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Sam Pollard on When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts

Published on October 16, 2007

by Sheila Curran Bernard

A year after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, HBO aired the four-hour documentary When the Levees Broke, produced by Spike Lee and Sam Pollard; Lee directed, and Sam was the supervising editor. A professor at NYU's Kanbar Institute of Film and Television, Pollard is a long-time collaborator of Lee's, editing the dramatic features Mo' Better Blues, Jungle Fever and Bamboozled, among others, and co-producing and editing the documentary 4 Little Girls, nominated for an Academy Award.

Bernard's book, Documentary Storytelling, is available on Amazon.com.

In Documentary Storytelling, Second Edition: Making Stronger and More Dramatic Nonfiction Films, published on January 26, Pollard talks to author Sheila Curran Bernard (with whom he collaborated on two films for the PBS series Eyes on the Prize) about working on Levees. This interview is excerpted here with permission.

When was your first shoot in New Orleans?
Thanksgiving [2005]. We went down with this mammoth crew of 25 people. Normally when you shoot a doc, it's you as the producer; camera; an assistant, if you're shooting film; sound; and maybe a p.a. [production assistant]. But when we flew out of Newark the day after Thanksgiving, it was Spike, me, a line producer, three cameramen, four assistants, and six graduate students from NYU. Then, when we got to New Orleans, we got a location manager with his four location people, five vans, five drivers, a camera loader - I mean, it was like an army. And Spike gave us our assignments: this crew goes to this parish, this crew goes here.

Spike returned to New Orleans several times, and also filmed evacuees in New York. I’ve read that there were about 130 interviews in all, some 200 hours of footage. I'm curious about your role, not only as editor but also as co-producer.
Basically, my charge is to figure out how to make this thing a film. As with 4 Little Girls, I'm given a task of combing through all this material and trying to figure out a structure to make it come to life. Spike will come in and critique it and want changes, but I'm trying to build it, trying to tell a story and figure out how to make it exciting. And I've got about 18, 20 weeks to make it happen.

Sam Pollard, editor and co-producer on Levees.

When did you start to edit?
I brought three assistants on in February 2006 to start logging and digitizing the interviews, and they were all transcribed, and the assistants went through the transcript books and wrote down the time code numbers. Then I figured out what I call subject bins, such as The Days Before The Hurricane; The Day Katrina Hit; They Thought They Had Dodged The Bullet. If anybody talked about one of those particular subjects, the assistants put that bite into that bin. And then when I started, on March 6, I started going through each bin, putting together all the interview bites and whittling them down, shaping them. I don't go but so far, because I know that as soon as I start to put footage in, which is the next stage, it'll change.

Do you draft a script on paper before you cut?
I don't usually do a paper cut, I'm more instinctual now. But I will write out a structure - where I want to start, how I want to get to the end. I sketch out scenes and what the order should be. Then I start adding footage and stills, assembling edited sequences. What happens in this process of building is that I'll see things from my paper structure that aren't working, so I start to move things around. And I'll go back through the transcripts sometimes, like when I need a way to transition to certain footage. And then when I show Spike a cut, he'll ask, "How come you didn't put this in, how come you didn't add this sequence?" So I'll go back and look at the material and rebuild.

If each of the hours is an act, what is the over-arching story?
A people under siege. [Hours] one and two are chronologically driven; three and four [edited by Geeta Gandbhir and Nancy Novack] are more thematically driven.

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts is available for purchase and rental.

With 130 storytellers, isn't there a risk that the film will be a long montage, and not a coherent story that carries viewers through an experience?
That's the challenge. Everybody's got different pieces of the story, and someone who might be good at the beginning is not so good when it comes to talking about the evacuation. Someone who doesn’t say much in the beginning is great when it comes to talking about the flooding. So I'm trying to find the rhythms of these people, to create a journey, an arc. I've noticed in a lot of sequences where we've tried to intercut people telling the same story, I've gone back and I've taken out some voices, to allow one person tell the story. If you find the right characters, the right interviews, they can give you a visceral sense of immediacy, of being there, so you feel emotionally connected to it. When this man tells you about finding his mother's body under the refrigerator, because she hadn't gotten out… Or this woman whose daughter went to stay with her father in the Ninth Ward, and she couldn't find her and was having dreams that she was falling, falling, falling, and then a few months later they found her daughter's body... That's powerful. You try to get out of the way, not to condense too much, edit it too much.

Documentary Storytelling, Second Edition also features interviews with Steven Ascher & Jeanne Jordan, Victoria Bruce & Karin Hayes, Ric Burns, Jon Else, Nick Fraser, Susan Froemke, Kenn Rabin, Per Saari, and Onyekachi Wambu. The book is available through Focal Press, Amazon, and other online booksellers.