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By Windspeaker.com Staff
With Files from Jeremy Harpe of CFWE-FM
Coming Friday to the Princess Theatre in Edmonton is the film Neither Wolf Nor Dog, featuring a tour de force performance by the now late Dave Bald Eagle, 97, whose portrayal of the character, Dan, is being described as his legacy film.
“It’s an extraordinary performance,” said director Steven Lewis Simpson. He credits Bald Eagle’s performance for the film’s 4.7 out of 5 rating on Rotten Tomatoes, saying Bald Eagle made people “fall madly in love” with the character.
“They’ve never experienced anyone like him on screen before,” Simpson said.
The film is an adaptation of a 1996 novel by Kent Nerburn. A white author (Christopher Sweeny/ Nerburn) is convinced by a Lakota Elder (Dan) to take a road trip through Indian country, and to write a book from Dan’s perspective, deepening the author’s understanding of contemporary Native American life and the history that led to it.
Bald Eagle, who appeared in the films “Into the West” and “River of Fundament”, was born in 1919 on the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Reservation in South Dakota, and died there on July 22, 2016. He brought a wholly authentic and personal relationship to the role of Dan, said the director.
“Importantly, when it reached the climax of the film, which is at Wounded Knee, we abandoned the novel and the screen play, and I had Dave go deep into an improvisation the whole way through. And the thing about it was Dave’s family connection was closer to the events at Wounded Knee than the character he was playing… so he poured his heart out in that scene,” said Simpson.
“And at the end of it, after I called cut and we were all just wiped out, he turned to Christopher Sweeny who played Nerburn opposite him and said ‘I’ve been holding that in for 95 years’.”
Simpson said the film Neither Wolf Nor Dog came about when author Kent Nerburn approached him with the novel of the same name, which Hollywood had been talking about making into a movie for 20 years, but never had.
Simpson had experience in working in the Native American community at Pine Ridge Reservation with the film Rez Bomb starring Russell Means.
Finding parallels between the two stories and hearing from Lakota friends about how much they thought about the book, Simpson took on the project.
People really loved the Elder’s character in the novel, and the film is, front and centre, about this character. On screen Dan was transcendent with Bald Eagle’s performance, said Simpson.
“He is more than they could ever have imagined.” And the novelist Nerburn agreed.
“He was blown away by this when he first saw the film. It was more than he ever dreamed of.”
The film has been showing in the U.S. for some time, and the director says its bridging a divide between Native and non-Native peoples, and bringing white people to a point of empathy for the Native American experience.
And it’s all down to Dave Bald Eagle, he said.
“To me, you could present Wounded Knee in a documentary and it’s very dramatic and very powerful, but there’s something that can happen in a fiction where you have a protagonist that an audience falls in love with over the course of the narrative that opens their hearts and allows them to listen in a different way.”
When Bald Eagle comes to speak about that most powerful part of the story, it’s coming from his heart, directly from him to the audience “and their hearts are wide open at that point.”
Simpson said for those people who haven’t paid attention to their own history, the film allows them a different access point, and for young people “it might change their perspective somewhat.”
In the U.S., large school groups have been booking to see the film.
“That’s really gratifying, because I think if I was 12 years old or something and I saw Dave on screen it would be a character that would be with me for the rest of my life.”
Watch the trailer of Neither Wolf Nor Dog: https://vimeo.com/168084062
For movie dates and theatres go to https://www.facebook.com/neitherwolfnordog