Writer-director Andrew Okpeaha MacLean makes his feature debut with the L.A. Film Fest entry On the Ice, a character tale about two Alaskan teenagers wrestling with guilt after the accidental murder of a friend. With its isolated setting, cast of non-actors, and rollercoaster ride of a Sundance premiere, the indie drama isn't the easiest sell for mainstream America, but it's a film that deserves to find an audience -- a window into a generation of Alaskan teens balancing native culture with hip-hop, at a unique crossroads between community traditions and the volatile influence of urban culture.
On the Ice, based on MacLean's Sundance award-winning short Sukimi (lensed by NYU classmate Cary Fukunaga, who executive produced On the Ice), was developed through the Sundance writing and directing labs and premiered earlier this year at Sundance. It went on to win Best Debut Film and the Crystal Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival and screened last weekend at the L.A. Film Fest; a grassroots self-release is in the works for the fall. MacLean spoke with Movieline about adapting his short into a full feature, his commitment to preserving native culture, bouncing back from the Sundance reviews that may have jeopardized an early distribution deal, and the rewarding, challenging journey he's still taking with On the Ice.
On the Ice initially began as a short film, but after you debuted at Sundance you expanded it into a full feature. What was the process of developing it into a full film like?
I didn't have the feature in mind when I wrote the short, and when I made it and started showing it to people, people would have a lot of questions about the characters and what happens to them. Some people that I really respected said, "You should think about adapting this into a feature," so I thought about it and there were definitely things that were attractive about it. So many unanswered questions from a story perspective, but also from a thematic perspective. Sundance was the first festival it played at and it won there, so all of a sudden I was in a position of, "Well, what are you doing next?" So I said I was working on adapting the short. I wish I would say it was this grand plan, but I just found myself in this position. Then I went home and started writing it.
You grew up in Barrow, Alaska, where you set and filmed On the Ice. Take me back to Alaska and describe the culture and community that inspired your story.
I did some of the writing while I was in Barrow, actually. And in adapting the feature there were some things I really wanted to explore in the culture. The short is set in the 1950s, back when people were still using dog teams as their primary mode of transportation. And I knew I wanted to do something contemporary and something about kids, because I was fascinated with how kids up there are crafting their identities. I'm a generation removed from it; I grew up in a different era than the one they're growing up in. When I was in Alaska, when I was in Barrow, it was more isolated. It felt smaller. Now the kids up there have this incredible access to the outside world that forces them to confront who they are in a way that I kind of didn't have to as much growing up.
That juxtaposition between tradition and modernity is fascinating, even in the opening scenes alone. You show your teenage protagonists performing traditional dances, then hitting a house party with hip-hop playing and kids freestyling. How did you familiarize yourself with that generation of kids and their lifestyle?
I have a million cousins up there -- I'm related to half of the town. So basically I was watching my cousins growing up, and they're like ten or fifteen years younger than me. Seeing what they're doing, what they're going through, and how the pace of things has picked up so much. How much the stakes have risen. The drugs are harder and it's easier to sort of lose your way, but at the same time it's easier to find it. There's a deeper level of pride that they have in themselves within the culture. They're forced to stake their identity in a way -- they go on Facebook, they join native groups, they reach out to each other and proclaim themselves in a way that I found really interesting. And they use things like hip-hop for that. I have cousins of mine who were just making demo tapes, rapping, they're appropriating a style, a kind of identity that they want. They kind of want to be like Lil Wayne or Jay-Z or something like that, but at the same time they don't. They use that, and instead of trying to rap about stuff that's really not a part of their lives, they're proclaiming their pride in who they are and where they're from through hip-hop. I found that interesting and it was one of the real launching points for my approach to the feature.
You're absolutely right about this generation of kids accelerating at a faster rate because of the Internet, but the position these kids in Alaska find themselves in is really is so unique. Between urban culture, which has its own kind of relationship to gun culture, and the local hunting traditions that allow for these same teenagers to go out into the world with guns. And they really know how to use them.
It is interesting, and I think about it because I'm here living in the city and there's a whole different relationship with guns, then I go home to Barrow and I've got five or six guns myself. I've got a whole bunch of rifles and shotguns and stuff, but guns are different up there. The relationship is almost opposite. Guns are implements, they're tools, and people take a lot of pride in them. But nobody's like, "Yeah, I got my 9 mm because it makes me tough." People are like, "I've got this awesome 308, look at this scope, it's amazing -- it's got stabilization on it, I could take out the eye of a seal at like 200 yards while we're bouncing on the ocean!" There's a kind of pride in that. It's still boys playing with toys, but guns aren't an implement of violence. They're an implement of food gathering.
Right. And yet the inciting incident in On the Ice comes out of these teenagers having these weapons that are meant for sustenance and for hunting, and becoming overcome by the macho confrontational swagger prevalent in hip-hop culture.
Absolutely. And I remember thinking about that in writing. I read a news article when I was in the stages of writing about it, and it was a police chief in Newark or something talking about why violence happens. What he was saying was that violence doesn't happen over big things. People don't get killed over millions of dollars or huge love stories or anything like that these days, it's about somebody giving someone a wrong look, and then it escalates. It's this culture of not backing down, and it's related to exactly that, this kind of macho, no-compromise, "You disrespect me? I'm gonna come at you harder.'" Then you're gonna come at me harder, then I'm gonna come at you harder, and eventually somebody dies from it. That's where the violence in On the Ice comes from. It starts over nothing. It just erupts because of that kind of unwillingness to step back and evaluate -- which is really antithetical to the traditional culture up there, which is very nonviolent.
