Cinema Canada (Dec 1977-Jan 1978)

oes Feesmcarne preokteme an interview with martin defalco by joan irving You directed Cold Journey. Did you also conceive the film? It was actually Noel Starblanket who directed us to the issue of native education. At the time, around 1969, he was working here as part of the NFB’s Indian training film crew. That crew, many of whom have since gone on to be important leaders in their community, made a little film about residential schools. They had all experienced what it was like to be taken away from home as youngsters and sent to the government run residential schools, and they wanted to examine that situation in a longer film. They asked me to _work with them on it and | agreed. Had you worked with the Indian film unit prior to that? No, but | was familiar with the kinds of problems they were talking about. At that time | was finishing a sponsored documentary film, titled Northern Fisherman, that | shot in Northern Saskatchewan on the Indian reserve at Pelican Narrows. | was shooting there around the first of September — the village was full of life. One day | walked down to the dock and they were pushing the kids into float planes. From then on there were no kids in the village and | suddenly realized that they had been taken out, to school. That had really bothered me, so when the idea for Cold Journey came up, | was interested. George Pearson (who produced Northern Fisherman), and | went to work ona proposal. From there we hired a scriptwriter and the project mushroomed. You went back to Pelican Narrows to shoot much of the film. How were you, your crew and cast received there? Very well. Of course | knew of the people from the previous film. Also, Buckley Petawabano, the young Indian who plays the central character in the film, speaks Cree. He and Johnny Yesno, the other lead actor, cleared the way for us many times. We didn't try to tight ly organize and set-up the shoot; we went there and asked permission to do things as the filming proceeded. Working in that way, with the people, the film became much more of a community thing. Whenever people told us that what we were shooting wasn’t right, such as the handling of the animals or the ceremonies and that, we changed it. So from the beginning you were concerned about the authenticity of the film? | tried to stay within the truth of the real situation. It was a film with a fictionalized story line, but | wanted to stay within a documentary context. When | go into the trapper’s house in the film, it’s really his house with his wife and his children. The people shown in the film are in their own situations. We had to be accurate because it was their lives we were depicting. Did you decide to use documentary techniques in Cold Journey because of your background as a documentary director at the NFB? That was part of it | suppose, but in Cold Journey, the documentary technique allowed me to get into the environment, to really feel it, to be almost impressionistic about it. And | think it worked. To me, the strength of the film is its documentary setting. The religious ceremony, the pow-pow, is real. The scenes showing Indians fishing and trapping are real. It’s not a Hollywood thing. Also, there was the problem of actors. You can't make people who are not actors, act. So | eliminated that; except for Johnny Yesno, Buckley Petawabano, Chief Dan George and a few white actors, all the characters play themselves. Frankly, | don’t think | could have made the film without using documentary techniques; | couldn’t have cast it. There were two professional Indian actors in Canada — Buckley and Johnny. Luckily, we were able to get them to play the two lead roles. There was some suggestion at the time we were casting though, that other actors should take the parts. You mean there was talk at the NFB about hiring non-Indian actors to play in the film. Yes there was, and | think it was an honest concern. We were making a feature film. At the time, around 1970, there had never been a film made with Indians as the main characters, Chief Dan George had played in Little Big Man, but | believe he was cast as an afterthought, when they couldn't get Richard Boone or somebody. |’'d worked with Indians and was absolutely convinced that not only could they do it, they would really make the picture. But it was a new thing, and as it turned out, we had problems. The fact that it is an inherently Indian film presented problems. The rhythms in the film