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[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is "On Story."

A look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.

This week on "On Story," On Writing "Dark Winds" with Graham Roland.

- With films that attempted to humanize Native Americans and did a good job of doing that, there was one kind of common thread which is you were always being brought into the Native American world through a white protagonist.

And to me, "Dark Winds" was a tremendous opportunity to not do that and to show the beauty of this world in this community and these people, but show it through the eyes of a Native American protagonist or two in this case.

[paper crumples] [typing] [carriage returns, ding] [Narrator] This week on "On Story," creator and showrunner Graham Roland discusses creating his newest AMC series, "Dark Winds."

Roland elaborates on his process of adapting the original novel by Tony Hillerman and the importance of developing the show through an authentic Native American lens.

[typewriter ding] - If you were gonna tell somebody, "Here's why I really think you should watch this show, my show."

What are some of the things that would stand out for you?

- Being part Native American and growing up with films and seeing Native Americans portrayed on film in all different ways and even with films that attempted to humanize Native Americans and did a good job of doing that, there was one kind of common thread, which is you were always being brought into the Native American world through a white protagonist.

And to me, "Dark Winds" was a tremendous opportunity to not do that and to show the beauty of this world in this community and these people but show it through the eyes of a Native American protagonist or two in this case.

The other thing is the beauty of the Navajo culture and the Navajo people and that particular place in the world is like no other place for anyone who's ever been there.

- "Dark Winds" of course is based on a series of detective novels by Tony Hillerman.

A white writer from New Mexico, former journalist.

When you came to the project, what were some of the things that you saw in Tony Hillerman's books that said to you 'I think that we could make a great show from these?'

- I think first and foremost, the sense of place.

Tony was not Navajo, but he was a, you know, a friend of the Navajo Nation and very tied into the community.

And you can tell that when you read his books.

And I think the world, how immersive his writing was and how it really put you there was the first thing that jumped out about his novels to me.

That, and also, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, I just thought were two fantastic protagonists that we hadn't seen before.

And telling a noir style detective story through the eyes of a Navajo tribal police officer was just, you know, such a unique thing to do.

Not only when he did it in the early '70s when he began this book series, but even still today.

- I know that when you were young, like many of us, you were drawn to the work of Stephen King.

And that there were things about his work that maybe were in some way, instrumental about making you want to tell stories.

Are there things that you learned from Stephen King that you still use today?

- I think, you know, he said this in many an interview and I think even in his book that he did about writing which is, it's no coincidence that most of his stories take place in the area where he is from.

And he very much writes from a place of what you know.

And that was very, very influential on me and still is to this day I feel like.

Usually, anything that I do, there's some element of my personal experience in there.

Obviously, I'm not Navajo, but it's my ties to the Native American community that led me into "Dark Winds."

I'm not a spy, but it was my background as a Marine that I shared with the character of Jack Ryan that brought me to that project.

So when everything I do, I very much try to find something that I can draw from my own experience.

- And I was gonna ask you about your time in the Marines and I know that that's something that you were able to make a translation to the "Jack Ryan" project.

What else about that time and about that experience was formative for you as a writer or as a person?

- One of the things that I did when I was there was keep a journal and the journal was not necessarily, "This happened to me today."

It was just things that I found interesting as I encountered them throughout that tour.

And I still have the journal and I haven't really taken anything specific from it but for me at that time, especially being young, it was just a whole different world.

One of the things that really stuck with me and it became immediate when, when I was there was that yes, they have a different religion.

Yes, they speak a different language.

Yes, they look different than I do, but at the end of the day, we shared a lot of things in common.

They loved and wanted to take care of their family and had goals and aspirations for themselves and their kids and all the things that we have here.

And that really stuck with me, this idea that we're more alike than we are different.

And that was really influential on me when I got to writing the first season of "Jack Ryan" and trying to understand how someone like the antagonist in that story could get to the place he got.

[speaking in Arabic] [laughing] [kisses smacking] [speaking in Arabic] [speaking in Arabic] [laughs] [speaking in Arabic] [speaking in Arabic] [speaking in Arabic] [kiss smack] - I love the way that you put it, that we're so much more alike than we are different.

