I just saw the movie, "Skins" by Chris Eyre this weekend. My sister in law heard that I was taking an Indian Lit class and suggested the movie to me. I have to say that I was entranced. I had seen "Smoke Signals" a few years back and loved it but I had never even heard of this movie. I think this was a better movie by far. Eyre set out not to make a movie about Indians but to make a movie about people who happen to be Indian. It could be argued that Eyre threw every type of stereotype into this film and that he should be ashamed. but in the interview I posted below, he states that these are not stereotypes, this is how things are. I agree. The character of Mogie, played with Oscar caliber by Graham Greene, is easily the most believable character in any Indian film I've seen to date. I see in him not just another drunk Indian, but another drunken Human. I myself am a recovered alcoholic. I have been dry since 1987. I was just like Mogie in most ways, maybe worse because funds were readily available and so was the booze.
I think the best thing about Eyre's movie is his strive to give Indians a story. Storytelling is pivotal and key in all native cultures. Every tribe we've read and heard of, has a tale to tell. It seems that over the past 150 years, those stories have been taken away, Tales have been replaced by "accounts". Accounts of massacre, accounts of starvation, accounts of poverty, accounts of extinction. The movie is based on a novel by Adrian Louis, a half-breed, as he calls himself, but a writer and voice for many tribes in Nevada. Louis and Eyre seem to want to create tales to fit the modern aspect of the Indian. In fact, the movie seems to center around the "trickster" in the form of a spider, who every time a spider shows up, bad things happen, really bad things. That voice is important. It gives us all a voice in the matters. Whether that voice is condemning or condoning, it is still a voice. That is what I hope Eyre continues to strive to do. Give all of us human-beings, a voice.
I have posted the interview below with Chris Eyre, I hope you enjoy.
CHRIS NEUMER: I saw your recent film Skins and I really enjoyed it. I tell you that because I actually reserve that statement for films that I have seen and enjoyed. Everyone is talking about how this is a Native American project and it seems that lost in all of this press is that the movie is pretty damn solid. I just keep reading about how you are Native American and it just seems that people continually overlook the fact that this is a good work of cinema. CHRIS EYRE: Yeah, I’m glad that you noticed. I think it is. I thought Smoke Signals was. I think ultimately it’s more about the story. I think it has to be provocative and interesting people cinema, but more than that I’m more interested in where the movie ends. Where the movie ends is really a beginning point for a lot of the Pandora’s Box as it were of what is Indian country and how does it relate to America. I see the movie as a reflection of our Native American fabric of America. I appreciate the fact that it’s a solid movie and a good movie, but really for me I’m trying to strive for touching something that doesn’t exist in cinema and that is representation of contemporary Native America. I think that we live in segregated places in this country and I don’t think that we are harmonious. Administrations would have us believe…
CHRIS EYRE: We’re really invisible especially when it comes to movies and television. We’re actually invisible. I’m not trying to make that an article with you or an interview with you that’s about victimization, but just like my movie, I think that there are certain truths and we aren’t being objective about those things being truths.
CHRIS EYRE: Like alcoholism. People act like it’s a stereotype. It’s not a stereotype, it’s a truth. There’s no secret. People who think it’s airing dirty laundry aren’t strong enough to be objective and say this is something that has been an affliction not only in Indian country, but throughout a lot of America. In my movie I just try to be honest, find that truth.
CHRIS EYRE: Certainly my goal was to make a person; I didn’t think of him as an alcoholic. If you think the movie’s about alcoholism, you really miss the boat. Alcoholism is only a symptom of the condition on that reservation. The movie is not about alcoholism. I never thought about it in terms of making an alcoholic character. I thought about it terms of making a story about a man that I care about. It’s interesting. We’re talking about some things that are paradoxes. On one hand we’re talking about stereotypes and on the other hand we’re talking about things that shouldn’t be stereotypes. Strange. We’re walking a fine line here.
CHRIS EYRE: The fact that I’m trying to portray these characters as people. That shouldn’t be novel.
CHRIS EYRE: That was Justin Lin.
