An Interview with Courtney Hunt

A glimmer in filmmaker Courtney Hunt’s eye ten years ago and a project she came back to in earnest after 9/11, Frozen River premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival – picked up by Sony Pictures Classics for distribution even before it won the dramatic competition’s Jury Prize – then screened on opening night for Lincoln Center Film Society’s prestigious New Directors/New Films festival in New York City. After a blitz of advance press screenings in Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston, now it’s made its way into theaters. Hunt says she made this first feature-length film for “well under a million dollars.”

Hunt lives east of the state capital of Albany, at the northern end of the Hudson River Valley corridor above metro New York, where there’s already active independent filmmaking of some renown. Hunt was pregnant when the 9/11 attacks happened; she and her husband, who had northern New York roots, left the city. But indie film is getting more decentralized all the time. Other small upstate cities across the state have established film festivals, commissions and productions too. Had New York State passed legislation that increases tax credits for filmmakers earlier than several months ago – the kind of incentive that draws filmmakers to Louisiana and New Mexico, for example, and is worth full-page ads in film magazines – Courtney Hunt might have finished Frozen River way sooner and kept in that “too ambitious” opening scene that she couldn’t afford to shoot.

Frozen River’s story is set even farther north, near the little city of Massena on the St. Lawrence River and the Mohawk Nation reserve at Akwesasne – “the rez” – that straddles both the mile-wide river and the US-Canadian border. As two again-single mothers who make runs across the frigid, dangerous ice of the title – smuggling illegal immigrants in the trunk and tangling with casually brutal Québécois and relentless state police – Seattle-based Misty Upham as Lila Littlewolf and Melissa Leo as Ray Eddy provide riveting, nuanced performances. Charlie McDermott, promising two years ago in Jay Craven’s Vermont yarn, Disappearances, holds his own with them as Ray’s son T.J.

Hunt filmed around Plattsburgh, using Lake Champlain to fill in for the frozen St. Lawrence. Her film contains the kind of visual detail that somebody who’s actually spent enough time in the North Country would include. So there’s a shot of Ray’s showerhead and bathtub drain, caked with rust from the sulphur-heavy water that still afflicts some plumbing there. And she gets the TV weatherman right on Ray’s enormous Rent-to-Own TV (the actual Tom Messner of NBC affiliate Channel 5 WPTZ in Plattsburgh, who also does weather broadcasts on the Akwesasne radio station, not all that far as the crow flies).

Courtney Hunt spoke with me by phone last Tuesday from New York. Here’s part of our conversation:

Nancy Keefe Rhodes (NKR): I wonder if we could start by talking about the script? This is such a tight and economical film – it reminds me of those ancient Mayan temples where you still can’t get a knife blade between the blocks. Every scene does its work.

Courtney Hunt (CH): Well, one reason it’s so tight is when we finally got funding, we had very little time to shoot. We had almost no pre-production. We had nine days. So when that money was probably going to come in, I sat down and did one final re-write. I just combed out anything that wasn’t necessary, and just got the story told. I wasn’t going have the luxury to, you know, linger on transitional shots. There was a big opening scene I cut because it was just too ambitious. If you spend a week of your four weeks on one scene, you’re not going to make your days.

NKR: Perhaps knew the story so well that you were able to do that. You’ve talked before about really admiring films like Crash and Babel that luxuriate in playing with point of view. And this film’s forward thrust is just so clean. You spent a decade researching this film’s background. Can you talk a little bit about that? I know your husband’s from Malone, which is near the Canadian border – actually about midway between Massena, where the story’s set and Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain, where you filmed. What occurred in those ten years between imagining such a story and opening this week at the Anjelika and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas?

CH: Well it wasn’t constant working. I just would basically check in on it every so often. I made friends with some different Mohawk people. I met some women smugglers and talked to them. I got to know the North Country, just observing people and meeting people – to get a sense of who the white woman was. I just kept going back to it. I wanted to sort of throw the story away because I’d done it about cigarette smuggling and the stakes weren’t quite high enough. I thought it was a good set-up and I wasn’t getting much attention for it. I knew they’d switched over to illegal immigrants, but after 9/11 it became much more interesting. It seemed like the stakes now really mattered. So I went back to it. I only got really serious about this about four years ago. But I got to know all these people during this time, which you can’t do in a quick amount of time. That’s a very closed community. I was able to make friends over time without showing up and interviewing them and then – going away. I just think getting to know them, they were comfortable around me. You know, I got a lot of compliments on the “rez” humor. People liked that there’s a certain “rez” humor. Native people who have seen it were happy and impressed that was in the movie.

