Some Background
Red Shirt: Can you tell me a bit about your background?
Eyre: I grew up in Klamath Falls, Oregon. I was adopted. I'm Cheyenne and Arapahoe. I went to school in Portland, Oregon. I pursued an associate's degree in television, in directing; I earned my bachelor's degree in media arts at the University of Arizona, and my master's at New York University in filmmaking. I took a very traditional route to a career that cost me quite a bit of money in student loans.

Red Shirt: How did you get into filmmaking?
Eyre: When I was in high school I did a lot of photography. I did a lot of landscape photography and I really always had a love for images. A teacher told me one time in college that the key to making good photography is to tell a story in one picture, and it occurred to me-why should I be telling a story in one picture when I could use 24 frames a second, as in film. So, I started working in video, doing 16-millimeter shorts.

On His Working Style
Red Shirt: How would you describe your directing style?
Eyre: My directing style is very loose, very quiet and fast (laughs)

Red Shirt: Are you an artist?
Eyre: Oh yeah, but I never use the word. I would never call myself an artist in public. What an artist does is make aesthetic choices that add up to a sum, and the sum could be put down on canvas, the sum could be put down in sculpture, or the sum could be put down in celluloid, and as a filmmaker I'm making choices all the time.

Red Shirt: What do you find to be the greatest challenge in filmmaking?
Eyre: The hardest part of filmmaking for me, because I don't come from a theater background, is working with actors. It's also the thing I probably enjoy the most. Working with a camera is something I'm comfortable with. I feel like I know photography well. And I know motivation of camera and how to use it to tell a story. But working with the actors is the variable no one can ever master, because it changes with every story, location, character and actor.

Red Shirt: Do you develop friendships or close relationships with the actors you work with?
Eyre: I really don't know how to do it any other way. That's the unique thing about making movies in the Indian community, or with Indian actors-it's the alliance there that I really feel is unique. It's not just a job, it's a very, very personal thing. The stories are very personal, and the people who are portraying the characters know from experience who these people are. They're not doing it based on theory, and that's why I tell the actors when I'm working with them that they really can't do anything wrong-no matter what they do, they are. I can't help but develop friendships, and it's a nice thing because it builds community and camaraderie.
Ultimately that's always been one of my objectives-along with a lot of people who came before me-to create a Native American or an Indian cinema. It sounds idealistic. But it's been a dream of a lot of people for a long time, that we actually tell stories in a way that we think is first-person or that represents us better.

Red Shirt: Do you listen to Native actors' ideas or suggestion about scenes?
Eyre: I don't listen to them; I say, "Let me see it," and they do it and I share their experience. I'm very Zen about the filmmaking process. I never tell an actor how to do something. I ask them to show me, because their experience may be deeper than mine, more on the nose than my experience with that particular scenario. And they'll get up and do it. Everybody says, "Well, what's Indian?" Indian isn't something that I can define, but I know it when I see it and I think the world should see it.

On His New Film Skins
Red Shirt: Can you tell us briefly what the film is about?
Eyre: Skins is about humanizing an untouchable. It is about an alcoholic man who is dying. He also has a son, a wife-or a brother, or mother, or father-and that's what Skins is about: humanizing that person. He's not an untouchable to people who know him. In the second minute of the movie, one of the brothers says to his older brother, "I'll always be there for you Mogie. No matter what. You can always count on me."And that's the whole structure of the film.

Red Shirt: Do you think there is a difference in the way a Native director relates to Native actors?
Eyre: Yeah, definitely. I don't think an Indian director is afraid of being seen as "politically incorrect." Life and film are not about political correctness. Most of the good stuff is "unpolitically correct," you know what I mean? Most of the good stuff is real. In working with Graham Greene and Eric Schweig on Skins, Graham portrayed a person who is totally not politically correct, and he had me laughing the whole time.

