The book was about a 22-year legal battle, and let me tell you, that makes for a well-researched but very convoluted story, |
The iron range has it’s problems, like everywhere else, but the people are genuinely good, |
The real case, as you probably know, went for over 20 years. We had to collapse the time frame just for dramatic purposes. |
There is usually so much stuff all over the floor that it's like the actors are in a cage. How could you act that way? We were able to have the camera follow the actors, so they could move and breathe. |
There was something really nice about the fact that he is from Hibbing, on the Iron Range, ... But the big thing was that the way this man speaks about the human condition is so incredible. And I think that he really, profoundly loves women, so his music is a big influence on the movie. |
We talked to the women about what it was like, the first time they went into the mine, because all of them have grown up with those buildings on the landscape and those smokestacks and the men in their families going off to the mine, and it was always a mythical place, |
We went to Toronto, we didn't have distribution, we didn't have a publicist, we didn't have anything. But we had a film. |
Whale Rider |
When I put up Springsteen songs against our pictures, I couldn't make any of them work, ... Springsteen writes almost exclusively about the young male experience in working-class America. But you put anything by Dylan against this film and it works. |
You've got to be pretty to get their attention, but then that becomes your prison, as well, |