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SPOILER ALERT: This story contains major spoilers for “Dark Winds” Season 3, Episode 6, titled “Ábidoo’niidęę (What He Had Been Told)” streaming now on AMC.
Throughout season 3 of “Dark Winds,” Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) has been seeing monsters, particularly Ye’iitsoh, the Navajo creature known as Big Giant. He’s haunted by killing wealthy villain B.J. Vines (John Diehl) in Season 2, and the Ye’iitsoh has been plaguing him.
At the end of last week’s episode, he had another encounter with the Ye’iitsoh – but was he hallucinating or was it real? Episode 6 delves into Joe’s past and explains it shaped his character.
Director Erica Tremblay worked with the writers to figure out how to tell this fever-like dream scenario Joe finds himself in – he’s back in his childhood home, with his parents and his younger self. It also addresses the sensitive issue of his past trauma, where he witnesses his cousin, Will, being abused by a Catholic priest. Tremblay and the writing team understood the weight of responsibility in depicting this particular kind of historical trauma. They started to look at it through the lens of being in a boarding school, but that was quickly nixed.
Navajo writer and director Billy Luther grew up hearing Diné folklore and history that helped carve the monster slayer story. Their idea was that the episode would open with a school play about the monster mythology before Joe Leaphorn is transported back in time, threading together three narrative threads: the traditional Navajo story of the Hero Twins facing the Ye’iitsoh; Joe’s present-day confrontation with a monster that’s been haunting him throughout Season 3; and the revelation of a deeply personal childhood trauma.
Tremblay discussed the writer’s room process of addressing Native historical trauma, working with McClarnon and why she held his hand during the episode’s pivotal scene, and how David Lynch’s visuals helped her with transitioning between the worlds.
Take me into the writer’s room. What was discussed about how you would approach this episode?
This was an episode that took a really long time to find. At first, this was a boarding school episode, and for a lot of different reasons, I think the Native writers in the room, we were all like, “If we do a boarding school, there’s a lot that you have to unpack in terms of going back in time.” We had everyone in the room watch “Sugarcane,” and we had a lot of conversations and decided it made sense to tackle this by way of a church in the community, versus being inside the boarding school.
That broke open a lot of ideas about how we could talk about Leaphorn’s past, and how throughout this season the monster is chasing him. But that’s an allegory for his trauma, PTSD, guilt and shame.
It was Max Hurwitz (writer and executive producer) who said what if we tell it through a children’s story. Billy Luther is a writer on this episode and is Navajo, and he grew up hearing the story of the monster slayer, and that’s when it broke open. Leaphorn is going through his subconscious as he uncovers this childhood traumatic event that he has shoved down so deep that he doesn’t even remember it, and through that journey inside his subconscious, he’s pulling out all of the different reasons why he chose to do to B.J Vines what he chose to do, and this event in his childhood colored all of the reasons why he chose to be a cop, but then also all of the reasons why he sees the corruption inside of the justice system and ended up taking justice into his own hands.
The episode opens with the voiceover and the hero twins reenacting the Ye’iitsoh mythology in a play. How did the idea come together?
It was a great way to set the story inside Diné mythology. This was going to be different than other “Dark Winds” episodes, and we’re going to take you on a dream-like journey. We searched high and low to find the space to have this place, and it’s a Shriners building, and they have this stage with hand-painted backdrops from the 1920s, and it just grounded the episode in the mythology that is fueling Leaphorn’s fever dream.
You’re dealing with Leaphorn’s monster and his trauma. What discussions did you have with your collaborators, production designer, composer and cinematographer about how this fever dream needed to look and sound?
It was a real challenge. This episode does a lot, but it needs to do a lot inside the same budget and scope as all of the rest of the episodes. I remember being in the prep meetings, and everybody had ideas. The dreamscape and endless desert in Joe’s mind are different colors from the temperature when he’s with George, running around in the real world at night. Those were all purposeful decisions.
I watched a lot of anime, such as “Perfect Blue.” David Lynch was a huge inspiration in this episode, and thinking of how to have creative transitions from one scene to the next. I watched “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” on repeat as we were piecing this together and looking at masters of the craft to bring some of the magic into this episode.
The dinner scene was a great metaphor with the broken plate and being in his “childhood” home. What did that mean to represent?
That was one of my favorite transitions in the whole episode. He’s in the desert, and he walks with the basketball through the door. He recognizes it as his childhood home, but it’s also his home now. And that’s what dreams are like – mixing things that exist in your life with memories from the past, and they meld together.
