A Path into Filmmaking, the Cayuga Language, and Fancy Dance: An Interview with Erica Tremblay

Could you begin by telling us how you got started working in film and television and perhaps discuss some of the first projects that you worked on or some of your favorite early projects? It would be great to get a sense of your path into the industry.

Thank you so much to the team here for inviting me. I am thrilled to be here tonight and incredibly grateful that my family, who are visiting from upstate New York, could be present too.

I always really loved storytelling, and I love the storytellers in my community, the speakers in the longhouse who would get people riled up. My uncles are really great storytellers, and I always recognized their ability to get people to lean in when they were telling a story. And I realized I wanted to be a person that makes people lean in. I wanted to have that talent.

I was definitely the overachieving neighbor girl who would get everyone together to do plays and trampoline routines. My sister and I were just chatting backstage; she hates that part of our past, but she was my first star. I got my mom to buy me a VHS recorder at Goodwill, and I would edit tape-to-tape. But I don’t think I actually knew that filmmaking was a path, a job. And certainly, if I knew that watching Tarantino movies in the late nineties or whatever could lead to work—well, I didn’t recognize that a woman could do that job.

I remember being twenty-one years old, almost graduating from college, when I saw a film called High Art [1998], by Lisa Cholodenko, which was this queer movie, and I was coming into my own queerness. I saw her name at the end of the credits and I was like, “Holy shit. A woman can direct a movie.” I started working and making more-serious short films with peers, and we would work on each other’s films on the weekends.

I worked as a production assistant on a couple of projects that came through the Midwest, and then I was working on this movie and the second assistant director had just worked on a David Fincher film. And there were all these people from LA and I thought, “Oh, I can move to LA.” They’re just normal people. There were all these epiphanies that I had along the way that took me longer probably than I would have liked.

I remember I was working at a strip club, and I was like, “I’m gonna save up two thousand dollars, and when I have two thousand dollars, I’m gonna move out to LA.” And so, I moved out to LA and I lived there for ten years, working in various parts of the industry—like working as an assistant to a producer. And I was making documentaries on the weekends with my own money.

And then I realized that health care is a need and you don’t really get paid or have health care in these jobs that I was doing. So, I got a job in advertising and I spent over a decade producing projects there. Then I moved to New York, where I switched over to publishing, but I still remembered this dream that I had.

So, I decided to make a short film called Little Chief and really give it my all. It premiered at Sundance in 2020, and then doors just started opening for me. I got reps, started working in TV, started writing, starting directing, and then I packaged this film and got to make Fancy Dance. So, long-winded answer, but that’s the journey.

Can you tell us more about Little Chief? This was your first film with Lily Gladstone, right?

Yes. The whole time I was working in advertising, in these media jobs that were kind of adjacent, I was always frustrated because I wanted to be doing creative work. But now, looking back, it was such a great gift to learn and know how to be a boots-on-the-ground producer. I was able to use that skill set to make Little Chief and Fancy Dance.

I’m very grateful to know how to produce my own work. So, I always encourage folks that I talk to, especially students, to take the path that gets you closest to your dream, and while you’re on that path just try to soak up anything and everything that will pay off later. Do I wish that I had made my first feature before being forty years old? Yes, but would I have been able to? No, because it took me until I was forty to do it.

Fancy Dance is set on the Seneca-Cayuga Nation Reservation and in parts of Oklahoma, including Tulsa and Oklahoma City. Can you talk about the development of the story that the film is based on? You cowrote the script with Miciana Alise. How did the story evolve and how did you work together?

I was working in this job that I should have been so happy with. I was the head of video at Bustle, and I took the train in to New York City every day and had this director-level position and had worked for all of these fancy titles like Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar, but I was just miserable. So, I quit my job and moved to a small reserve in Canada to learn my language, Cayuga, full-time.