I know that while you were in Iraq, you had had this experience where you had read and you had been interested in movies but your parents sent you box sets of some pretty great television as well.

- Yeah, so for anyone who's ever been in the military, you know, there is downtime and in between doing my job and our mission overseas, we would watch a lot of movies as a group.

And movies, they burn up really quickly 'cause they're only two hours.

And so I wrote my mom and I said, "Why don't you send me some box sets of television shows because it'll last longer?"

For me, it was eye-opening because it was so different than the television I had grown up on.

I'd grown up watching stuff in the '80s, and "Knight Rider" and "A Team."

And then when we got to the '90s, "NYPD Blue" and "ER," "West Wing," and those were all fantastic shows, but seeing a show like "The Sopranos" or "Deadwood" and then "Lost" and then seeing what TV had become, it was the first step for sure of realizing like, whoa, TV has really changed and there's something interesting going on here.

And I might wanna be a part of that if I can.

- You would later go on and do some work on "Lost."

- Yeah.

- What was it about that show that you connected with?

- To me, it was this ensemble.

And everybody in the ensemble had some sort of trauma or wound that they were trying to recover from and really, they were on this path of self-discovery and self-improvement.

And what had made it so unique having the experience of watching that for the first time with my fellow Marines in a little tent in Fallujah was that it felt like represented in that show were many of us.

We came from all over the country.

We had grown up in very different ways but our common mission of just trying to do our job and then come home had pulled us all together.

And so that really resonated with me at that time in a way that it probably wouldn't have if I had watched it when it was on the air.

- So that's Jack saying we can live together or we- - Can die alone.

Yeah, live together, die alone.

So yeah, it was just very moving to me at that particular time.

[typewriter ding] - So after Iraq, film school?

- Film school, yeah.

So I stepped back into school and they were offering a one-hour TV writing drama class when they had a new professor there who had not been there.

And it was his first semester teaching and his name was Robert Engels.

And he was a television writer.

And so, I had never met a television writer.

Someone whose work I could look and see on screen and see their name.

This guy was the first person to do that.

I took the class and he assigned us all to write a spec of our favorite television show and that was a semester assignment.

And so I started writing a spec of "The Sopranos" which was my favorite show at the time.

And then he called me aside after class one day and he said, "I really like your writing, but I remember you saying when we were going around introducing each other that you had had this experience and you just got back from Iraq.

And I wondered if you would write an original pilot for me about that.

And if it's good or not good, it doesn't matter to me.

If it's 50 pages or more, I will give you an A."

And I said, "Okay, I'll take that deal."

And it ended up getting taken to a management company and that's how I ended up getting representation.

So tangibly, that was a great gift that he gave me.

But the intangible thing was even more important was here was a person who had worked on "Twin Peaks" and shows that it had been really influential on me saying, "Hey, I do this for a living and I think you can too."

And that was to me the biggest gift he could have given me.

- So, Bob Redford worked on this project along with everything else he does for decades.

George R.R.

Martin was a fan and had, I'm assuming some ideas.

Were there story pieces from either of them that made it into the larger concept?

- When I first sat with them, the two things that they told me that they wanted to, I wouldn't say mandates, but they definitely wanted me to consider was number one, the importance of setting it in the period when the book was written, which is the early 1970s on the reservation.

And their feeling was seeing old-fashioned police work without the benefit of modern forensics and cell phone technology and all the things that we have today was very interesting to them.

And the other reason, which was very important to me and very important to Chris Eyre, who was helping me develop it, was that it allowed us to talk about a lot of issues in the Native American society that had gone on and were more fresh in 1971 than they were in 2020 when we were talking about it.

And so for instance, the forced sterilization of Native American women, the boarding school experience for Native American children, all of these things were still very much a part of these characters' lives.

- Attended assimilation school.

But I wasn't dragged outta bed like most of my classmates.

My parents thought it was the best thing for me.

I always listened to them.

