Elmore Leonard: Djibouti

She walked out of her studio on Chartres in the Quarter and shot Katrina ripping through New Orleans, flooding much of the city, and her two sisters, divorced, left town together for Hot Springs, Arkansas. Her mother and dad, retired, living on St. Charles Avenue, thought of having their home repaired for the third time, sold the property and moved to Sea Island, Georgia. In the lull that followed the hurricane Dara's camera stayed on people who couldn't leave, homeless now, waiting for help that never came. Dara said she shot Katrina because there it was, outside. It won an Oscar.

The awards came during her first ten years making factual films, showing people's lives, getting them to talk about who they were. Dara was thirty-five at the time she began thinking about her next one.

Nuns? She found them in a convent, sisters who had taught her in grade school, a gathering of Brides of Christ, pressing their rosaries through withered fingers. Some still wore their habits. Not one Audrey Hepburn among them.

Try the other direction: a call girl talking about love for sale as she dresses to meet a john at one of the better hotels. She moves around the bedroom with her exposed breasts beginning to sag, telling Dara, "What do I do after, run a house? In New York it's a three-bedroom apartment on the West Side. Sit in the living room talking to the john waiting for the high-energy black girl. He's looking at Playboy. I was in Playboy when I was eighteen, before you had to shave your cooze and come off looking like a fucking statue. Is that what you want to make, a movie about me bitching?"

An idea came along from a guy who sold restaurant supplies in a town devoted to restaurants. Gerard, a nasty drunk before he found his Higher Power in AA and cleaned himself up. Gerard's idea-he'd even finance it-shoot AA meetings, the drunkalogues, a man or woman standing in the front of the room telling about harrowing situations inspired by booze. "I look up, I'm driving into traffic coming at me on the freeway, fast, nine o'clock Friday evening."

Dara had doubts, but listened to stories at meetings, heard recovering alcoholics being contrite, heard others tell their drunkalogues like they were doing stand-up. "I go out to wash the car, I'm in my bathing suit, and I come in the house smashed." One after another. "In two years I had three DUIs and did thirty days for driving without a license."

"Everything is told," Dara said. "These people are telling the film instead of showing it. They're doing monologues. Albert Maysles knew how to set a mood. He was seventy-eight when he made In Transit, got passengers on a train talking about intimate moments in their lives. But while they're telling, they're showing who they are. He got as close to his subjects as possible and seldom asked a question, never ever foreground himself in his scenes."

Gerard said, "So you don't want to shoot drunkalogues."

Dara became fixed on the pirates reading a three-column headline in the Times-Picayune:

She read the piece that began: "Somalia's increasingly brazen pirates are building sprawling stone houses, cruising in luxury cars-even hiring caterers to prepare Western-style food for the hostages."

Down to: "In northern coastal towns the pirate economy is thriving thanks to the money pouring in from ransomed ships, which has reached thirty million so far this year."

Dara pulled stories off the Internet and read about Somali pirates for the next few hours, accounts of what they were up to, some stories with photographs:

The Saudi oil tanker carrying a hundred million dollars of crude, hijacked, boarded by pirates in less than fifteen minutes.

The MV Faina, a Ukrainian cargo ship, being held for ransom since September, thirty-three Russian tanks and assault rifles aboard.

Photographs of Somali speedboats skimming over the water with six or seven pirates aboard, each boat armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

Another photo, a trawler and its crew of Somalis wearing casually wrapped kaffiyehs and T-shirts, and a sign on the trawler's wheelhouse that read SOMALI COAST GUARD.

She began to realize these guys were doing their own style of piracy, nothing like the old-time cutthroats. The Somalis were having a good time getting rich. She thought of Xavier who lived around the corner on St. Philip, and phoned him.

Xavier's voice came on asking Dara, "What you up to this hour?"

She said, "You've been through the Gulf of Aden, haven't you?" XAVIER LEBO, SIX-SIX STRAIGHT up in his bare feet, seventy-two years old, a black man with a gold ring in his ear, some gray in his hair and white teeth he showed smiling at Dara. Xavier had gone to sea when he was sixteen. He told Dara he'd been through the Gulf of Aden thirty, forty times counting both ways. He said, "You know how many ships pass through?"

"All I'm sure of," Dara said, "it's on the east coast of Africa."

"Twenty thousand merchant ships and oil tankers a year," Xavier said. "The ones headin west go up through the Red Sea to Suez, where the Egyptians try to shake you down. The other way you go all the way to China. You interested in the pirates, huh, rippin off all the ships go by."

"I wouldn't mind talking to some of them."

"They gone after a hundred ships and caught maybe forty of 'em. Take money from the safe and what they want from the galley. Or they run the ship down to Eyl and hold it there for ransom. Ask a couple million for a Greek cargo ship and get it. You know what they want for the Sirius Star, the Saudi oil tanker? Twenty-five million. The Saudis say they won't give 'em shit. All right, they'll take seventeen million. They'll get some- thin and buy new cars. You know what their favorite is? Black Toyota SUV with black windows. I hear some of the pirates are dressin up. They put on a suit and tie, drive up to Djibouti to get laid and marry a fine-lookin woman. Be his Djibouti wife."

Dara heard him flick his Ronson to light a cigarette.

"You know where to find the best-lookin girls in Africa? Eritrea, on the Red Sea, above Ethiopia. But now I think about it, they some fine-lookin Ethiopian women I've seen. Smart-lookin thin ladies with the cheekbones, some black as coal, their race not tampered with much through the ages." He said, "Hang on a minute, I got to take a leak, relieve my worn-out bladder."

He came back on and Dara said, "I'm thinking about doing one on the pirates. Interview some of them…Does that make sense?"

Xavier said, "Yeah, but they take one look at you, gonna hold you for ransom."

"Really?" Dara said. "What do you think I'd be worth?" THEY MET THE FIRST time two days before Katrina, knowing it was coming, Dara waiting for a table at Felix's, the manager telling her, "Just a few minutes, Dara."

Xavier got up from his table and waved her over.

"Come on sit here. They lyin to you, 'just a few minutes.'" He pulled out a chair at his table, a dozen oysters and a bottle of beer waiting. "You don't mind, I like to ask you about a movie you made." He started to smile a little. "The one you called Whites Only? You surprise me. Nice-lookin woman associatin with those freaks. They try and mess with you?"

"At first," Dara said, seated now with Xavier. "I told them I'm too busy to fall in love, okay? I asked what they've got against African Americans. Got them saying nasty things and started shooting."

"Shoulda used a shotgun."

Dara had a dozen oysters, then another while Xavier was on his third plate, Xavier telling her he'd been going to sea on and off most of fifty years. "Me and three hundred thousand Filipinos. I don't know where they go. I always come back to New Orleans."

They had a couple of cognacs and coffee after.