SXSW 2023 – A Cathartic Moment of Love and Connection: A Conversation with ‘Fancy Dance’ Director and Co-Writer Erica Tremblay

Following her sister's disappearance, a Native American hustler kidnaps her niece from the child's white grandparents and sets out for the state powwow in the hopes of keeping what’s left of her family intact.

The writerly saying "write what you know" rings loud and true in Erica Tremblay's feature film Fancy Dance. The film brings the Cayuga language and people to the forefront, showcasing their love, struggle, survival, and connection. It shines as a beautifully helmed and meticulously crafted script, but between the white lines, we are privy to ongoing unethical mistreatment of Indigenous people, from murder to housing Native children. 

Filmmaker Erica Tremblay recently spoke with Script about the first spark of inspiration for the story, how her native language was integral to the story, creative collaboration, re-teaming with actress Lily Gladstone and more.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: How did you land on this story and what was the writing collaboration like with your co-writer?

Erica Tremblay: I had just kind of quit my day job [laughs] to take a chance on becoming a screenwriter and director. I had moved to a small reserve in Canada and I was attending this university, taking a full-time language immersion program in Cayuga, which is my native language. And I was studying the language eight hours a day with my cohort, seven other language learners. And we were learning about family words, and the word for mother is knó:ha. And the word for your mother's sister, your aunt is knohá:ˀah, which essentially means small mother or your other mother. Being able to go in and learn this language that isn't actually spoken in my community anymore, because we lost our last language speaker in 1989, I was seeing a worldview of my culture that I hadn't had access to before.

Patriarchy, white supremacy, sexism, all of these things have taken over so much of our culture, and in the language, this beautiful matrilineal society was so clear to me and how the grammar, the sentence structure, the vocabulary, and just in general, how you speak it was just so clear to me this other way of living, and I just embarked on this mission to make a modern-day story, where young people speak the language fluently and where matrilineal society is the backbone of culture. And I wanted to kind of just celebrate the women and queer or folks that keep our community safe.

I had gone through the Sundance Indigenous Lab and I had met this really incredible indigenous screenwriter named Miciana [Alise]. It was the height of the pandemic when I started writing the script, and I was alone and lonely, and it was a really weird time for all of us. I slid into her DMs and I was like, ‘Hey, do you remember me? Would you be interested in working on this project with me?’ And so Miciana joined me and the two of us embarked on this effort to bring these two characters to life and we broke the script during the pandemic and would Zoom with each other. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, and I was in the Northeast and so across a continent we would join every day digitally and work together to make this screenplay.

Sadie: Was there a North star to carry you through the story?

Erica: Yeah, I think we were very methodical. We knew that we had enough experience in this world coming from our own communities. That what was really important for us to figure out where our characters were going and we were very methodical and we built spreadsheets. And we came up with our character arcs, and we spent a lot of time talking about who was in their world and what the relationships looked like with all of these people, and we knew the ending. We always knew what the ending was going to be.

In fact, I had this idea of this auntie-niece story with the knó:ha and knohá:ˀah element, and I saw the two of them dancing at the end and that was like the first spark of inspiration. So, we always knew where we were going to end it. And it was really just the two of us alongside with our producer Deidre Backs who was developing the project along with us. It was always about how do we get them there? What kind of adventures and obstacles are they overcoming in order to have this cathartic moment of love and connection with each other in the end?

Sadie: It's such a beautiful bookend moment. In terms of your characters and their character development, especially Jax played by Lily Gladstone who is just phenomenal – you two had worked on one of your short films Little Chief, what was the creative collaboration like on this project with this character, and how you were shaping her voice?

Erica: I am such a huge fan of Lily and I fell in love with her the first time I saw her face in Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women. Through the Sundance Institute, I had been teamed up with Sterlin Harjo as one of my mentors and he knew Lily and I was like, ‘I really want her to be in my short film, do you think she would do it?’ and he was like, ‘well you could email her.’ [laughs] And she came along for the adventure and the ride and as soon as we wrapped Little Chief and it premiered at Sundance in 2020, I knew that I wanted to do something bigger with her.

She's so generous and so talented and so present, that when we had a very first draft completed that was just real, bare-bones skeleton, we sent that to Lily, and she was reading drafts along the way. She's a busy person, but she would find time to have conversations around Jax. And by the time we took the script through the Sundance Labs, and we got financing, and we arrived on set - she had been sitting with Jax for a couple of years, and so had I - and it was almost as if we were returning to an old friend in a way because we had created this character in the short film that was very similar. And while it's not an extension of the short film, it's in the same world with a similar character. And it was just a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful collaboration.

