Were Really Funny People: Native American Director Erica Tremblay on Lily Gladstone, Laughter to Survive and Break Hollywood | Movies

WWhen Erica Tremblay was little, she watched her aunts and uncles make everyone laugh with their stories. I noticed this physical change in the audience, where people were leaning in. And I thought: I want this power. I want to be a person that other people lean on.

Within the Seneca Cayuga Nation on the borders of Oklahoma and Missouri, near the small town where she was raised by her mother, community storytelling was a part of daily life. But so did financial hardship and violence, the unsolved murders of women and the forced removal of their children. It's a massive bleeding injury that still exists, she said. From first contact, violence against Indigenous women was an epidemic, and it remains so today. You can't go online or on social media as an Indigenous person without seeing a post shared about a missing person.

Three decades later, she integrated this persistent crisis into a touching and hilariously offbeat first feature film, Fantasy dance, which dwells not so much on the horror as on the strength and ingenuity it takes for a community to survive it. It stars Lily Gladstone, Oscar nominee for Flower Moon Killerswho beautifully plays Jax, an inscrutable lesbian con artist, who unofficially adopted her 13-year-old niece, Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson), after her sister disappeared.

Jax isn't an obvious role model: she has a criminal record and teaches Roki how to shoplift when supplies are low. His sister was a stripper and small-time drug dealer for oilmen living in trailer parks near them. I wasn't interested in telling the story of a model minority who does everything by the rules, who looks and acts a certain way, says Tremblay. I wanted Jax to have varying degrees of gray; I wanted her to react to her situations in a way that her heart tells her, and to sometimes not seem very smart. But she makes all these decisions because she truly believes it's what's best for her niece and herself. And, you know, I appreciate these people in my life so much. Without people like Jax, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you in this version of myself.

Tremblay's friendship with Gladstone dates back to a short film they made together, Little Chef, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020. People kept asking me: Well, are you going to make a feature film of this? And I never really thought about it because that story seemed like a blast to me. It was written to be short. But I recognized that people were really interested in her world and the strong Indigenous character played by Lily. So I called her and said, Hey, would you like to do a feature film?

At the time, Tremblay was in Canada, having dedicated three years of his life to a language immersion course in Cayuga, which still has fewer than 20 indigenous speakers. In her own community in Oklahoma, she says, the last person fluent in the language died in the late 1980s. One of the things she learned was that the word for aunt knoh: ah I meant a little mother. And it just took me to see the matrilineal kinship and matriarchy destroyed by colonialism still so vibrantly intact in the language. I saw a picture in my head of this aunt and her niece dancing, and so I started trying to figure out how to get them there.

Tremblay, now in her early 40s, speaks via video link from upstate New York, where she lives on the original lands of the Seneca Cayuga Nation, before she was evicted and widespread across North America. Growing up, she says, she was always the bossy girl in the neighborhood. After her mother, a teacher, bought her a video camera at a local Goodwill store, she began getting her cousins ​​to play games for her. But she didn't even know such a profession as a director existed, so when she got a scholarship to a state university, she assumed she was going into journalism because it would bring me as close as possible to the cameras.

It wasn't until later that she had a eureka moment. It was in the late 1990s: I saw this queer film called High quality art, just as I was entering into my quirk. And at the end of the film it says, directed by Lisa Cholodenko. And, you know, it's weird to think now that with the Internet and everything else, at the time, it was the first time I realized that a woman could even do this job.

She started making these crappy little short films with her friends on the weekends and got a job as a PA on a small film shooting in the Midwest, where she met a man from Los Angeles who had worked for David Fincher. He was very kind and great at his job, but he was just a normal person. And that was another revelation that I could go to Los Angeles. She saved the $2,000 she thought she needed and drove away. Everything was going pretty well until she realized she needed health insurance and a decent salary and, you know, it's hard to get that as an assistant when you're working at Hollywood.

So she cashed in her chips for a job in advertising and built a successful career in New York. But the dream of becoming a filmmaker tormented her. So I just took the opportunity to write a short film, walked into a native lab at Sundance, and when my short film got to Sundance in 2020, I was like, OK, this is the sign that I should really give it a go. That's when I quit all my day jobs, moved to a remote reservation, and started learning my language by day and writing by night.

At Sundance, she read a native romantic comedy from the woman who would become her writing partner for Fantasy dance, Miciana Alise. I slid into his DMs and said, Hey, I have the outline of this movie I want to make. Would you like to bring your romantic sensibilities to this aunt and niece relationship? Even though the themes are serious, the comedy is important, she said.

They were really funny people. I think when you survive as much darkness as the natives do, one of the survival mechanisms becomes laughter and joy in things. We wanted to express the reality of what it means to be Indigenous. And the two of them, Isabel and Lily, are so funny in real life. From the moment they arrived, they were playing pranks on each other and the set; they really were Jax and Roki in many ways.

In addition to directing his own films, Tremblay worked on the groundbreaking television series Native American Reservation dogs And Dark Winds. In terms of representation, at least, it seems like things are improving. But, you know, she said, Native Americans have been telling stories as part of a vital culture for millennia. These stories have always existed and have always served our communities. And these stories will always continue to exist.

If we were talking specifically about Western media and the Western distribution system, of course we were left out. So, are we at a moment where this version of the Indigenous narrative is healthier? Absolutely. As Indigenous storytellers, do we receive responses to phone calls? Absolutely. Are we being hired into positions of leadership and power in Hollywood that we weren't 10 or 15 years ago? Absolutely. This momentum is there. We see it with the success of all these shows. We see this with the wonderful trip Lily Gladstone took last year. But I think it's still important to say that our representation has never diminished. I mean, it went down when it was illegal for us to practice our ceremonies, but what did we do? We found ways to do that and preserve that knowledge, so that we can still have those stories and tell them today.

Her commitment to herself is to continue to tell the stories of her people in every way possible. For me, it doesn't matter the space, it doesn't matter the vehicle, whether it's a TV or equipment. I want to create stories that inspire people to get involved. This is my goal and this is my dream.