The second I arrived, they cut my hair, took my clothes.

They could never crush my spirit.

That took something else altogether.

[typewriter ding] - You have said about adaptation, the hardest thing is to know when to take license and when to stick to the roadmap that the author's given you.

Could you talk a little bit about that process?

- You know, Tony Hillerman had passed away at that point and so I couldn't turn to him and say, "Hey Tony, what's really important to you that I retain in this adaptation and what do you feel less precious about?"

But, I had George who was not only a novelist himself who's had his work adapted, but was a friend of Tony's, longtime friend of Tony's.

And so he was a great steward of the novels and always had that eye for, "Okay, we're changing something but are we changing it to make it a better adaptation or are we changing it just to change it?"

So it was good to have him sort of that backstop.

For me, the big thing right away that I felt like was necessary for a successful adaptation was I felt like we needed to do a little bit more work on the two protagonists and try and find some personal stakes for Leaphorn and Chee in the case that they're investigating.

So that was where the idea of having Leaphorn and Emma have a child that had passed away, 19-year-old son.

And that's not a part of Tony's books, but it felt like it's something that would be a long-running thing that we could explore all the dimensions of over the course of many hours of television.

And it's also something that would tie in very neatly to maybe some of the things he's investigating.

That probably took the most license with the character of Jim Chee.

And what I told Anne Hillerman when we finally met and talked about it was that it was not or is not my intention to reimagine Jim Chee from the way her father depicted him in the books.

So if you've ever read the books, he's a very spiritual character.

Very much, yes, he's a tribal police officer, but he's very much immersed in the Navajo spirituality and he's practicing to be a medicine man.

And I felt like that's a really interesting character.

It's a really interesting sort of two sides of a coin.

But what I thought could be unique or interesting is seeing a character get to that place rather than him starting him there.

And so I felt like, okay what is the farthest away from that point you can get?

And I felt like, okay, well what if this guy who, in the book, he is considering applying for the FBI?

So I thought, well what if he's already in the FBI?

What if he's an FBI agent first?

What if he's hasn't been on the reservation in many, many years and has lost touch with his community and his culture?

And that felt like a very interesting character journey to me to see somebody who was coming back to this world and was from this world but no longer felt a part of it.

- You know, most men your age would jump at the chance to get off the res and get college degree, but you came back.

You still have family in Shiprock?

- No, my mom died.

Kinda lost touch.

- Well, you are back now.

[mysterious music] - It was pointed out to me after the fact that it was mirroring a little bit of my own experience having left Oklahoma when I was about eight years old but then being shipped back to live with my dad every summer as a kid.

So I grew up in the Bay Area during the school year and then every summer, I would go back to Southern Oklahoma and live with my father.

But every time I went back, I just felt more and more removed from that community and I no longer felt like I fit in there.

And so I think Jim Chee is going through a little of that himself.

And as I found out when I got to know Kaiwa a little bit.

He had a very similar experience.

And so I think it's just one of those things that cosmically kinda worked out.

- You made some changes to Emma Leaphorn and they're not substantial in terms of like the character but you made some changes to her that made incredible dramatic sense, but also fit in to some of the themes that you were exploring.

- I think my first instinct was that I didn't want Emma to just be Joe's wife and to come home and be the wife of the law man and, you know, have dinner on the table and help him put his gun away.

I wanted her to be formidable in her own right and I wanted her to be a member and I guess you would say a servant of her community just like Leaphorn was, but in a different way.

If she is working as a midwife and a nurse and she's helping her community that way, it allows her to not only have her own stories, but in the same way, she can get to know certain people in the community and is probably more trusted in the community than her husband is because there's a suspicion of law enforcement sometimes because their job is to arrest you when you get out of line.

And so people probably wouldn't tell Leaphorn certain things, whereas they might tell Emma something.

And so I felt like this is a way that could maybe make her relevant to his story and keep her involved in what's going on and maybe even an investigation somewhere down the line in a different way than he's involved in it.

- You have said that one of the reasons you were drawn to this show is that for once, Native Americans got to be the heroes instead of the villains or victims.