CHRIS EYRE: I think it is very progressive in the sense that. I feel that in order to move forward you really have to own the good, the bad and the ugly of yourself. It’s about me as an artist or an individual owning all the parts of myself that I don’t like, but that is what makes me whole as a person. Know what I mean? And by that same token I think whether it was Justin’s movie or Skins, I hate political correctness. I was making a movie that was about people. It wasn’t about am I scared to talk about alcoholism or am I scared to talk about patriotism or backlash of patriotism. Even in this day and age, I think that you can get away with all that stuff when you add the humor. Graham is really the trickster in a large way. His humor is the thing that carries people through all the hard times. That’s the saving grace of anybody. I haven’t seen Justin’s movie but certainly it’s always about the humor, how you can tell a group of people being themselves, being authentic. Especially in this case, oppressed people because they know how to make light of their situation. They know how to make light of themselves.
CHRIS EYRE: One of the marks of being Indian is always the ability to make light of your situation because there is an alliance in that. There is an alliance in always being able to laugh at just your circumstance and situation. That was the same way with Smoke Signals. I think that this one goes a step further because… Smoke Signals was a charming movie to me. This movie I would say is a powerful movie. It’s a real movie. Maybe it’s not the Indians that people want to see, but these are Indians that are real to me. One of the interesting things to me was Hollywood’s version of this movie was Dances With Wolves because these are Lakotas. There are Lakotas in Dances With Wolves and there are Lakotas in Skins. Only in my version we are talking about Indians and in Hollywood’s version they are talking about Native Americans.
CHRIS EYRE: Indians weren’t the ones who said, "Hey, we want to be called Native Americans." ‘Indians’ is an adopted word also, but the fact of the matter is it is one that we own. ‘Native American’ is about distance, about segregation. When people stop coming up to me and asking what I want to be called then I’ll know that things are starting to be unified in terms of America. When people ask what I want to be called, I tell them ‘Chris.’ That’s what we’re talking about here, right? Everybody’s too sensitive, too touchy-feely and too politically correct. In terms of Indians being noble, somewhere after the 1960s when everybody smoked a lot of pot, Indians became Native Americans because Blacks became African Americans. I’m not saying all the Indian people bought into that, but it was an effort to show respect to people. You can show respect to people… I mean these guys call each other ‘skin’ because I know that’s what real people call each other. My movie is not about romanticizing Indians. That’s what Dances With Wolves with its Native Americans was about. My characters are flawed in the most beautiful way. They are flawed in the human way.
CHRIS EYRE: That’s what makes us all the same. That’s what I’m talking about. I love Bogie??? I made the movie because I love Bogie. I want the world to love Bogie because he’s a person who is important to me. Because he is me.
CHRIS EYRE: In a metaphoric sense. I couldn’t have made the movie unless I had those projections that could have been me. Certainly that isn’t me.
CHRIS EYRE: (Tells Chris his battery may go dead, but to keep going)
CHRIS EYRE: Graham said that this role was daunting to him at first because it was real. All of a sudden it was like, wait a second, it was like buckskin and playing Indian, you know what I’m talking about? You’re talking about these are real people. Relatives or community members or people that we’ve all known and he confessed it himself that he didn’t want to do this role. It was too dark and what he brought to it was comedy. He elevated the whole thing with the comedy. Eric was the same way. He said he was so happy to put on a pair of Levis and go to work and not a loincloth.
CHRIS EYRE: There was a lot. Graham was somebody that I was really learning from and Eric is a great actor. We were cutting lines left and right just because they didn’t feel like those were right. They could convey what they were trying to convey without the dialogue. Look at Eric when he’s in the truck after he burns Mogie. That was improv and it’s a testament to the fact that these Indian actors deserve good material. I don’t think that Indian actors get good material.
CHRIS EYRE: Really we were challenging ourselves. Graham and I talked about it later. I want to challenge myself and I want them to challenge me. I think that’s when everybody is at their best.
CHRIS EYRE: I think that you are right and I’m learning that.