It was a three-year program. I learned with a cohort of eight students, speaking Cayuga eight hours a day, and at night I would write. I wrote Little Chief while I was there, but even after the favorable response to the film at Sundance in 2020, I knew I didn’t want to make that story bigger. But I recognized that people were attracted to Lily Gladstone’s character and the community I was representing. While I was still in language immersion, I started outlining Fancy Dance. I was learning the familial words. For instance, I had just recently learned that the word for your aunt on your mother’s side was k’noha’a, “little mother,” and I was seeing this incredibly beautiful matrilineal system that also was preserved in the language.

In Cayuga, if you don’t know the gender of a person, it’s a “she.” If it’s a mixed-gender group of people, they’re all “she’s”. It’s literally the opposite of English in terms of how the language is rooted, and I learned so much about what the culture looked like precontact, much of which has been eroded and lost to forces of colonialism.

And so, I saw this image in my head of an aunt and a niece dancing. And I was like, how can I use this film as part of my efforts in language revitalization? How can I do that work, and get this aunt and this niece to this moment of dancing in catharsis at the end of the film? So, I outlined it and had about twenty pages written when the pandemic hit.

These topics are so hard, like forced removal and the missing and murdered Indigenous people’s crisis. I was just feeling very lonely in that work. And I had met Miciana Alise, this incredible Tlingit writer from Alaska, at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. And I slid into her DMs and I was like, “I don’t know if you remember me, but I loved your rom-com that you wrote and I would love some of that rom-com sensibility in this story.” Because really this film is a love story. It’s a film about these two people who are kind of going in and out of their relationship with each other. I was like, “Let’s put some of that flavor on this.” So, we wrote the script together throughout the pandemic. We did it remotely through Zoom. And that’s how it all came to be.

The Cayuga language is a crucial element in Fancy Dance. Can you describe how you decided to integrate the Cayuga language into the script and filmmaking process? Were there certain motivations for weaving the Cayuga language into some scenes and not others? How did you work with the actors? Did actors’ participation in the film result in Cayuga language learning for them as well?

I love this question because I could nerd out about language all day long. Currently there are less than twenty first-language Cayuga speakers left in the world. It’s considered an extinct language. Most of those speakers are in Canada. In Oklahoma, we lost our last speaker in 1989. So, I was not brought up or raised around the language. There were only rote, memorized speeches that you would hear in the longhouse. However, I was privileged enough to be able to take time off from work to go do this program. And its influence was vital to my writing and filmmaking process. One of the women who was in my cohort, Keysa Parker, came on as our language consultant.

We did two weeks of language immersion with Lily Gladstone and Isabel Deroy-Olson. They would do four hours of immersion and then four hours of dance. We wove the Cayuga language not just into the script but throughout our filmmaking process. We didn’t want the language to just be a performative thing on the screen. We wanted it to feel like the living, breathing language that it should be.

It is a goal to have young people speaking the language fluently like Lily’s and Isabel’s characters, Jax and Roki. We were aspirational for that to be something that exists in the world, and wanted to do our part. We worked with elders because the language is really stagnant, and when you don’t use a language, you don’t have modern words for everything. We came up with the words for action, cut, rolling, sound speeds, and we printed these lanyards off and gave them to the whole crew. By the third day, everyone was speaking in Cayuga and referring to production roles in Cayuga.

So, language was a really important part of the film. We were thoughtful about when Jax and Roki would go in and out of Cayuga, and we wanted it to feel very special and to be something that the two of them shared together that not everyone else had access to, which sometimes can feel very rare in Native spaces.

And one of my greatest moments so far in this journey, and it’ll make me tear up, was screening the film in Toronto, which is about forty miles from the reserve where I did my immersion program. We brought in all of the elders, and they watched the film and they were like, “You did a good job.” It was so special to sit there and watch these incredibly beautiful people that have shepherded our language when it was not meant to survive watch this film and see their language on the big screen for the first time. I was like, “You did good!”

