Story without borders

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This article was published 10/08/2017 (3302 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Canadian actors abound in Taylor Sheridan’s upcoming film Wind River — Graham Greene, Hugh Dillon, Tantoo Cardinal — so much so, one might get the impression it’s one of those American movies that employed Canadian locations doubling for American ones.

In fact, the film is set in Wyoming, Sheridan’s home base, but was shot in Utah. Sheridan, 47, who started out as an actor before turning to writing (Sicario, Hell or High Water) apparently has an affinity for Canadian talent, sometimes without realizing it. (For example, it was news to him that Hell or High Water executive producer Rachel Shane is a former Winnipegger.)

“I can’t say that it was conscious,” he says of the film’s unwitting Canadian content. “Hugh has been a friend of mine for the past 15 years. I didn’t even know Graham was Canadian and I didn’t even know Tantoo was Canadian until I made the offer to her.

https://youtu.be/zN9PDOoLAfg

“I just think there’s a tremendous amount of talent that exists there, the film business in Vancouver and Toronto has always been robust, and that integration back and forth from Canada has been a natural flow for a long time.”

For Canadian audiences, the film’s story might pack an even more powerful punch. Wind River is the story of Cory (Jeremy Renner), a professional game tracker who discovers the dead body of a young Indigenous woman on a remote, frozen area of the wilderness on the Wind River Indian Reservation. The apparent homicide leads Cory to assist an out-of-her-element FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) to investigate the case in an area where little has changed since the violent days of the Wild West.

The film wraps up with an intertitle on the topic of missing and murdered Aboriginal women: “While missing person statistics are compiled for every other demographic, none exist for Native American women. No one knows how many are missing,” it reads.

The subject is a vital political issue in Canada, but in the U.S., Sheridan says, there is “zero” awareness of it.

“I have an awareness because I live very close to the rez, and I also have close friends who grew up on the reservation and heard stories,” he says on the phone from Park City, Utah. “When I read native actors for the roles, there wasn’t one Native American actor who read for me that didn’t begin their audition by saying: ‘My cousin…’ ‘My sister…’ ‘My best friend…’ ‘My somebody.’ They had all been touched by it.”

The lack of statistics, Sheridan explains, has to do with an information gap between state and U.S. federal law enforcement.

“It’s the state’s job to compile those statistics and the state doesn’t have any authority over the reservations, which are federal land,” he says. “So there is no one to keep them.

“There have been some articles,” he says of the issue. “But for whatever reason, it hasn’t been presented in a way that has captured the public consciousness, and I certainly hope this film addresses that.”

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Wind River represents Sheridan’s first time directing. He ended up in that capacity because of a growing discontent with acting, notwithstanding recurring roles on TV shows such as Sons of Anarchy and Veronica Mars.

“It was a dissatisfaction with the way the business was treating me as an actor,” he says. “It was very difficult to support a family and I had a baby coming. I had to make a decision and I made the decision to tell my own stories. It was something that was festering inside me for a while and I just decided to start writing.”

That worked out well, with the Texas-born Sheridan scripting the much-praised 2015 film Sicario, followed up in 2016 with Hell or High Water, which won him an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay.

Though both those films are unrelated to each other and to Wind River, Sheridan considers them an unofficial trilogy.

“That was the design. It’s in two different forms, one as an exploration of the modern American frontier, and how much it has changed, and how little has it changed, since settlement.

“And also: How much do the consequences of that settlement still reverberate today?”

randall.king@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @FreepKing