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Chris Eyre: I don’t think so. I mean most of all it’s supposed to be entertainment. Aside from cinema, Indian people have this political baggage that seems to follow them. Just on the merits of the fact that we’re cultural icons in this country. And hopefully for Indian people it can just be entertainment. I think that the way you can really tell a true Indian person is they don’t want to be political. The true “rez” Indian person is the one who really I think has been pushed and pulled and prodded through bureaucracies and are so self-aware of the fact that they are Indian. I think people just want to enjoy and be entertained and have a good time. I hope that it isn’t something that we also have to be so conscious of.
T.M. But, as far as academia is concerned, do you think it’s problematic that the perception or the perspective that’s always being put forth is one of Western thought?
C.E. I think what you’re talking about is more about the artist or the individual. As an artist, I can figure out why it is I’m doing what I’m doing or why it is I’m saying what I’m saying. But, as an Indian person, I really don’t care for the politics a lot of the times.
T.M. Is the Native American experience marked differently by the specific colonial reality (the US govt.) in which they live compared to Maori, Australian Aboriginal or other Indigenous peoples throughout the world?
C.E. Everywhere is more progressive than here (United States). Canada is more progressive with its relationship with Native people, that’s not to say it’s as functional as it should be. At least in New Zealand, they’ve admitted to what their history is with Native people. In this country, we’re still anesthetized by not wanting to be conscious and understand what happened. Certainly there’s no politician in this country, in terms of the president or any administration that would ever say, “we’re sorry about what happened here”. In terms of developed countries, I still think we’re the least progressive in terms of the dysfunctional relationship between Indian people and their government that there is. So yes, it’s different. It’s a little different, but it’s the same.
T.M. Is it fundamentally important to distinguish between the various cosmologies of Native Nations within a film context?
C.E. I’m not really versed on cosmologies. I know there are creation stories and cosmologies that are parallel to those stories. But I can’t speak about other people’s cosmologies.
T.M. Knowing every Nation has their own creation story can it (cosmology) be engaged in film in a more general manner, instead of having to be specific?
C.E. To be honest, I’ve never really made a movie that is a cultural movie, in terms of what I would like to make. When you deal with culture, specific tribes, you deal with creation story, you deal with religion, you deal with language and then I think you have a specific tribe. I’ve never made a movie that deals with the Cheyenne language, and then creation story and then say the Native American Church Religion, or Sun Dance or whatever. That’s a cultural movie and if you put it in a narrative context of live action, I’ve never done that. I don’t know of any movies that really have gone that far, because I don’t think that the audiences are really there for it, and you might think that that’s wrong. It’s a very difficult thing. The Fast Runner was a cultural movie to some degree, because it was very specific in its language and its understanding of its self. Smoke Signals was a very pan-Indian movie, that’s not a cultural movie at all. It’s a very pan-Indian, contemporary movie. You get to these merits that make an Indian movie and we really haven’t gone through to the tip of the iceberg.
T.M. Would you disagree that Smoke Signals didn’t touch upon some of those aspects?
C.E. The tribe was Coeur D’Arlene. It didn’t discuss language. It didn’t have anything to do with Coeur D’Arlene religion, traditional religion, and it had nothing to do with ‘creation’ – tribal stories. It was all fictitious. (Asks me to repeat the initial question.)
T.M. Is it fundamentally important to distinguish between various cosmologies?
C.E. Honestly, I don’t know that there are commercial movies made about Native people that are really cultural. I think it’s important to distinguish the merits of a certain tribe, specificity. I don’t think that those movies are being made. I don’t think that you’re going to raise millions of dollars to make those movies. In Edge of America [Chris’ film for Showtime to be debuted November 21st, 2005], I made up a Tribe. I made up the Three Nations Reservations in Utah and nobody will know that’s made up. America doesn’t understand, doesn’t know what Indians are, or who they are.
T.M. Do you think what we were just talking about, being more culturally specific – you don’t see that in mainstream film, is that because it’s more commercialized?
C.E. Yes. People don’t care; people don’t know who Indian people are in this country at all. It’s reservations dispersed in a lot of states, it’s a very segregated thing. They (America) say “the Indians,” those are “the Indians,” yeah, those are “the Indians.” People care in the romantic sense, but they don’t care in the contemporary sense. In the romantic sense, people love to have their westerns, and their Lakotas. In the contemporary sense, everybody says where’s Red Lake [Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, Minnesota] when the shootings happened [the deadly shooting spree, killing ten, wounding a dozen more, most of which occurred at the Red Lake Nation High School, March 21st, 2005]. I’m generalizing.
T.M. (Discussing the issue of stereotypes and media) Fourth Cinema as a theory, it’s encompassing of Indigenous filmmaking, giving it an Indigenous perspective, and taking it away from the Western school of thought. Although we can only hope that we can get away from the Western school of thought. If Fourth Cinema was developed, it would be basically Indigenous perspective and coming from an Indigenous viewpoint, instead of whitestream America. Do you think if we did have Fourth Cinema that it would confront and re-contextualize those stereotypes?