CHRIS EYRE: I love voyeurism. Voyeurism, a long lens. That’s the way you learn. That’s the way that I really see things. I didn’t use a long lens as much as I wanted to but it’s about being privy about something that you are not supposed to be privy to in a lot of cases. And also wee didn’t have a chance to do a lot of coverage. Graham and his son inside the shack, that was just a wide shot. We just let it go and I didn’t have coverage of that. Graham and Noah Watt???? can carry that scene in a wide shot. It was beautiful because it was all real. That house wasn’t designed. That was a real guy’s house on Pine Ridge. That’s the way it was. Graham walked in and looked around. He looked at the bed he was going to lie on and he said, "Are those going to be part of the production?" because it was a real house. I told him yes. That was all he needed to know to be comfortable and lie down and do a scene. The rest of the house was ‘as is.’ We paid $150 for that location and that’s a guy’s house. Those were people… There’s no substitute, you know.
CHRIS EYRE: What was it?
CHRIS EYRE: There’s a lot of setup in this movie. The first act ends really late. You know where he sees the green shoelaces at the Texaco? That’s really where the second act begins and that is very, very late. There’s a lot of stuff at the very beginning, acclimation. That’s why I started out with that documentary footage with the voiceover because after I finished the movie I realized that not everybody knows where Pine Ridge is. Not everybody knows all about Pine Ridge, or the proximity of Mount Rushmore. I pulled that stuff from NBC Nightly News. It’s all real stuff and real statistics. I thought in the spirit of the movie, the tone of the movie, I’m trying to make something real. I was trying to scratch the surface of the reality, so to marry it with the documentary footage and the voiceover to acclimate people. If people in Germany see the movie… There are so many disparities of education regarding what people know and don’t know about Native America, that you have to have a common starting point. There’s so much information at the beginning that the second act starts really late. I’m glad that you thought it wove together okay because I was like, "I’ve got to get this movie going by the first 20 minutes." It only starts moving once he sees those green shoelaces the second time.
CHRIS EYRE: Revolving.
CHRIS EYRE: You know what’s interesting about what you are saying? That’s what I’m saying. The end of the movie is really the beginning. You’ve opened up the Pandora’s box of why. Why do the Third World conditions exist? It’s not about alcohol. It’s about the 120 years of the reservation system.
CHRIS EYRE: Same as Smoke Signals. It ends in the beginning. It ends with Victor taking the first steps to healing.
CHRIS EYRE: Go see Smoke Signals. Will you rent it for me?
CHRIS EYRE: Yeah, because I think that you will see some similarities.
CHRIS NEUMER: The last thing that I wanted to talk to you about was to ask if you ever encountered any problems with the way you were talking about defacing Mount Rushmore? In these patriotic times if you say one bad word about (end of tape)
CHRIS EYRE: Patriotism for me is about exercising your right to speak or to exercise the democracy that you have in an effort to make what we have better in this American family. We do live in the best country in the world. That’s not bias, that’s truth. What we’re going through is changes all the time. If we can’t dialogue about how to make our country better… If we’re going to be the humanitarians of the world, the first thing I think we need to do is to know our history of this country. What I don’t think we’ve done is know our history of Native Americans in this country. It’s something people sweep under the rug. My movie is like you were saying, it evolves. The end is really about a Pandora’s Box.
CHRIS EYRE: I’m too young to get on a perch and wave a flag and for that to be my patriotism.
CHRIS NEUMER: You do like that image of the Pandora’s box. For what it’s worth, I thought the poster art was pretty cool. I thought it was a good image and would probably grab a few more people to take a look at the film.
CHRIS NEUMER: I will rent it for you and if you are interested, I’ll even give you a call back and give you my impression of it.
CHRIS NEUMER: I must confess that I have not seen Smoke Signals.
CHRIS NEUMER: It’s like life in that respect you know. Even though this might be the end of your particular job, tomorrow brings on new challenges that today has set up.
CHRIS NEUMER: Exactly.
CHRIS NEUMER: You kind of get the feeling when he comes across the guy in the deserted house that this might be a mystery. Then you see the vigilante aspect and I wondered if this was going to be something like Unbreakable. And then, no, it wasn’t that. Is it going to be like a brother drama like this. And, no, it wasn’t. It constantly seems to be…
CHRIS NEUMER: The way the characters go off in several different directions. They are dealing with one over-arching principal, but they are dealing with this in several different ways.
