? It’s becoming diluted. Other places like Houston and Atlanta are benefiting from it. But New Orleans, this cultural mecca of America, is losing what made it so.
What lessons do you think Katrina has to teach us about our approach to disaster preparedness today?
First and foremost, we need FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency]. And we need FEMA to work correctly. And when I say work correctly, it’s not only just going out after the disaster. FEMA can do a lot of mitigation work. And so a lot of the funds that the government provides are supposed to be for preparedness. We see flooding in Texas, fires in California, landslides in North Carolina. There’s so much happening. So the government needs to make solid plans, do studies and then actually act on the studies. They did a simulation called Hurricane Pam a year before Katrina that showed that things were problematic, but they didn’t learn from it. So we need to be investing in these things now more than ever.
Reggie Ugwu is a Times culture reporter.
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