Indigenous Filmmakers Struggle to Break Into Hollywood as Killers of the Flower Moon Heads Into Oscar Season

Erica Tremblay’s debut feature Fancy Dance enjoyed a fortuitous journey to completion: She worked on the script in the prestigious Sundance Development Labs; she lined up financiers to fund the project; and it stars Lily Gladstone, now the lead in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Tremblay, a member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation, watched the film premiere at the Sundance Film Festival’s biggest theater on a Friday night last January and read the rave reviews that followed. 

A year later, however, Fancy Dance is still waiting for a distributor to take it to theaters. “We had folks saying, ‘We love this film. We really love you, Erica. We want to figure out how to work with you, but this just isn’t for us at this time,’” said Tremblay. “There’s a lot at play with the indie film market right now. There’s just been a lot of tumult, but it was a very weird reckoning to go from, OK, we’ve done everything we’ve been given to do to create a successful independent film, and now what do you do when there’s no viable pathway to an audience?”
 

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Tremblay’s experience reflects Hollywood’s ongoing exclusion of Indigenous talent. Movies for and by Indigenous people are being made, but major distributors are not buying these titles and, as a result, the films are not getting the theatrical or streaming reach, marketing or support other movies in that budget range can earn, limiting a filmmaker’s ability to pay back their investors or move up to bigger budgets and projects. 

While searching for a distributor, Tremblay said she was approached with an unusually telling request. “We had a studio that didn’t have any interest in acquiring the film, but wanted to screen the film internally for diversity training,” she said. For Tremblay, that studio ask added another insult to Hollywood’s history of injury. “So, you do see the value in this film, and you do recognize that it is entertaining, that it is important for us to have these conversations, but essentially we’re being relegated into the diversity banner, and that’s not what we are doing.”

A number of recent studies on diversity in Hollywood have documented the erasure of Indigenous communities from screens large and small. USC Annenberg’s Inclusion Initiative found that Indigenous Americans account for less than 0.25% of speaking characters on screen in a study of the top 100 films over the last 16 years. UCLA’s most recent Hollywood Diversity Report found that no Indigenous actors played lead characters in 2022 theatrical or streaming film releases. While the streaming space tends to be more diverse in representation, it too failed to make room for Indigenous actors. 

One of the authors of the UCLA report, Ana-Christina Ramón, said progress has been minimal and that Hollywood’s erasure and relegation of Indigenous characters to the past have created real world harm. “The perception that Indigenous people do not exist in the present time really affects the way that people think about Indigenous issues,” she said. “They think there’s not really that many indigenous people, or do they even live now? I remember a survey several years ago that asked the general public about Indigenous people, and it was like 40% didn’t think that they existed anymore in the United States.”

As awards season heats up, numerous films are vying for their share of Oscars, including Killers of the Flower Moon. Based on David Grann’s book of the same name, Killers of the Flower Moon recounts the horrors of the Osage Indian murders in 1920s Oklahoma. Lily Gladstone, the star of Tremblay’s Fancy Dance, is one of the industry favorites for the Academy Awards’ acting Oscars, alongside Scorsese stalwarts Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. While the film was critically acclaimed, The Oklahoman found Indigenous viewers’ reaction to Killers of the Flower Moon ranged from pride in working on the film to disappointment and disgust, describing  the experience of watching the movie’s depiction of violence against the Osage as akin to “hellfire.”

For Tremblay, Killers of the Flower Moon’s production and marketing budget represent the kind of opportunities few Indigenous filmmakers have been able to access. Tremblay said she fielded a few modest offers for Fancy Dance, but they don’t cover her financiers’ investments or offer a way to streaming platforms. “I want this film to be accessible in Native communities. I want this film to be accessible in non-Native communities in Middle America,” she said. “I think the case is there for films like this to be great business endeavors. As a first-time filmmaker, I’m under no impression that my film is in any way in comparison with a Martin Scorsese juggernaut, but when we are rendered virtually invisible, that disparity is so vast and that gap is so wide that it makes it hard to accept that the only version of this conversation is the version created by non-Native filmmakers.” 

Progress isn’t impossible, as UCLA’s Ramón cites recent strides in the streaming space to bolster on-screen representation. But “behind the camera, [parity] has really lagged, especially for groups such as Indigenous people,” she said. “The only way that you’re going to see change is when you do have more executives, more filmmakers, writers and show creators that are from different backgrounds” who can greenlight shows, she said. 

“When that massive budget was given to Killers of the Flower Moon, I don’t think that those executives were sitting around saying, ‘We’re going to make a billion dollars off of this,’” said Tremblay. “They were investing in that for probably lots of reasons. It’s Martin Scorsese. It’s going to win a lot of awards. We’ve got A-list actors in it. That’s an investment, and they’re making a calculated risk about how they’re approaching those business decisions. We need that same mindset on a much, much smaller scale for these gatekeepers to make those calculated assessments and those calculated risks on authentic Native storytellers as well. Right now, I don’t have a way to connect my film to an audience that quite clearly is saying that they want to see the film. They want more authentic stories. They want interesting points of views that they haven’t seen before, and I strongly believe that there’s a world where both films should and can exist.”

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