Sydney Freeland in the long journey to complete her Netflix basketball-focused feature film, produced by LeBron James, had as a key goal to show real native lives on screen.
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But finding Indigenous basketball players was easier said than done, or at least at first, Freeland told a Toronto Film Festival audience on Monday.
“Netflix bought the film and I was, ‘Oh shit, we got to go find these people now.’ They have to be out there. They have to be out there,” Freeland remembered. Her insistence on proper representation onscreen sprang in part from knowing, as a Navajo trans woman, what it’s like to be excluded from screens big and small.
“Coming from multiple marginalized communities, I’m double used to being misrepresented in film and television,” she told the TIFF panel. Ultimately, finding Indigenous actors that could play basketball was easier than she had initially feared.
“The talent is out there, they just haven’t been given a chance. We knew the talent was out there. We had to find them,” Freeland said. Eventually, she went from 5,000 submissions for 10 Indigenous athlete roles whittled down to 250 people and then 32 top contenders.
Freeland argued filling roles authentically to tell culturally accurate stories is possible if you cast your net wide. “We want to say we caught lightening in a bottle. But if you’re catching lightening in a bottle over and over again, are you just giving a chance to people who didn’t the opportunity before?” she questioned.
Also Monday, Seeds director Kaniehtiio Horn , talked about filling her Indigenous horror pic with actors from her community after years of stereotypical representations from Hollywood.
“I’ve seen over the last 20 years a difference in how we’re even portrayed, how we’re taken seriously,” Horn, who did her directorial feature after breaking out as the Deer Lady on FX’s Reservation Dogs and Tanis on Hulu ’s Letterkenny , said at TIFF.
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“I accepted I was never going to get cast as an Indigenous person,” Horn recounted when graduating from theater school at 19 years old. But that changed when she was cast in the late Jeff Barnaby’s 2007 short film The Colony.
“I got this audition that said ‘dark, curvy native woman steps on stage.’ And they wanted to see me. So I did it, and he (Barnaby) said ‘yep, that was great.’ And I got the role,” Horn recalled. But Horn and Freeland agreed improving native representation in TV series and movies means casting Indigenous actors in the right roles.
“If I get an audition for a Cheyenne warrior in the 1600s, I’ll say, listen, guys, I don’t look like that,” Horn argued. At the same time, the push and effort to get more Indigenous talent onto and behind screens, including as directors and producers, had to continue.
For Freeland, that meant the coach in Rez Ball was not going to be the typical white guy from the city finding himself in a small town to tell a basketball team what to do, like Gene Hackman in Hoosiers. “We had to have someone from the community as the coach, to help them,” she added.
So Canadian Indigenous actor Jessica Matten was tapped to play the coach of the Warriors as her character returned home after playing professional basketball. “Our motto was the tell a story from the inside out, and that set the tone,” Freeland said.
The Toronto Film Festival continues through Sept. 15.
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