C.E. I think media; cinema or media in general, is a huge tool for people learning. And it’s a tool that I think could change the world. I think stories can change the world. The problem is, when you talk about cinema, I don’t know if that means commercial, theatrical, cable television, or if that means Indigenous film festivals. There’s a big difference in that there are only so many outlets that people get their information from because of the gate keeping that goes on with media, with movies and everything. If you’re talking about cinema in terms of it having an impact on changing things through local film festivals, it can have an impact but it’s going to be a much smaller impact than being able to put a movie like, Jarhead, which came out last night on 2000 screens nationwide and then around the world. There’s just a huge difference in terms of what you mean by cinema. I’m trying to make work that’s commercial that gets seen. If you’re making work that’s very experimental, and much more of the artistic endeavor then your work is going to be confined to a smaller vacuum of people. Both of these ways can change things. If you’re talking about real change of course one’s going to reach more people than the other. When you talk about real change, you have to realize there are three hundred million Americans here. Thirty million of them are Black, that’s a tenth of the populace. You have to realize that Native Americans represent maybe three million people in this country, so that’s one percent of the overall populace. And, for us to have a voice as one percent is pretty rare, just based on the merits of the numbers. I think film has the ability to change things. You have to actually make commercial work and you have to play within the system for people to see it. And that’s the real trick to make work that isn’t seen as victimization, and isn’t seen as political with all the baggage. Whether it’s Oliver Stone making a political movie or you making a movie about Indian people that’s political, political movies don’t sell. That’s why they don’t make political movies. Yes, you will see a movie like Nixon come out and you’ll see a political movie every year come out, but those aren’t the movies that make money. Therefore, with Native subject matter, it’s something that people . . . and I’m not talking about distributors or studios, I’m talking about the American populace that makes up the other hundred and fifty million people in this country that elected Bush. Those are the people that don’t care. They don’t care about any of this stuff. They don’t care about Indian cinema. They don’t care about contemporary Indian people. They don’t care. So, the bottom line is you have to make entertainment first. And entertainment can come in the form of Skins, which was very political or it can come in the form of Smoke Signals, which was entertaining, people think it’s more political than it probably is. It’s laws of gravity. There’s no revolution that’s happening without it being attached to one hundred and fifty to two hundred million White people in this country that have total apathy for what’s happening around the world. So, it’s not even an Indian problem . . . it’s, people do not really care. We live in that day and age -- about issues -- they don’t care about politics. They don’t care about issues. They don’t care about the humanity of others to a large degree. If you look at it generationally, the whole generation we have now really just wants to be entertained and stimulated all the time and faster and faster. Cinema can change the world, but I’m not sure if that’s local cinema, or three thousand screens opening Friday across the country. I think they both can have an affect, but when you look at what a major motion picture can do like Dances With Wolves versus an experimental video at a film festival in Iowa, I think there night and day.
T.M. We just talked about audience in a general manner. With Skins you released it and created the “Rolling Rez Tour”. When creating your work, in any phase given its context, what role does “audience,” if any, play in determining how you approach your creation or address your audience?
C.E. Well, when I get to make a piece of work, audience has been thought about pretty heavily by whoever’s putting the money up. If they’re giving a few million dollars to make a movie, they’ve thought okay, this is the audience this is how much we’re going to spend to make this movie. And the reason that I make movies for a few million dollars instead of tens of millions is because they won’t reach that much on the subject matter unless it’s Dances With Wolves – a period piece about romantic western lore. So contemporary movies . . . Hollywood doesn’t add that up to translating into making a profit – contemporary movies about Indians. So before I start a new movie, somebody has thought about this is what we’re going to spend on the movie. So, they’ve thought about the audience from that perspective. They’ve thought this is the amount of money we’re willing to spend on this type of story, because it’s contemporary, it’s about Indians, and there’s no such thing as a marketable Indian actor. So somebody’s thought about it. When it comes to me, I look at it from a totally different standpoint, which is the characters and what the movie’s saying and I don’t think about the audience. But, I’m always attached to how much money they’re giving to make the movie. I don’t look at it while I’m making it in terms of I’m trying to fulfill whatever needs that the audience has of these characters. Look at Skins, Skins is a movie that nobody went to see at the movie theater, nobody saw that movie at the box office. It’s a depressing movie to some degree. It reaches for ideas and thoughts and conflicts and politics. I certainly didn’t think of the audience while I was making that. I made it because I was loving the characters, these two brothers. I didn’t think of the audience. I made it because as an artist, that was the work I thought was important to make.
T.M. Where did the idea of the “Rolling Rez Tour” come from?
C.E. That came toward the promotion of the movie. We thought that this would be a nice thing to do. Actually it was born from . . . we shot the movie on Pine Ridge. Pine Ridge is such a poor community that they didn’t have a local movie theater and we wanted to take the movie back to Pine Ridge. And so, somebody had the idea of a mobile cinema that they heard of and we looked it up online. We started to get more information on it. We said okay, we’re going to take this mobile cinema to Pine Ridge and why don’t -- along the way -- we stop at these other Reservations and Indian places, and we just went coast to coast. It came from the idea of taking the movie back to Pine Ridge.
T.M. Why is the re-appropriation of Native American imagery, or for that matter, of Indigenous representation important to necessitate healing in Native American/Indigenous communities?
C.E. I think film is a wonderful reflection of who we are and where we’ve been and where we’re going. When people relate to their own image on the screen, meaning when Indian people relate to contemporary fashions of themselves, that they see as more than the bad projections of things like Walker: Texas Ranger with Indians in it, they see something of themselves. It inspires people to think in different ways and outside themselves and about their own lives. It’s similar to a dream. It’s like lucid dreaming. Do you know lucid dreaming? When you have a dream and you make your dream go a direction you want it to go. It’s the same thing. I mean it’s the same thing as watching yourself on screen, when you identify yourself with those characters. You do the right thing and it reinforces your own projections. So it heals.
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