He sits down next to whom he knows as George, but as he’s looking at him, he realizes, “No, that’s me.” He’s starting to piece it together, that he’s in the past. What’s interesting is that everyone at that table is Joe Leaphorn. Even when he’s having that conversation with the priest, that’s his interpretation of the priest, and in some ways, as the priest is asking for forgiveness, he is asking for forgiveness. That was one of the first scenes that we filmed, because we got to exercise all of these different versions of his subconscious.
We get to see Joe Leaphorn witnessing Will and the abuse by the priest. How did you want to approach telling this part of the historical trauma?
Very early on in the writer’s room, we were talking about these topics and themes, we knew we wanted to go there, and we knew that we needed to figure out a way to do it that was accurate to Leaphorn’s story, but that also felt like it wasn’t mining trauma of Native Americans.
It took time and care to excavate what that was going to look like. When we were writing the show, everyone needed to feel good about it. We trusted our instincts and the non-Native writers. We wanted to take the fear we were feeling and challenge ourselves to find ways to express this dark history in a way that feels authentic, but also isn’t going to re-trigger and re-traumatize our Native viewers and the Native folks working on the show.
Zahn and I had conversations about how we were going to do this in a way that was going to leave the least amount of marks on us as Native people. We discussed our experience – we have parents, grandparents and great-grandparents that have been in boarding schools or that have been in situations where they’ve been abused by the church. We have our experiences in life, where our way of life is challenged by Western systems that have been hurled upon us, and the violence that exists in the wake of that is very real, and it’s still ongoing, and it’s still like something that we experience and deal with as Native people. At one point, Zahn and I turned to one another, and I was like, ‘It’s a scary place to go, but we’re the right people to be doing this. If we’re going to do this, it’s going to be you and me.’
What about shooting this sequence?
One of the first decisions I made coming into the episode was that the day we shoot this scene, it would be a closed set. We’re going to bring in an intimacy coordinator to make sure that Enzo Okuma Linton, who played Will, feels good, and that his parents feel good because Enzo is a young Native boy in the scene. We also wanted to protect our energies so that we could bring about the best version of that scene.
One of the most beautiful moments that I’ve experienced as a director happened in that scene. We shot everything with Will and the priest first – and that was Zahn’s choice – and he wanted to then have all of his coverage come at the end of the scene. He has to break open the truth about what happened to his cousin when he was a child. It’s that feeling of not being able to do anything about it because you’re a child, and in this instance, you’re a Native child, witnessing something happening by this priest that holds a lot of power in the system that they’re faced with.
We did several takes, and he was really angry, which is a really understandable expression of witnessing this thing. I went up to him and said, “I think you have something more than just anger to give to this, but I don’t want to press you to go somewhere where you don’t want to go, and I understand this is a very complicated thing to react to.”
So we see this tragic sorrow and the emotion coming from him, it’s anger mixed with shame and sadness. He gets one line in and says, “Erica, I can’t do this by myself. You have to come over here.”
I cry thinking about it. So I walk to the side of the jail cell, and he’s on the other side, and I’m an inch out of the shot, and underneath, his hand is holding my arm through the bars, and he gives this stunning performance. It was this moment where, as a director, you feel trusted, and as a Native person, you feel trusted. In that moment, both Zahn and I needed to let go and trust one another and know that we’d be there for one another. We’re expressing something that’s deeply triggering and hard for Native Americans to talk about and discuss. When we yelled cut, we knew we had it. Zahn’s performance is nothing short of brilliant. Had we not had the privacy of the closed set, had Zahn and I not had our own experiences in this world that led us to that, had we not been able to trust that we could open up ourselves and be vulnerable, we couldn’t have gotten there.
As two Native people trying to say something really honest and true. It’s a TV show and entertainment, it’s all these things, but at the end of the day, what we’re doing feels profound because we haven’t ever been given this stage to be able to say these things in our own voices, in our way, with our artistic license.
This episode is about monsters that we have to face in both the literal and metaphorical sense, but also deals with what we learn from facing that trauma. You’ve said that you’ve been given your artistic license to tell this story, what does it mean to have it out there?
.A lot of the lessons are right there. When Joe is talking with his father on the stump, and his dad is saying, “I did the same thing,” he has to go into this memory that he had sequestered away because it was too painful to remember. He had to go in there and break open that trauma to forgive himself for his involvement with B.J.’s death. We’re flashing back between the monster slayer and the hero twins, conquering the monster. When he sees the bloody handprint, it’s not a monster, it’s a man. That to me is the lesson of the episode, is that the things that have happened to Native Americans and historically, the things that we’ve we’ve dealt with, the monsters were genocide, the monsters are lack of justice, the monsters are individuals, human beings who are exacting this thing upon other human beings. I think that hopefully a lesson that non-Native folks can take away from this episode.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