How did you find your two young leads? It seems like this film was probably a difficult one to cast, considering that you hired mostly non-actors.
We knew it was going to be a difficult process and that was probably going to be our biggest challenge, because it wasn't an easy script. It wasn't a script that was made for non-actors, so we had to find people who were at least a part of the way there themselves that we could take the rest of the way. I knew it would have to be non-actors because there are no really trained Inuit actors of that actors that I know of, and I've looked pretty hard. So my producer Cara [Marcous] and I went all over the Arctic and up in Canada... then went all over arctic Alaska... just trying to get as many people as we could to come out and audition. We just basically talked to them first to see, is this somebody who can be in front of a camera and not clam up?
Did either Josiah Patkotak or Frank Qutuq Irelan, your two young leads, have any previous acting experience?
No, neither of them did. I'd known both of them before, actually -- didn't have them in mind to cast them, but it ended up that I knew them.
Are they from Barrow?
Josiah is, and I've known his dad for a while. I've known Josiah since he was six; I met him when I went on a hunting trip with his dad out to their hunting cabin. He was just this mouthy six-year-old who was just a total ham and wouldn't shut up and was really funny, the kind of six-year-old who would just make fun of you mercilessly non-stop. So when we were casting, on our second or third trip up to Barrow, I was like, "If we don't find him this time I don't know if we can even make the film." I come out of the audition room and there's a group of kids, teenagers, like 14- and 15-year-olds. We had said we were only going to consider people who were 17 and older -- we wanted people we could work for the hours the film was going to require -- but he was there. I was like, "Josiah!" He was there kind of just goofing off, and I asked him if he wanted to read for it.
How old was he?
He was only 15! He was like, [lowers voice] "I'm only 15, is that too young?" I said, just come back and read. He did it and I was like, "This is sort of what we were looking for!" We had him come back and do a more difficult call back, and he hit it out of the park. He made us cry, he was crying himself, and he just found it.
Are either Josiah or Frank continuing to pursue acting at the moment?
No, not in any organized way. I think both of them would be interested; Josiah I think actually auditioned for another film that came up there. But there just aren't many opportunities in Alaska to do film work, and neither of them are interested in moving to L.A. or New York and pursuing it in that way.
You started the Iñupiat Theater with the mission of preserving the legacy of native language, which is also used in On the Ice. What was the impetus there?
It was kind of the brainchild of a cousin of mine, she's somebody who's been very active about youth and things like the language, because the language is in danger. People of our generation and younger tend not to speak it, so it could face problems. Her idea was, "You've done theater -- instead of people sitting around talking about the language, let's put on plays and we'll do it in the language."
Have you long felt a responsibility to continue those sort of traditions yourself as an artist?
I feel a sense of responsibility to myself, certainly. I want to learn it, I want to be a part of the culture, I want to speak the language. So every narrative film that I've done that takes place up there, I've used the language. I love hearing the language and having it be a part of it, and I like using it myself. It forces me to use it, to write and speak it and keep it alive in my own brain.
What's your take on the distributor reaction to On the Ice at Sundance? Do you think buyers saw this as too niche of a film to take a chance on?
Yeah, I think the traditional distributors weren't quite sure how to market it. There are obviously no stars in the cast, which poses a marketing challenge. It's set in a community that's kind of outside the mainstream, which can be perceived as another challenge. And we kind of got knocked; the first two reviews were not good.
Ah yes, the trade reviews. I remember that.
Variety and Hollywood Reporter came out and they didn't enjoy the film. That was not a great weekend. We were really sort of down on it. But since then we had wins in Berlin and in Seattle and gotten a couple of awards and good reviews, and it's all been great. So it's been a wonderful redemption of sorts -- the ego and how we feel about the film and everything. But unfortunately, the distributors were all there that first weekend. The timing could not have been worse.
Cary Fukunaga was involved in both On the Ice and the short it was adapted from, Sukimi. How did he come onboard, and how did you meet?
I met him on the first day of film school! He and I are film school classmates. We were sitting together watching the films they showed us on the first day of grad film school and they showed us a film by a guy who was a couple of years ahead of us, Seth Grossman, he made a documentary about people who artificially inseminate pigs on pig farms. [Laughs] He would do interviews with these guys while they were basically masturbating pigs. And that's how I met Cary! Fast friends ever since. Actually, Cary has DPed a bunch of my films; he DPed the first film that I made at film school and he DPed Sikumi, the short. He was going to DP On the Ice, but then he got the Jane Eyre gig and had to drop out.
Are you currently working on other upcoming film projects?
We're still pretty consumed with this one, not just in its festival life but in trying to get it out into the rest of the world. Distributors, we didn't get any offers we were excited for at Sundance, so we decided to do a form of self-release. We've got a few institutional partners that are going to help us do it, so the plan is to get it out there in eight to ten cities all over and give it a theatrical run and see where it goes from there. I think part of the key to it is raising the money for it, and we'll be going through Kickstarter. We're hoping the theatrical release will happen this fall.
Read more about On the Ice at the film's official website and Get more coverage of the 2011 L.A. Film Fest here.