Actor Brad Pitt says he and partner Angelina Jolie like to bike around New Orleans, and he enjoys seeing the energy-efficient homes his Make It Right Foundation built for families displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

“In New Orleans, the people are great. They leave Angie and me alone,” Pitt says in an interview on the New Orleans Times-Picayune’s website. Despite the paparazzi that often trail them, he says: “Everybody treats us like neighbors.”

“The Lower 9th is now the greenest — I don’t even like the word green — it’s the most high-performing clean neighborhood in the world, according to the Green Building council,” he says.

Pitt, who has a home in the French Quarter and is now there for Katrina’s fifth anniversary events, says he was drawn to the city because he found it “sexy and sultry.” He was interviewed by historian Douglas Brinkley, a longtime friend.

In 2006, Pitt’s non-profit foundation commissioned 13 architecture firms to design affordable, eco-friendly houses and has since built 30 in the Lower Ninth Ward, according to Brinkley. Here are excerpts of his interview with Pitt, as provided to the Times-Picayune

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