How did you get involved in this project?

My father, Robert Redford, optioned the series from Tony Hillerman in the late 1980s... and was intent on developing a series of movies. He saw it as a throwback to the Charlie Chan era of mysteries, where you had a series of movies with the same characters going through various scenarios, solving crimes.

I've been a Tony Hillerman fan since I was a young boy. I spent a lot of time growing up in Utah and traveling the Four Corners areas. Those were the days before seat belts, and you could lie in the back and stare out the window. We would spend hours driving around. It was not necessarily the most exciting thing in the world, but it actually really grew on me. So I've always loved the Southwest and was very taken with the history, and the Navajo culture in particular. ... I used to talk now and then with my father about his plans for the series. Somewhere around 1992 he asked me, looking over the span of Hillerman's books up until that time, where I thought a good starting point was. Having read them, it seemed obvious to me that Skinwalkers was the place to start, because Hillerman had developed Chee as a separate character in a number of Jim Chee mysteries, and Leaphorn as another character in a number of Leaphorn mysteries. But in Skinwalkers, they both came together. It was the dynamism of these two opposite police officers, the one detective and one officer, coming together with their different histories and their different points of view, I think, that made the Hillerman mystery novels really sing. It seemed like the logical place to start.

Eventually he asked me to write the screenplay, which I was more than happy to do. It's taken a long time. It's not an easy project to finance. It's an all-Native cast, and you don't have the big Hollywood names that you can put in front of your project to bring in the financing, so that was a difficult issue for many years as we were trying to get the movie off the ground. At one point I developed a fear of going to the bookstore, because I thought, Oh, I'm going to see yet another Tony Hillerman novel coming out. I was on my fourth draft, and he was on his fourth book since then.

What was it about Hillerman's work that interested you?

I think Tony Hillerman has this amazing ability to evoke the experience of the Southwest in his writing. When you read his work, you find yourself closing your eyes and imagining the places. You see the sights. You feel the ground and the air, and everything comes alive as he describes it. To a lot of people, it seemed like a logical choice to bring his work to movies, because... his descriptive prose is so visual. But any mystery novel is hard to adapt, because you have elements of the plot that are revealed through internal monologue, as each character is sorting through the evidence, trying to figure out where to go. The internal examination that a writer can reveal in prose is not available in film. It has to be seen. There is a lot of work in terms of making the story come together, but if you talk to any Hillerman fan, I think most of them will say they're surprised they haven't seen more in movies.

How many drafts you have written?

With a mystery screenplay, there is a lot of math involved. You have a lot of equations that have to add up. One change on page six can decimate the scene on page 86. You've got to be thinking at all times, looking backwards, looking forwards, looking down on it. It takes a lot of work.

Is this your first experience with the genre?

Yes, it is. I knew if we got the plot right, it would take care of itself, essentially. But the thing I was most concerned about was humanizing those characters that are so readily human in Hillerman's work, and making sure that the relationships evolved on film in a way that was at least evocative of the characters in the book. There are differences, and [there are] choices that are made. You've got a two-hour visual medium versus a book that can be read over a period of days, weeks, or months.

How have you held your own interest through this long collaboration?

Over the last eight years, I've written about four or five other scripts. I have produced a documentary, and another movie I wrote got made a couple of years ago. I've been up to a lot of other things along the way, and I think that's what has kept me productive. I've had time away to recharge the batteries on this project and come back to it with some new points of view. Also, in 1993, I had two liver transplants. The first one didn't work. It was a problem in the blood flow to the donated liver. So four months later, I was retransplanted. It was a very tough time, but I had started out working on Skinwalkers prior to that, so it was the first thing I went back to when I was back on my feet. There are elements in the story that, looking back on it now, have brought to light elements about health and healing and how one goes about it, particularly in the character of Emma. I can recognize that I was exploring issues there that were relevant to myself. I wouldn't have known that at the time, but now looking back on it, it seems pretty clear.

What led you to screenwriting?

When I was in fifth or sixth grade, I remember one kid telling me that I was just such a fabulous liar that it seemed a shame not to take advantage of that. I think making up stories is something that I like to do. I did an adaptation of The Iliad for a fifth-grade production. I certainly did better writing it than performing as Achilles, because my helmet was broken when I got on stage, and I made a fool of myself in front of the entire school. I think that's when I realized that maybe acting was not in the cards.

I've been writing in various forms since I was a kid and didn't initially think I'd be screenwriting. I went to Northwestern to graduate school and was writing a novel and short stories. I was trying to sort through how I was going to make a life out of all of that. At the same time, I was feeling creatively frustrated in graduate school. ... So I wrote my first script at that point. It was just obvious the minute I did it that I was meant to.

What's the role of Navajo culture in the story?