Another vital force in the film is dance. The film is called Fancy Dance, and I love how you focus attention on the power of dance as a kind of intergenerational experience among women and within communities. You also draw the viewer into these issues by using playback on a DVD player and remembrance via a photo album, which evokes the importance of sharing and learning about these traditions within the Seneca-Cayuga community. The missing character, Tawi, was also a stripper, so you approach dance in a complex manner with multiple valences. Could you could talk about dance as a cultural and social force in the film, especially since the narrative culminates in the powwow, and multiple themes and plot lines in the film are brought together in that gathering?

We worked with Hauli Sioux Gray, who is this incredible fancy shawl dancer. She came in and choreographed and taught all the dances. She also plays Tawi, the missing woman and mother of Roki.

Dance is such a huge part of the culture, and I didn’t actually do powwow dance growing up. My sister was the Indian princess. But I always spent a lot of time at powwows and in that culture, and it’s just a big part of living in Oklahoma, whether you’re Native or not Native. It’s something that’s happening all the time, and you come together and it’s this community gathering.

We wanted there to be a physical manifestation of Jax’s and Roki’s love for their culture. That was conveyed through dance, because that’s what it feels like when you go to a powwow and you have everyone there that you love. You’re expressing, and there’s music and there’s corn dogs and strawberry drink, and it’s just a really fun space to be in. And as a person who had worked in a strip club and has been a sex worker, I thought it was important to confront the representation of Native Americans and the tendency to position them within “poverty porn.” Such representations bring forth the white gaze and the white-savior complex in response. And then, going in the other direction, you’re just telling stories about model minorities.

For me, it’s really important to recognize that Tawi deserved to be found and deserved to be looked for regardless of what her job was. Sex workers, queer folks, trans folks, and all folks deserve to be searched for when they go missing, and their cases deserve an investigation when they are murdered. It was important to me to show the beauty of a mother who works for a living to provide the best home that she can for her child, and when she’s ripped from that family, what does that do to the people who are left behind?

Can you comment on the symbolism of the jacket that Roki finds and wears?

I used to have a similar jacket that I danced in. We were trying to figure out ways to bring Tawi into the story and for Roki to have something physical that represented her connection to her mother—loving her mother and looking up to her mother as this beautiful caretaker that she was for her, and taking that jacket and wrapping it around her as a representation of her hug and her love.

And then to see that jacket take flight at the end when Roki dances in it! That was a discovery in the script—writing to find a way to get that there. And now it’s like, How is that not always there from the beginning?

One more thing I will say about the powwow is the importance of having an understanding of how you tell those stories and why you’re telling stories from your community. We threw this powwow because it was during the pandemic and we couldn’t go to one. So, we had to hire all these extras and bring in all these Native folks to come and be in the powwow and all the dancers and the vendors and all of that. And I remember going to the producers the week before the powwow and telling them, “I need two thousand dollars to buy raffle prizes for the powwow.” And we bought a big-screen TV and a bunch of other raffle prizes. And throughout the night, we were raffling them off and we told the folks, “At 6 a.m., we’re going to be raffling off a big-screen TV.” And they stayed because they wanted to win that TV. My mom sent me a screenshot of a Facebook post that said, “The girls got tired last night, so who ended up winning the TV?” To sum up, you need to tell stories in your own way, and tell them in your community the way that you know that you’ll reach the people around you. I love that we got to have a real raffle at the powwow that night and that Donnie won the TV.

Another really important aspect of the film is queer identity and culture, and it was great to see Lily Gladstone playing Jax as such a complex, fascinating character. One of the reviews I read mentioned that the intent of the film was to spread awareness about missing and murdered Indigenous women, but it was also to serve as a love letter to the often-marginalized heroes of Native American communities. Can you say a bit more about the marginalized heroes of these communities?

The film was a love letter to the folks that keep our community safe. I think about the work that my mother and my sister have done in our community teaching our youth. I think about all of the aunties that are out on the front lines and are literally going into homes to, you know, put a body in between domestic violence. I think about the harrowing work that I witnessed from my elders growing up in my communities. And, yeah, Jax is doing everything she can in her own way. Even though she doesn’t make the right decisions every time, the intention behind every one of her decisions is to keep her family safe. And I witnessed that growing up, and I was saved by my mother’s ability to exit a very violent relationship. I was saved by domestic-violence shelters when we didn’t have anywhere else to go—shelters that were run by these sorts of women.