NKR: I’m thinking there’s something of a network among some independent filmmakers in the Northeast who have made films with Indian elements in the story. Your Frozen River location manager visited my city in April scouting for a possible Native-themed production. One of your producers was Heather Rae, who made the documentary Trudell, and you also have Charlie McDermott as Ray’s teenage son T.J. Both of them were in Vermont filmmaker Jay Craven’s 2006 film Disappearances – he’s done a number of films with Native casts and story elements, as has Heather Rae.

CH: Right.

NKR: You know, when I think about it there’s quite a tradition of smuggling along these northern borders.

CH: I know! That’s what I’ve tried to stress in interviews, to talk about a smuggling culture that’s not at all limited to Akwesasne and that’s been going on since Prohibition. And it’s not a huge business but it’s sort of an interesting business and it shifts from commodity to commodity. You know, whatever is selling. It’s not limited to Mohawks. And it certainly does not encompass the entire Mohawk reservation. We’re talking about a tiny little portion of a sovereign nation.

NKR: Here in Syracuse where I live – we’re several hundred miles northwest of New York City – there are a number of nearby indigenous nations. The Onondaga Nation is immediately south of the city. The Oneida Nation with the Turning Stone Casino is a few miles to the east. Really the Mohawks at Akwesasne are not that far away. So in this region there’s some familiarity, say, with a number of land claims that are in protracted court cases and within some of the nations, some very strong disputes and factions, for example over the issue of gaming. With a lesser filmmaker one – or both – issues would show up in a sub-plot and distract from this powerful story. But instead those elements play out dramatically between the two women.

CH: You know, I stuck to the action of the story which is smuggling and a white woman and a Mohawk woman in the car together. What was gonna happen? Were they gonna be friends? Were they not gonna be friends? And because the white woman knows nothing – zippo! – about the world up there, we get to learn it through her eyes. The complexity, the many different governmental bodies – it’s sort of a unique geographic situation – we’ll learn it as she learns it, which is really from Lila, the Mohawk girl’s point of view. That’s what Ray learns. I know all Mohawks don’t look at it that way, but I think they pretty much look at it as a sovereign nation. I think there’s agreement there. Smuggling is a totally different question. The friends that I made were absolutely against it.

NKR: When Ray is arguing with Lila about stealing the car from the bingo parking lot where Ray’s husband left it – “You mean you just took the car? Just because it was sitting there?” – I can’t help thinking that Lila might very well say that to Ray about all of North America.

CH: [Laughs] Exactly! Totally!

NKR: I wanted to talk about with Melissa Leo’s performance as Ray as someone who’s also performing a lot of the time – she’s someone able to tell lies. If you’re poor and your husband’s an addict and you’re always trying to hold onto the TV and keep your kids’ spirits up and get the double-wide trailer – you become very adept at telling lies. I’m thinking of Ray’s really plausible display of shock when the state trooper warns her that Lila’s a smuggler –

And of course Lila has to do that too, in order to survive.

CH: Well I think people living out there on the edge, they do what they need to survive and Lila is certainly – you know, they’re trying to get the money. Ray wants it for the double-wide. Lila wants it for her child. And they will do what they need to do, which includes lying. Anybody who’s poor knows that you’re gonna be tellin’ some lies, because you’re robbing Peter to pay Paul all the time.

NKR: Misty Upham also has this great quality of projecting how much she’s holding back.

CH: Oh, yeah! Yes.

NKR: How did you direct these two women together?

CH: They’re totally different kinds of actresses. And they had just a different style. Misty likes to ask a lot of questions and then kind of nail it on the first take. She’s really, really gifted in that way. Melissa comes to her part with a lot of motivations in mind, a lot of back-story in her head. She’s done a lot of research and then she sort of comes together with me and we work out everything. She is extremely dedicated and incredibly disciplined. I just gave them whatever they needed. If they wanted to ask questions, I answered questions. If they wanted me to listen to their ideas, I did that.

