What was it about the [Tony] Hillerman mysteries that caught your eye?

Initially what caught my eye about the Hillerman mysteries was word of mouth. It was back in the '80s, the mid-80s, and I think Tony just had about three or maybe four out at that time. But there was enough of a kind of a cult word of mouth floating around Santa Fe and parts of Arizona that got my interest, because I have been most of my life interested in and involved with Native American culture and issues. I was intrigued, not only out of interest, but because I was looking for something to do in film.

The first book I got was A Thief of Time, and when I read that, I knew this was something that I wanted to do. Then I read all of his books. What I was taken with was the fact that he was a real storyteller. I grew up in a storytelling family, and that was my form of education, storytelling. So I grew up with great respect for the role of storytelling in our culture. Of course, the Native American culture is a storytelling culture. So those three things are really what came together with this project.

When did you approach Tony Hillerman?

At the time I got around to making an offer to Tony, I had a concept in my mind to make a series out of his books and to create a steady stream of his works, because his pieces were just short enough and just charming enough and intriguing enough, and they were all tied to mysteries, which I thought was a fabulous thing to key off of. Normally works on Native American culture have been breast-beating, taking the issues seriously -- not that they shouldn't, but the issues of Native Americans have not been handled with humor, using mystery as the linchpin. I thought that was fabulous. ... They could be done on a very low budget. It would give two Native American actor unknowns a chance to be seen and discovered, and that would hopefully generate a whole rash of activity for Native Americans in film. Up to that point, Native Americans had not really emerged in film. This was before Chris Eyre had done Smoke Signals, which I think probably, outside of documentaries, was the first real breakthrough. We had a lab at Sundance open for Native Americans to help develop them as filmmakers, but nothing was emerging, so it seemed like [it was] time to find a vehicle that would be good for the Native American culture. Also, I thought a fresh look at the issues, the social and cultural issues around Native Americans, would be better served by a modern piece, where you could mix the traditional and the modern and the tension that comes between the two of them, which Tony's pieces do.

You had two fabulous characters. You had an older guy and a younger guy. The older guy was an experienced detective, and the younger guy was a novice, but who had certain skills, roughhewn as he was. The other thing was they were going to be very much in the [vein of the] Woodward-Bernstein relationship in All the President's Men. They were very contrasted types, very different, but they had to live together. This organic thing begins to develop between them, just the opposite of what you would think. The older guy, the detective, is experienced, on the edge of retirement, went to Albuquerque, through the Anglo-oriented schools and training programs to be a cop, and then to be a detective. He doesn't have much use for the traditional parts of the culture, so therefore he never involved himself in them. His wife does, but he doesn't. So he's sort of a modern guy -- older, seasoned, tired, funny, but modern. His name is Leaphorn, Joe Leaphorn.

The young guy, Jim Chee, is young, a real novice who wants to be everything you would imagine Joe Leaphorn to be. He wants to be the traditionalist. He wants to be a healer. So he's a cop who wants to be a healer. He chants; he goes to healing ceremonies. So you've got these two guys coming together, and each one doesn't have a lot of respect for what the other has decided to do with their life, which is just the opposite of what you might think, which makes it rather humorous. ... They have to solve these crimes on the reservation. That's where Tony Hillerman has done kind of, in my mind, a magical thing. He has been able to incorporate the Native American culture in a very realistic way. You have to look at the culture the way it is today, not in some imagined way, like on the back of a nickel or through some history book or some bad Hollywood movie that characterized Native Americans as monosyllabic villains.

To show the real sense of humor in those Native Americans, and what comes with it, I thought was a golden opportunity. That was why I got it, to begin with. I wanted to get all of them so they could be a series of small films, like the old Charlie Chan mysteries during the second world war. They were short. They came out with one about every 18 months. And that's how I saw this, as one Hillerman piece after the other, coming out at intervals of about 18 months.

It took a lot of years to get it going, because there wasn't a lot of support to do it. It was hard to get support in the mainstream part of the industry because they didn't think it sold, and I had a hard time convincing people that this was something that I thought was extremely commercial and could be very infectious, because it would allow the audience to discover fresh talent, new characters, and be supportive of them, the way you see audiences support a television series and the people who are in the series.

Did you deal with Hillerman personally? What was he like?

Tony -- well, he's just a great guy. Nothing seems to rattle his cage, you know? He's got charm. He's smart. He's got this slightly laconic, Oklahoma, easygoing manner. There is probably a lot more complication than what he gives you. He gives you a very simple presentation of how he thinks and who he is, and he's very smart. Clearly he knows that culture backwards and forwards. Since he came from a background of doing reporting in and around the Indian reservations... he got informed about enough stories around crime to create these mysteries. He couldn't have done what he's done if he didn't have an enormous skill to tell very simply. ... Every minute is moving to the next minute so that you're literally turning the pages in your head as you go. It's fast-moving, and he stays ahead of you.

Anyway, I saw Tony, and he was so cool about it. I didn't know if I was going to be up against some guy that was going to be saying, "I've got to have this; I've got to have that." I have been through that many times. I didn't know how easy or difficult it was going to be. ... But Tony seems to have mastered the whole deal in a very easy, no-fuss manner. And that's the way he treated me. He said, "Hey, look, you're doing a series -- go for it. I wouldn't sign it over if I didn't think you could do it, if I didn't have some faith. Let me know how it's going." Pretty great.

How was it to work with your son James on this project? Are you the kind of dad that wanted his son to follow in your footsteps, or did you want him to find a different profession?

No. I did not expect or want my son, or any member of my family, any of the kids, to necessarily follow in my footsteps. It was always going to be their choice, and whatever the choice was, I would be for it, and I would support it, but I didn't try to turn them against it; I didn't try to encourage them towards it. The fact that Jamie made that decision on his own was simply his choice. He spent years and years on this project, because there was a history of directors that didn't get it, that didn't know what they were doing. Fortunately, this time we had a Native American who knew the culture, and so that helped enormously. But Jamie had to work through draft after draft with directors.

I like his work a lot. I think he's terrific, because he does know the culture, and he spent not only his youth in the time that I spent there learning about it, but on his own, as a writer, went down and spent time there. He knows a lot, and I think he's a good writer. I think he did a good job with the script.

What was it that caught your eye about Chris Eyre for this project?

Chris is a natural, meaning he has a natural instinct to be a filmmaker. I know that because we got him through a lab at Sundance with an NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities] grant, and he developed Smoke Signals there, and I had worked with him. I could see that there was a natural in the making there, and I think he did a good job with that film. In addition to that, he's a visualist, because the culture is a visual culture. So I think that was a beautiful thing to put to this piece. The visual eye of a Native American is going to tell this story a little bit differently, and I was excited by that, because I think I've been anxious for many, many years to see a Native American step forward to tell a story based on their point of view, rather than having to filter it through an Anglo point of view, as has been done for 50 years.

By what yardstick would you measure the success of Skinwalkers?

The success of Skinwalkers for me begins with it getting made, because there was such resistance for so many years to taking a chance on the fact that Native Americans could be appealing as a commercial venture. So that's the first part of its success. The idea that we employed almost exclusively Native Americans is to me a success, because it's a breakthrough. This could be the beginning of what I had dreamed for now about 15 or 16 years -- the beginning of a series where you would be able to familiarize the rest of America with this culture from a different point of view, and to put it through entertainment to have it be entertainment without destroying the truth of the culture itself. To me that would be a success.