I think in some ways it can even make it more compelling. For me that was certainly the case. Researching the native mythology surrounding things like Skinwalkers, witches, and other murky characters was very compelling and obviously sets up great material for a film. I always thought that the Native culture, and the Southwest in particular, were just an endless possibility in terms of movies that could be inspired from that setting. I think this is only the beginning. ... I think [Chris Eyre's] work is showing that there is an enormous amount of richness and history that can be told from a new point of view, rather than the stereotypical noble savage of the 19th century that pervaded all of the John Ford Westerns, which were terrific certainly, but this area is ready to be revised, and hopefully this movie can push that forward.

Do you think the Navajos have something to teach us about healing?

One of the Navajo ideas of healing has to do with harmony... In the Western culture, we're fixated on the specifics of medication, prognosis, diagnosis, all of which are important to the process. I'm the first one to attest to that. .... The Navajo culture is more interested in how the person views their own place in this universe, rather than whether or not they're running a fever. Bringing the individual to harmony is not necessarily simply about changing the condition of somebody on a physical level; it's allowing them to be at peace. If you're sick, how are you going to be at peace with that, and how are you going to move forward from there?

How does that tie into Skinwalkers?

At the end of the movie, Emma finds herself getting a sing [traditional Navajo healing ceremony] for her ailment. There is a difference between her and Joe. She grew up on the reservation. She has an intuitive relationship to Navajo healing, where Joe is an urban, detached Native, grown up in Phoenix, does not have that intuitive connection. He questions; he wants to prove. Where are the results? Where is the proof? He's hesitant to embrace it. At the end, I think it's interesting that he does not step into the hogan with her, but he does take her to the hogan. So it's the beginning of what we'd think of as a series of steps for him, opening his own mind to what's possible.

What's been your favorite moment working on this film?

When Rebecca Eaton, Michael Nozik, Chris Eyre, and I were gathered for the first time, it was just one of those things you can feel within minutes. Is this going to be a fun group to work with or not? One of the things I always look for in a collaborative environment is the ability to reveal your worst ideas and to feel comfortable revealing your worst ideas, because often the ideas you want to discount, that you feel embarrassed by, that you think are not good, those are actually the good ideas. I found myself continually prefacing suggestions with "This is a really bad idea, but...." But you have to have that comfort level and know that everybody's agenda is pointed in one direction that's for the betterment of the movie. With this team, that was clearly the case. Very enjoyable.

Joe Leaphorn has changed from Tony Hillerman's books to your screenplay. Could you comment on that?

Given that we've got 90 minutes or two hours to tell the story in film, looking at Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, what we had at the core was the age-old buddy movie: two guys pushing toward a solution, bringing with them all of their personal histories and peccadilloes. In the case of Joe Leaphorn, we gave him a different history, one away from the reservation, one that was an urban history detached from the Native culture -- which of course is something that's commonplace today. So he represents an experience, a valid experience that's out there today.

You've met Tony Hillerman and visited with him?

We had lunch at a motel outside of Albuquerque one afternoon. He couldn't have been more open, engaging, and permissive of the screenwriting process. When I went in there, I think my mouth was pretty dry. I don't know what I anticipated, but I didn't anticipate him being as friendly and charming as he was.

Did he help you with the screenplay? Did he have any comments that helped?

I think he very much blessed this movie, but said, "God bless, and Godspeed. I'll do what I do, and you guys do what you do."

What has been the hardest part of this project for you?

When you have something like the Navajo world, and you're an Anglo, so to speak, and you're adapting from a mystery novel written by an Anglo, you're aware of the great distance between yourself and the subject matter. So there's all kinds of room for self-doubt: "Am I doing this right? Am I seeing it objectively? Is my own cultural myopia getting in the way here?" You tend to ask yourself a lot of questions. So I think the hardest thing was to relax. I remember at one point saying to myself, "Forget it all -- they're people." It sounds simple, but at that point I felt a tremendous freeing up in my own process, because it just seemed so easy to say. ... There are also a lot of very private and sacred elements to the Navajo healing that shouldn't be seen on film, or seen by anyone outside of the healer, his patient, and family. So [I wanted to] make sure we were respecting the tradition.

What's been the best moment for you on this film?

This morning I walked out onto the location where the last scene in the movie takes place. I came up on the horizon, I looked into it, and I was amazed. It seemed to have come right out of my own brain. That's really not a very typical thing for a writer, to have a director go out and do something that you feel has been taken right out of your own imagination.... It was almost a little unsettling, because there it was suddenly. I was walking around in the very spot that I had written. ... I think it was at that moment I just said, "God, this is really happening. This is really happening."

In a general sense, what does it take for a movie to be successful?

I think that there are so many different kinds of movies, so many different styles, so many different points of view. ... In the end, it has to have heart. It sounds so clichˇ to say that, but I'm not saying happy trails, riding off into the sunset; I'm saying something of real emotional value that you can either relate to or become sympathetic to or incorporate into your own thinking of what life is all about. And it comes in all shapes and sizes.