I think it’s important to talk about those heroes and recognize that when you can’t call the police and you can’t get a response from the FBI and you don’t have a tribal police force that has the ability to prosecute these cases, it is the women of our community that are left to do what they can to provide safety. And it is our uncles and our aunties, and it’s the queer folks in our community, that are left in those roles. And I know for a fact I wouldn’t be sitting here on this stage in this forum if I hadn’t had those heroes growing up.

There is a short scene in the film that is very visually and acoustically powerful. It’s when the community members are moving through a field, and you shoot this in a wide shot. All of these folks are searching for Tawi, calling out her name and moving in unison searching for her. Watching that scene is intense. Can you talk about how you decided to shoot it?

I’ve done work on and off at the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, which is an organization that helps specifically Native communities organize at a grassroots level. For instance, they’ll help communities in Alaska get rape kits to their remote villages. Each community may have different needs. And this national organization helps provide the resources and tools to bring people together and accomplish their goals.

I’ve been to so many different Indigenous communities, and I’ve witnessed this kind of search happening in most of them. It’s extremely hard to talk about, because every time you witness a search like that, you recognize it means that someone is missing or someone is gone and the family and community members are out there doing an action that is necessary to the investigative process. But it’s also a way to hold vigil and to be together and to be on the land—specifically, in the name of someone who is missing or has passed. It becomes more powerful and you pass it on by generation.

Not everyone loves that scene. The criticism is that it’s a little different than the rest of the film, and it’s more meditative. But I fought for it because I think that it’s a beautiful, kind of gut-wrenching exercise in survival and holding prayer and space as a community.

What kind of response have you had when showing Fancy Dance within Seneca-Cayuga or Cayuga communities? In 2024 you received an Achievement in Oklahoma Independent Filmmaking Award for Fancy Dance, so you seem to be receiving a strong response to your film work in Oklahoma.

It’s been great to share the film there and also where I currently live on Haudenosaunee lands, and in Six Nations territory up north. The response has been fantastic. We shot in Oklahoma, mostly on Cherokee Nation land, because we live a little bit farther out of the hub of production folks. But we had lots of Native folks working on the film. I also worked on the TV series Reservation Dogs, which was shot in Oklahoma, and the showrunner, Sterlin Harjo, had built up this beautiful crew of Native folks.

We just sold Fancy Dance to Apple, so it will have a theatrical release and will be available worldwide on the Apple platform. I’m excited that this will extend the film’s reach even farther.

Lily has been such an advocate of your film.

Lily is incredible. She’s a dear friend of mine and a cherished collaborator. And I’m so thrilled for her success this year and her bravery in continuing to speak about our film when she was on these stages to talk about her other film, Killers of the Flower Moon. I think this is a testament to the same kind of community and generosity that you see from the characters in Fancy Dance. I think Lily wants to scoop up all of her Indigenous collaborators, including others that maybe she hasn’t worked with yet, and take them with her. But what a gift to have Lily Gladstone in my life.

And what about working with Isabel Deroy-Olson, who played the teen character, Roki? How did you get the opportunity to work with her and cast her in Fancy Dance?

The first funds that we received for the film were through grants. This was before we had a production plan or financing, and we knew from very early on we wanted to spend the money on casting because we knew finding Roki was going to be the biggest challenge of all. And it was. It took us almost two years. We did a North America–wide casting search and we saw some incredibly talented young Indigenous actors, but I hadn’t quite found the one I was looking for. Lily is so big and is so present and their face just takes up that screen and the eyes and we needed someone who could counter them in a way—who wouldn’t just fall behind Lily’s star power.

I was working on an AMC series called Dark Winds, and we were casting a pregnant teen, and Isabel’s tape came across the screen. She looked way too young to play this pregnant teen, but she had the perfect look for Roki. I immediately took her name and wrote our casting director, and said, “I think I’ve found her.”

