Carl Deal and Tia Lessin are the producers and directors of the Academy Award-nominated documentary Trouble the Water, which follows the lives of Ninth Ward residents Kimberly and Scott Roberts during the aftermath of Katrina’s devastation of their homes in New Orleans. The film won the Gotham Independent Film Award and the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize, and is now available on DVD. Both Lessin and Deal continue to advocate assistance for impoverished, post-Katrina communities.

TMN: How did you initially come across Kimberly and Scott Roberts’s tape?

Tia Lessin: Carl and I wanted to do something in the aftermath of Katrina. We were stunned and outraged by the failures of our government, and, like so many others, we decided to channel that into action. So we put ourselves in central Louisiana about a week after the levees broke to make a film. That’s where Kimberly and Scott Roberts approached us, about 10 days after the levees failed. We were all at a Red Cross shelter. They were just at the beginning of their post-Katrina journey, and we had just been shut down by the military after filming several days with Louisiana National Guard soldiers returning home from Baghdad. Kimberly pitched us on the video she had shot on the days before and during Katrina: “What I got, I’ve been saving it, ‘cause I don’t want to give it to nobody local. This needs to be worldwide. ‘Cause all the footage I’ve seen on TV, nobody got what I got. I got right there in the hurricane.”

When we first saw the home video, we were stunned. It was most definitely not the Katrina broadcast on television. It was ground zero, intimate, raw. Our editor and co-producer T. Woody Richman painstakingly worked with it, and 15 minutes of that footage anchors the first part of Trouble the Water. Working with award-winning cinematographer P.J. Raval, we then filmed with Kimberly and Scott on and off for the next two years. And through all that, we were able to distill so much into one story—the abandonment of the city’s poorest, the incarcerated, and the hospitalized to Katrina’s floodwaters, and the government’s failures long before, during, and after the storm.

TMN: In what ways, as mentioned in the film, is “Katrina still going on?”

Carl Deal: Our executive producer, Danny Glover, put it this way: “When the hurricane struck, it did not turn the region into a Third World country—it revealed one.” The region and people along the Gulf Coast had been neglected by government institutions long before the levees failed in New Orleans, and Trouble the Water provides a window into that experience. And in the four years now since Katrina hit, very little has been done to reverse that. Tens of thousands of people still wish to return to their homes, but can’t. And those who have continue to face hardships. Rents have doubled and many homes remain unsafe; living-wage jobs remain scarce; the tourist economy remains the first option for redevelopment, as opposed to more sustainable and life-supporting development such as creating a green infrastructure would have; and schools continue to underperform. So the institutional failures that Katrina represented are still going on. Fortunately, the efforts to counter those failures are strong and meaningful.

TMN: What is your favorite object in your office?

TL & CD: The copper belt buckle we received from the Sundance Film Festival is our favorite object in the office. We are so grateful for that recognition. There’s also a picture of us and the team at Sundance feeling the joy after the Grand Jury prize was announced.

TMN: Have there been any significant efforts to rebuild the Ninth Ward?

CD: There are so many residents fighting every day to rebuild their communities, with and without government support. Mostly without. And of course there are so many meaningful projects, like the green building project of the Make it Right Foundation that is creating safe and sustainable housing close to the levee in the lower Ninth Ward. And colleges and high schools continue to send students to the region to volunteer, through alternative spring break programs, churches, and other community groups. We’ve listed on our web site many of the organizations that are working for equity in the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast, but so much more needs to be done.

TMN: What’s something you’re not good at but wish you were?

TL: Ice skating.


 —Erik Bryan, Sep. 23, 2009

Author Tom Piazza’s latest novel, City of Refuge, was runner-up in this year’s Tournament of Books. As a music writer, he won a Grammy for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey.

TMN: During the Tournament of Books, David Rees said City of Refuge “feels like it’s breathing and stretching and moving like a big organism.” What scope did you set when you began writing?

TP: Hurricane Katrina wasn’t just a local or regional disaster. The story didn’t just have to do with people’s houses getting smashed or flooded. People were taken out of their usual narratives and thrown all around the country into other people’s narratives. Probably half the novel takes place outside of New Orleans—Houston, Chicago, Missouri, upstate New York. Anyway, I knew the book would need to reflect that kind of upheaval and those kinds of contrasts.

Anytime you write a story that attends to people’s social or political lives as well as their interior, emotional lives, there is going to be a lot of tension among elements. City of Refuge contains several different types of discourse and narrative. I think that rattled some people, but it was the only way I thought I could, in fact, make the book be the kind of “organism” it needed to be.

TMN: What are your five least favorite things about New Orleans?

TP: Most of the same things I would dislike anywhere: Indifference to poverty and its causes. Violence. Racism. Greed and opportunism. Lack of curiosity.

TMN: How does your creative process begin?

TP: Usually with an image, a voice, or a gesture. I need to have something in mind that I know is true, and then I can build on that. I need to see that red wheelbarrow. If I can see it, or hear it, and I’m not just trying to tell myself I saw it or heard it, then I have something to go with. I like Picasso’s remark: “I don’t seek; I find.” I try to keep that in mind.

TMN: What are your three favorite books to recommend to people?

TP: Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann looks and reads like a big 19th-century family novel but is in fact a Trojan horse full of all these Modernist techniques that slip in and do their work without the reader noticing. Norman Rush’s short-story collection Whites is a neglected masterpiece. Bloods, an oral history of black Vietnam veterans by Wallace Terry, is one of the most astonishing books I’ve ever read. The speakers come from across the class and rank spectrum, and Terry manages to bring their extraordinarily varied voices to the page so that they appear in front of you like holograms.

TMN: What’s something you’re not good at but wish you were?

TP: Juggling.

TMN: Who is your archnemesis?

TP: Everyone’s archnemesis is some version of himself or herself.

TMN: What is your favorite object in your office/workplace?

TP: I like antique folding rulers; I always have at least one or two within reach. The one in the picture is made, like most of them, of boxwood and brass. I love how precisely it is put together. I like the paint on it and the marks and patina that come from having been used by someone who knew what he or she was doing. This ruler is somewhere around 90 years old. My father was an engineer, and there’s something about the irreducible utility of this thing that probably makes me feel connected to the best part of my dad, too.

TMN: What are you working on next?

TP: I’m working on a new novel set mostly in New York City, but also in other parts of the country. I don’t really like to talk about work-in-progress, at least until it’s more than halfway done, but this book is as different from City of Refuge as could be. I told my editor that it is essentially a comic novel but with tragedy riding underneath, set against a more or less epic landscape. I don’t know if he believed me. I’m also putting together a collection of my nonfiction pieces, and I’m writing for David Simon’s new HBO series Treme, which is set in post-Katrina New Orleans. —Mike Deri Smith, Jun. 10, 2009