HUM 221: 'Smoke Signals' - how a movie gets made

In 1998 Sherman Alexie was interviewed for Cinaste magazine, which specializes in film criticism, about how he wrote "Smoke Signals" and adapted it for the movies. Alexie had a lot to say about how he wrote the story the movie is based on, how he quit drinking before he did the movie and how the characters changed because he quit, and some of the decisions he made about music, camera shots and the other details of making a movie. Some highlights:

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Remember the young women driving a car that only works in reverse? It's an inside joke on the "rez." It's also kind of an ironic comment on the way Victor and Thomas set out on a mythic journey.

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Mythic? Well, yeah. Alexie said in the interview he wrote the screenplay to tell "a very basic story, a road trip/buddy movie about a lost father, so I'm working with two very classical, mythic structures. You can find them in everything from The Bible to The Iliad and The Odyssey."

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Alexie chose to do a road movie because it's one of the "cheapest kind[s] of independent film to make." So he adapted one of his stories to a screenplay about "these two odd buddies, sort of Mutt and Jeff on a road trip." Alexie says:

You can let the landscape tell a lot of story. And if it's a road/buddy movie, you're going to have a lot of music, and I always knew music was going to be a part of this. There are specific music cues in the screenplay about traditional music or rock and roll music, or a combination of the two. "John Wayne's Teeth," for example, is a combination of English lyrics and Western musical rhythms along with Indian vocables and Indian traditional drums. I also wanted to use Indian artists, so as not only to make a revolutionary movie for Indians, but also to use Indian artists on the soundtrack, which fits well with the road/buddy movie structure.

There's more in the interview. Let's take a look at it Monday.