[Uplifting music]
[Haig-Brown] The Haida language — there are just over 20
fluent speakers left in Haida Gwaii.
There are three dialects.
Well, there are probably more than that,
but there are three communities now:
Skidegate, Masset, and Hydaburg, in Alaska.
There are quite a few language champions,
people who have taken on learning the language,
who've made it their life and breathe it every day
and work really hard on the language.
[Loud laughter]
My mother's a linguist in the Tsilhqot'in language,
and so this is actually what was probably
one of the most intriguing aspects
of the pre-production for me.
I found myself really excited and kind of geeking out
on how can we prepare these actors
to not only speak in the language
but emote properly, tonally.
And I really wanted the few last speakers,
I think, because of the specific with the Haida language —
with there being so few fluent speakers left —
the intensity of the responsibility
to get it right was really strong.
I wanted the few speakers, when listening to it,
to just be like, "That's how it is. That's how it sounds."
[Laughing softly]
In one breath, it's so powerful
because it is a regenerative aspect, right?
With our colonial history and language being taken,
finding that voice and for that voice to be expressed again
is really exciting in itself.
[Birds chirping softly]
[Mellow music]
Some of the things we did is we got audio recordings
for the cast of all of their lines,
and they had that for about six months prior.
So they got to study on their own.
They then had mentorship, one-on-one mentorship,
with either a language speaker
or a champion within the community
that they had a certain amount of mentorship hours with,
and then we did what we called a boot camp,
a language boot camp, where we spent two weeks
living out in off-grid longhouses all together.
It was also a way that we could also
do the bonding before we were about to
live in the bush for six weeks to shoot,
and in that time, we played with a theatre process
they use for memorization and rapid memorization,
and what you do is you just have someone feed lines.
So you have a bunch of line feeders per scene,
and you have the cast have a person each
who feeds them lines,
and they stand up as though they're on a stage,
and they just do the scene over
and over and over and over again
with someone just orally feeding them the lines.
Not only do they get that memorization process
with them there,
but they also will then be able
to be coached by these language speakers
who will say, "No, no, no, no, no.
You don't go up there in tone when you're asking a question.
That's English.
Haida, we don't do that."
It was such hard work, and I remember,
finally, after giving them a week to do that,
I was like, "Okay, let's all come together.
Let's pick one scene," and selected a bunch of the actors,
and I said, "Okay, this time we're gonna do it.
I just want you guys to act like giddy teenagers.
Do the whole scene that way.
Like, giddy, giddy, giddy.
A person you have a crush on has just arrived,
and they've brought you a gift," and da-da-da-da,
and so it was incredible because, as they began,
people were feeding them their lines,
and they were now bringing the emotion to the lines,
so then it was super alive.
And then all of a sudden, the actors
were just saying their lines without being fed,
and they shocked themselves.
Within that week, they had memorized.
It was a pretty powerful, powerful couple of weeks.
[Fire burning loudly]
[Emotional music]