CHRIS NEUMER: No, there isn’t. It comes across with an authenticity that you’re not going to see if it’s on a sound stage somewhere. One thing that I liked about the plot was the fact that it goes in a couple of different directions. There’s sort of the vigilante aspect, dealing with Mogie and his chronic problems and coming to grips with where he is in comparison with other people. Even the memories that both boys had with their father. It all comes back together in the end when everything gets sort of connected. Usually when you see a film that goes in several different directions at the same time, you instantly think of some film like Batman Forever that is just a mess. In this particular case it was quite fluid the way everything interwove together. I am curious to know if that was a purposeful interweaving or if that was the original intent.
CHRIS NEUMER: I liked it because you had a very subtle directorial presence there. It wasn’t intrusive. There were a couple of different shots that really stuck in my head. There’s one shot of when Rudy is driving in his car and you are shooting this from about a block away. There was another, the P.O.V. shot when Rudy looks out in front of the liquor store. Little things like that…
CHRIS NEUMER: It’s interesting too that you wrote and directed this. It just seems like that’s what you have to do, create your own project unless you want to fall prey to the stereotypes that are rampant within the studio system.
CHRIS NEUMER: I think that you could extend that statement to even some other minority groups. It’s like you have to write your own.
CHRIS NEUMER: I think that was what really came through in the final product too. Roles like that seem like they are pretty hard to pass up as well, just from an actor’s standpoint. Was there a lot of improvisation on the set or was what you guys shot, what showed up in the final cut, was that what you had written?
CHRIS NEUMER: It was just amazing to me to see Eric and Graham completely embodying these roles.
CHRIS NEUMER: You got two very, very commendable and solid performances with the two leads. I haven’t seen Eric in any movie since Last of the Mohicans whenever that was, 12 years ago. It just seemed like both of them morphed into these roles and just captured everything.
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh, really?
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s the best kind of flaw.
CHRIS NEUMER: I have to ask. What do you see as the difference between the two terms when you say Native American and Indian?
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s a very interesting point that you don’t hear very much. Once you can make fun of it, it seems that’s going the right way, but of course that would conflict greatly with the politically correct version of what the media portrays.
CHRIS NEUMER: This is the one that got the big shouting match among the film critic audience members at the end. It’s interesting to think, and I compared Skins to that in as much as people are saying, "How can you do this to Asian Americans. Look at what you are doing to them." My reaction to both films was, I’m not sure if I’m being naïve or I’m being super enlightened, but when I watched this movie, I just saw people. Granted they were American Indian people, but to me they were just two guys going about, doing their thing. It just seems interesting that that is not the collective opinion of this film in the American mainstream.
CHRIS NEUMER: No. It’s interesting too because there was a film that was out at Sundance this year called Better Luck Tomorrow. It was…
CHRIS NEUMER: And what is it that shouldn’t be a stereotype?
CHRIS NEUMER: I thought it was very interesting because there are so many different alcoholics that you see in Hollywood films, they stumble around and fall down, swear a lot, but Graham Greene and Mogie??? Seemed to be a more realistic alcoholic with his character. Was there any conversation about that before you guys started shooting?
CHRIS NEUMER: If I could just interrupt you to ask you, what are these truths that you are speaking of?
CHRIS NEUMER: It’s almost as if the American Indian isn’t even a minority any more, even smaller than that.
CHRIS EYRE: I love voyeurism. Voyeurism, a long lens. That’s the way you learn. That’s the way that I really see things. I didn’t use a long lens as much as I wanted to but it’s about being privy about something that you are not supposed to be privy to in a lot of cases. And also wee didn’t have a chance to do a lot of coverage. Graham and his son inside the shack, that was just a wide shot. We just let it go and I didn’t have coverage of that. Graham and Noah Watt???? can carry that scene in a wide shot. It was beautiful because it was all real. That house wasn’t designed. That was a real guy’s house on Pine Ridge. That’s the way it was. Graham walked in and looked around. He looked at the bed he was going to lie on and he said, "Are those going to be part of the production?" because it was a real house. I told him yes. That was all he needed to know to be comfortable and lie down and do a scene. The rest of the house was ‘as is.’ We paid $150 for that location and that’s a guy’s house. Those were people… There’s no substitute, you know.
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