I'm wondering, was that one of the things that held up the development of this project for so many years?

And then my second part is, did that hold you up or was it a selling point in today's market?

- Well, I'll answer the second part first.

So it absolutely was a selling point.

It did not give me any pause.

This was 2019 when I came on board, early 2019.

So "Reservation Dogs" had not come out yet.

We definitely felt like if we do this, we're gonna be breaking the mold a little bit here because it's gonna be a cast that would be primarily Native.

However, a show like "Dark Winds" probably took so long to get made because of the that fact.

But now, I think that instead of being a hindrance or a mark against the property, I actually think in a weird way, it's a bonus.

And I also think that a show like "Reservation Dogs" proved, in our show coming after, has proven that okay, it's a niche community, but doesn't mean that it's not gonna appeal to a wider audience.

- What are some ways that you think in this first season you were able to take that incredible particularity of Navajo Nation, but tell some really universal stories that everybody could resonate with?

- Well, first of all, I have to thank the Navajo writers, the Navajo consultants, the Navajo crew members, the people who helped us get the details right and make it feel as authentic as possible.

I certainly could not have done that on my own.

And I think no matter what culture you come from, you can identify with a grieving father who doesn't know how to move on from the death of his son or a young man who doesn't feel at home in his own community or doesn't feel like he belongs anywhere.

And so those things I think transcend cultures and religion and ethnicities.

- I'm sorry about your son.

[deep sigh] - Didn't Bernadette did look beautiful the other night?

- Would you stop?

Emma was always trying to play matchmaker.

Believe me, honey, those two are not a match.

What?

- I don't have to play matchmaker.

[chuckles] - Come on, you're joking, right?

Chee, she's joking, right?

Really?

You could have fooled me.

- I think they did.

- Yeah, I guess.

[all laughing] - Being a member of the Chickasaw Nation, there are certain things that you understand about Native experience to understand the Navajo culture.

What sort of prep did you have to do?

- When I was in the writing the pilot, obviously I had the benefit of doing the research trip.

The ride-along experience that I had done with the tribal police officers was one of the most valuable things because not only did it give me a sense of life, day-to-day life on the reservation, but it gave me a sense of what it was like to do this job and how it was different than just being a normal cop.

And I think that was made apparent to me one evening when we responded or the officer that I was in the ride-along with responded to a domestic violence call.

And we were out in the middle of nowhere in a house, no neighbors around for as far as the eye could see.

I just remember thinking, "If something were to happen, we're alone out here."

And it's a very different experience being a Navajo tribal police officer than being a police officer in the LAPD.

The sense of isolation that goes along with the job.

And Chris and I talked a lot about that.

He was on the research trip with me as well.

And how do we evoke that, not only in the writing but in the way he was filming things and the way he filmed the landscape.

And then obviously, I did a lot of reading.

Not only Tony's books and getting to know the characters but reading other books about the Navajo culture, the Navajo origin story, and the belief system.

So, all of that was necessary.

But even then, even with all of that, I still had this amazing consultant named Filmer Bluehouse who was a Navajo tribal police officer in the 1970s.

I was able to call him if I had a question about either a ceremony that was being depicted or something on the tribal police front.

So really, it's just a process of being open, being humble, and asking for help as you're writing.

- Could you talk with us a little bit about why you chose to have language be a prominent part and to have people actually speaking it?

- It's a beautiful language and it's integral to depicting the community and the way of life there.

And so it's a very challenging language to ask actors to learn.

And especially some of the actors who were not Navajo.

So we really had to strike a balance of what is practical for the show while also trying to keep it as authentic as possible.

And we tried.

And I think we'll continue to do that.

It's still a part of the show.

It's still something that we're all very passionate about but it is one of the harder things that had to do.

[typewriter ding] [Narrator] You've been watching On Writing "Dark Winds" with Graham Roland on "On Story."

On Story is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story project that also includes the "On Story" radio program, podcast, book series, and the "On Story" archive accessible through the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

To find out more about On Story and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.

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