Isabel did one reading on a Zoom with me, and that was it. She’s really like a spitfire. She pranked everybody on set and was running around with this infectious personality. She’s also a trained dancer, so she’s very poised, and she tricks you into believing her innocence until she gets a good prank over on you. Isabel is this incredible soul and picked up the language very quickly. She and Lily have continued working together. She played young Lily in Lily’s recent television series Under the Bridge [2024], and they got dinner together all the time when Lily was working in Vancouver. So, if I did anything in this world it was putting those two together to be friends. Film or no film, it’s a beautiful relationship, and I’ve become very close with Isabel and her family as well.

Returning to an issue we started to discuss earlier, I want to ask about the tension in the film around law enforcers who are tasked to investigate cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women but end up being incompetent, negligent, corrupt, and/or ignorant. As a result, other systems of caretaking, guardianship, and investigation emerge in the film and become vital. What options exist in communities when people cannot count on federal or tribal cops to investigate the disappearance and murder of Native American women?

I think you see this similar kind of quagmire of injustice in lots of places where colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy have inflicted their disease into everything. It’s by design, you know? It’s by design to take a community of people that you don’t want to have any rightful claim over what is a rightful claim and suck off all resources. And one of those resources is life. And one of those resources is getting justice for crimes committed against you. And the Violence against Women Act didn’t cover Alaska until very recently. You know, we’ve been forcibly removing Native children from their communities since the boats arrived.

And it’s not an exaggeration, what’s reflected here. If anything, we could have gone farther down the rabbit hole of a procedural, but that’s not the movie that I wanted to make. My sister and my mom worked, and our community dealt with Child Protective Services a lot. Do you call and have CPS come and remove the kid from the community and risk having them adopted? Or do you not call and maybe it’s better that they stay? These are the kinds of questions that our educators are dealing with on a daily basis in the schools. Because the system is so messed up that there’s not a right or wrong answer. It’s very complicated, which is a reason why we didn’t want Jax to be perfect.

My mom, who looks very different than I do, has dealt with these sorts of things. She’s been pulled off a Greyhound bus and asked to show her papers or proof that she should be living in the United States. The closer that you get to the border in Texas, the more you see these very aggressive systems. For instance, the ICE officers will just park in front of pharmacies and Walmarts where people need to go to get things to live their daily lives. We wanted to show this scene with Jax and Roki where they’re speaking their language. It’s misinterpreted by an ICE officer as a different language. “Oh, maybe they’re not supposed to be in this country.” And that’s what he is concerned about, not about finding this missing woman.

With a show like Reservation Dogs, you hope that you’re getting folks to laugh one minute and then cry the next. We didn’t quite go the comedy route with Fancy Dance, but we wanted to blend the genres so that as you’re watching the film, you’re terrified about what’s going to happen with this ICE officer, and then thirty seconds later, Roki is cracking a joke about how she bled all over the cop’s car and used her menses as a weapon against the police.

Being from Native spaces, you learn to navigate the blending of those genres because you need your family and humor and laughter and love to kind of get through some of the more dramatic, serious, and oppressive systems. So, we didn’t want to make a procedural, but we wanted the exposition of how fucked up our justice system is to be in the background, creating dramatic forces against our beautiful family that’s surviving with each other through the space.

Can you talk a bit about what you are working on next?

Well, Fancy Dance has been a full-time job. I’m currently working on Dark Winds, season 3. I was unable to do season 2 because we were doing the film. I have a couple of television shows in development, and I really want to do genre stuff next.

I’m working on a horror film right now, and then Miciana and I are coming back together to work on a sexy thriller. I love the nineties. I want to subvert those movies and make something that you recognize, but is also surprising. So, I’m working on lots of stuff. I feel extremely blessed and excited that I get to do this for a living, and share it with my family and my nieces. I’m the little mother to my nieces, and they’re such an inspiration to me. My niece McKenna is an incredible poet, and we write together and we have projects that we work on. So yeah, just anything and everything that I can get my hands on that calls me.