Lee plans HBO doc on Katrina

Never far from the center of a storm, self-described filmmaker “provocateur” Spike Lee is headed to New Orleans to make a documentary for HBO examining how race and politics may have collided in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Lee says he will use “factual journalism, not creative narrative” in his look at Katrina and New Orleans, which has become a rallying point for black political activists and conspiracy theorists.

Lee watched television coverage of Katrina while he was in Venice, Italy, for a film festival and found himself riveted to the television. He compared the New Orleans situation with the 1974 film “Chinatown,” which starts as a simple detective story set in 1933 Los Angeles but evolves into an intricate tale of high-level corruption and greed.

“People could not believe, especially the residents of the Ninth Ward, that there wasn’t hanky-panky in the flooding,” Lee said of the impoverished New Orleans neighborhood that was hit especially hard by the flood. “And what I thought about automatically was ‘Chinatown,’ the great film by Roman Polanski. The whole subplot of the whole thing is about water in Southern California and how it was not delivered to the people who needed it.”

Lee plans to have his film ready for the one-year anniversary of Katrina.