There's political baggage whenever you put an Indian in a movie. There's greater iconic value, and it can work for you or against you. If you try to make something profound it comes off as pretentious. What you're trying to do is find the truth, and the truth isn't always pretty and it isn't always what people want to be told about Indians, but it's the truth and that's what can be funny about it. That's what Graham and Eric brought to the characters they played. I knew when I was going into the movie that I wasn't going to pull any punches with this movie. Liberals' eyes are going to pop out of their heads because they're going to think that it's politically uncorrect. Skins is not about assimilated Indians. This movie is about people who have spent decades and decades just surviving. They're not into the politics of "why?" They just are.

Red Shirt: Are you pleased with the outcome of Skins so far?
Eyre: Oh yeah, but it's like a "baby." I have a hard time seeing some of the problems that I need to see going through the process, and so I screen the movie for friends and they say, "Oh, that's no good," or "That doesn't work." People think filmmaking is a very dictatorial post. In reality, I have to listen.

My wife, Lori, is Oglala from Pine Ridge (South Dakota). I asked her all the time what she thought of scenes in Skins, if it rings true for her, her family and friends that live in the area. Those are the people that I want to please with the movie, because I never felt like there's been such a thing as a real Indian movie. Dances With Wolves was supposed to be an Indian movie, but it was a movie about a white guy who goes into Indian Country and is a liberal and suffers for Indians.

On the Business of Filmmaking
Red Shirt: Did you have to raise money for Smoke Signals and Skins?
Eyre: Yeah, I've helped to raise the money for each of the three films I've done: Smoke Signals, Doughboys and Skins.
Red Shirt: So, a director has to be a businessman as well as an artist?
Eyre: These are smaller movies according to Hollywood standards. When you're making small movies, you're what's considered a "filmmaker," and you're not just a director. It's your job to put every one of those hats on at different times and to get the movie made no matter what, so I've never had the luxury of being hired just as a director to make a movie.

Red Shirt: Who are the people that provide funding for Native films?
Eyre: You know people always talk about grants; you can make documentaries with those kinds of monies, but there's a definite limit when you're spending a couple of million dollars-it has to be a profitable venture for whoever is putting the money.

The Big Picture
Red Shirt: How many Native directors are there other than yourself?
Eyre: Feature directors? Probably enough to count on one hand, probably five. There should be more Native directors, as well as writers and producers. In Indian Country, we define professional athletics as a lofty goal for kids, but I don't feel we place enough emphasis on the arts as a viable career. And, inherently Indians are artists, I think.

Red Shirt: When you make a film who are you trying to please?
Eyre: The audience, of course. When I was in film school, people used to say if nobody understood their film, then it was their problem. And that's a total cop-out. My goal is to make spiritually-I hesitate to use this word-nourishing films that enrich humanity and people's souls. The reason is to contribute to humanity, to give people laughter...to let people escape. It's about putting yourself in somebody else's shoes and forgetting about your own life for a while.

Red Shirt: And as director what kind of material are you looking to produce?
Eyre: There's no one person in Indian Country who can say, "This is who Indians are," and "This is who Indians have been." Indian Country is huge, mosaic, and it would be an injustice to other Indians to say, "This is who Indians are." It does such a disservice to romanticize Indians, even myself as a Cheyenne, to say the only Indians are Plains Indians. Yet it's true when people say, "Many nations, one people." There are common threads.

When you talk about what is an "Indian" movie you really have to get into spoken language, religion and culture. Those are the three defining things that I would consider vital to an "Indian" movie. In cinema we haven't scratched the surface, especially in terms of spoken language. There is also the visual "language" of cinema. The way that we have it now is totally different from what I think an Indian movie would be. It wouldn't follow the same convention, shot structure or story structure. And it probably wouldn't be palatable for a commercial audience.

Red Shirt: It's intriguing to hear you say it's a "different" language.
Eyre: Film is a language that you watch-you expect an establishing shot, and then a medium shot, and close-ups, reverses and inserts. There are conventions, and a true Indian movie wouldn't have the same conventions. But because people are so used to the standards, I don't know if people would get it; it might not be palatable. Self-representation of Indians in cinema is important to me. It is one of the last frontiers left after a hundred years of cinema. It's territory that the world still doesn't know. But one day yet, there may be a real Indian movie.