NKR: The turning point in Ray and Lila’s relationship is when they decide immediately to go back for the Pakistani baby that they’ve left on the ice by mistake.

CH: Mmm-hmm, right.

NKR: And that – well, the possibly miraculous re-birth of a child whose parents are fleeing the law on Christmas Eve has enormous pitfalls for a filmmaker.

This could’ve fallen over the cliff into sentimentality. Could’ve come off as some heavy-handed symbolism. Could have seemed really at odds with the story’s kind of gritty realism. None of those things happen. How did you walk that line?

CH: Well, I didn’t think of it as Messianic. I thought of it as, Christmas time comes and what we do in this culture is buy a bunch of crap for our kids. That’s what we do. So, if you don’t have any money, you’re in a tight place, because as a parent it is expected that, no matter how poor you are, that on Christmas morning there’s a pile of presents and Santa Claus comes for your children. That was my thought. They’re doing it for the money to get the stuff for under the tree. And that’s where I stopped. It really grows out of the facts of the situation in the most immediate way and I didn’t worry about it beyond that.

NKR: Films that are set or filmed in upstate New York in the winter – or for that matter in New England or Canada – tend to be pretty bleak. But even though we can see on-screen that it was pretty brutal out there on Lake Champlain when you were shooting, I suspect that you find the landscape friendlier. I’m thinking of right away in the opening, you have some of your camera shots sweep up. You go up from the frozen river to the sky. The birds are in flight. There’s the shot that begins with Ray’s feet and goes up to her face.

CH: Mmm-hmm!

NKR: An early horizon shot is always hopeful. And right away you’re drawing an analogy between Ray and the landscape.

CH: Right.

NKR: How do you feel about the landscape?

CH: I love the vast flatness of the landscape. I love the grays and the blues that are there, on the ice and i the sky. I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and that’s totally flat landscape against the huge Mississippi River. So it felt natural to me and made sense to me and I love that it’s all frozen. And I like the open feeling of a border land where there’s a sense of lawlessness. You know, like the West? Wide open, expansive and sort of undefined. I love that whole feel. I wanted it to feel that way. And of course I love John Ford. I love his framing. I completely, you know, I just ripped that off. Any time that I can get a camera, I always shoot that way. There’s a lot of scenes with the side of the trailer and I wanted it to fill up over half the screen. I wanted the trailer in as a character as much as possible. And I loved the line of it, that boxy feel. They’re stuck in this box in the middle of nowhere. >

NKR: It reminds us that New York State was “the West” at one point.

CH: Yeah! Exactly.

NKR: And in some ways still is. For a while now, when politicians talk about “ungoverned spaces” like the Pakistani- Afghan border and the lawlessness that goes on there, I think that has a lot to do with bringing Westerns back as a way to talk about the world now. I’m not at all surprised to hear that you like John Ford. In this film we can almost see northern New York again as the frontier.

CH: I think so. Really, I think one reason that my father likes the movie so much is that he really only likes Westerns.

NKR: Earlier I mentioned another indie filmmaker who sets – and makes – his films in the landscape of the northeast. Jay Craven in particular has been a terrific advocate of independent filmmaking.

CH: Yes he has.

NKR: And this spring New York State has increased tax credits for filmmakers who choose New York to shoot films. Of course that means metropolitan New York, but it also boosts other locations across the state that want to expand their filmmaking.

CH: Yeah, it’s great! You know, in my next film, I have a script that takes place here in New York – on the Lower East Side – but I’ll shoot a lot of it north of the city in the Hudson Valley, where there’s a lot of turn-of-the-century architecture that will work perfectly without having to be in the city – which is more complicated. It’s very exciting. I’m so glad that the state film commission made that happen.

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Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River opened on August 1st in New York City and Los Angeles. Her next film is set in 1904 and also concerns immigrants. This interview was recorded by telephone on July 29. Nancy Keefe Rhodes is a founding FilmSlasher and a member of the Women Film Critics Circle. She lives in upstate New York, where she writes about film, photo and visual arts.