Lily is she's not just a phenomenal actor, but she's also just so smart and intelligent, just brings a maturity and levity to everything that she does. And I'm just so grateful to what she brought to this character. And when we were on set, we would do a couple of takes, and then I would be like, ‘now do it, but pull it back by 50%.’ And then, ‘pull it back by 10%.’ We would just play around with how much Jax is showing on the surface and how much she's hiding. And we had a real blast playing around with like the dial on Jax and ultimately we ended up using a really reserved version of her performances in the edited version. I just think that she just really made that character so nuanced and come to life in such a wonderful way.

Sadie: Her presence, there's a steadiness about her and I liked how you start chipping away at her character throughout this film. In terms of the visual tone – what was it like working alongside your cinematographer Carolina Costa?

Erica: Yeah, Carolina is so incredible, and so I'm so glad to have worked with her and hope to collaborate with her so many more times. [laughs] Carolina would make these Bibles that she would send out every morning or the night before and it would just be this organized manifestation of us geeking out together on what we wanted the next day to be. We spent a lot of time on the weekends putting together our shot list. We definitely went into every day with a real plan. And when you're shooting a movie for not very much money, you have to be prepared. And of course, you have to be ready to have an epiphany or an idea and you want to be flexible and sometimes things don't go the way that you want them to go. But for me showing up to set with a plan is vital, and especially when you are shooting under budgetary and time constraints.

We just got each other. We had the same visual language, we loved the same references from other films and from other photographers. She just was such a pleasure on set as well and we had a lot of fun together and experimenting. We want it to be right with the women most of the time and we want it to be right on their shoulders and it was a really wonderful collaboration. She just she won the cinematography award for Fancy Dance at South by Southwest last week. So, I'm so glad that other people recognize just how incredibly talented she is.

Sadie: Yeah, she definitely has a knack for capturing those very intimate moments in all of her work, especially from a female perspective and not being afraid to take the camera there where I think a lot of other cinematographers are not so sure-footed in that in that front.

Erica: Yeah, and one thing to maybe just to add to that, a strong example of that collaboration was the strip club scenes. I worked in several different strip clubs, and I always laugh when I watch films of how the set decoration of strip clubs and just how not authentic and real they are portrayed on screen. And so, we worked very closely with the art department to bring that space to life and we wanted it to feel real and raw. And we also didn't want to exploit the women. So every scene is on level with the dancers and we never see them from the viewpoint of the men and we were very conscious about where the camera was at and how we were using the camera in relation to the women who were working at the strip club. That was something that we thought a lot, a lot, a lot about and prepared as we went into shooting those scenes.

Sadie: As a storyteller, are there any themes or stories that you want to explore through your work?

Erica: I'm just really interested in women being badass in whatever that is. I think that you can apply that to a romcom, you can apply that to sci-fi, to horror - I'm just really interested in seeing specifically Queer Indigenous characters, navigating the world and succeeding. Our film, navigates some really treacherous themes that are prevalent in Indian country, but they succeed in living and they succeed in loving and that's what I love to see characters do that are kind of up against it, but managed to salvage their humanity for survival.

I'm currently developing a grounded horror film that takes native mythology, set in a present-day setting and I'm having just a blast with it. There's so many incredible native storytellers out there and so many incredible native stories that have yet to be told that I want to make my own and I want to watch all of my peers make their own versions of these stories. So yeah, I just want to see more badass Indigenous characters living and laughing and loving.

Sadie: I'm totally there. Who do we write the check out to?

Erica: That's the thing, it's really hard to get people to invest in these stories. Hollywood loves to say that they want to make diverse stories and that diversity is important, but that only means something if they're actually writing checks. We were so fortunate to team up with our incredible producers. and Tommy Oliver and Heather Rae and Nina Yang Bongiovi, Deidre Backs; we found producers that believed in the story that we were telling and believed enough that they wrote us a check, and that just needs to keep happening.

Sadie: That speaks volumes, and we need to see more of that coming from Hollywood – more walk the walk, less talk the talk.

What do you hope audiences take away from watching your film?

Erica: I really hope that folks from my community and folks from the Native community, get to have a movie to watch that they can relate to, that they can laugh at, [and] that they can engage with in some way. That's why we made this film. We made this film for native audiences, but past that, I think it's a very global story, and I hope that any non-natives that come across this film are inspired to understand more about their role and living in North America and what that means and what issues are facing Native Americans in this country every single day.

This isn't a procedural film. It's not teaching lessons or any sort of specific law, but I hope people will look up the Indian Child Welfare Act after and start to wonder who does raise Native kids and who is responsible for that? And I do think that we have this epidemic of missing Indigenous people and murdered Indigenous people that's a very real thing. And I hope that people can understand that we all play a role in providing safety for each other. But I mean, ultimately, I want people to just feel that sense of connection and humanity that we hope the end of the film provides to our audience.