Original-Cin Q&A: Inuit Horror Filmmaker Nyla Innuksuk on her Debut Slash/Back and Goonies Influence
By Thom Ernst
Nyla Innuksuk, director of the coming-of-age, Arctic alien-invasion film Slash/Back, adds a new voice to cinema—a voice unmistakably influenced by being both a woman and an Inuit.
But as important as those attributes are, neither qualifier wholly defines Innuksuk as a filmmaker. Her work, as evident in this feature directorial debut, reveals a filmmaker not only passionate about what she does, but one influenced by the cinema she grew up on. The Thing, Attack the Block, The Goonies, E.T.—all of them appear somewhere in the corners and background of Slash/Back.
But the voice that Innuksuk provides doesn’t belong solely to cinema. Perhaps it’s inevitable that if you come from a region remote enough that your voice is rarely heard - not to mention being silenced by institutionalized racism - you become the willing (or unwilling) spokesperson for that community.
Initially Innuksuk’s conversation with Original-Cin focused on her film debut Slash/Back, her young cast, and the heart-felt appreciation for her mother’s love of genre films.
And then, with ease and subtlety, she caps all that by gently sliding into the heart of her passion—a passion that comes not just from the love of film, but out of the love for her community, and the place she once called home.
Slash/Back is directed by Nyla Innuksuk and stars Tasiana Shirley, Alexis Wolfe, Nalajoss Ellsworth and Chelsea Prusky. It opens June 24 in theatres in Toronto (Fox), Vancouver (Vancity), Ottawa (ByTowne), Winnipeg (Cinematheque), Edmonton (Metro), Saskatoon (Broadway) and Kingston (Screening Room).
ORIGINAL-CIN: Thank you so much for joining us.
INNUKSUK: Thank you. Happy to join.
ORIGINAL-CIN: My initial observation when reacting to Slash/Back is that it has a distinct Attack the Block vibe to it.
INNUKSUK: Oh, that's really fun. I definitely love that movie. And I think a kind of—certainly for me—a kind of E.T., Goonies vibe, but maybe in a in a way we haven't seen before. I love (Attack the Block) and appreciate any comparison.
ORIGINAL-CIN: I hate to add pressure on you as you go into your next project but there is a Steven Spielberg feel to Slash/Back. I felt it with the bike chase at the beginning and in the affection shown for your central characters. Is this Nyla looking back fondly at her own childhood in Nunavut?
INNUKSUK: Yeah definitely. I mean I grew up in with my friends riding my bikes around Nunavut. And I am a big fan of all types of movies, but obsessed with the horror genre.
Director Nyla Innuksuk
I grew up obsessed with E.T. and Goonies. And so, when I was out having adventures with my friends, it was almost like imagining that battle music. And so, for me when I had a chance to make a movie and was thinking about teenage girls fighting aliens, it was really fun for me to think about the movies that I grew up watching.
ORIGINAL-CIN: Did living in Nunavut make the reality of becoming a filmmaker more difficult or was there something innately in you that said, “This is what I'm going to do, no matter where I’m from?”
INNUKSUK: Yeah, well I grew up, like I mentioned, kind of obsessive about movies. It was a real passion. As I became older, I started making movies with my friends and genre films was always a big part of that.
I also grew up with a mom who introduced me to horror, but was also someone who encouraged me to go after what I what I wanted, even if the dreams are big.
And so, I was making movies with my friends and part of me questioned, “Oh is this something that you can actually do?” And then, “If this is something that you can do when you're when you're 16 or 17 years old…”—and that's kind of the age of my teenagers—my cast.
I shouldn’t say “my teenagers,” but they kind of are. And they feel this pressure to figure out what they want to do for the rest of their lives, because this is when they're finishing grade 11 exams and preparing for the final year of high school and college and all of that stuff.
I remember struggling at that age with what I was going to be doing next. I put a lot of pressure on myself, that I should be doing something important. I knew I loved movies, and that was kind of my thing. but it didn't seem as something that was possible.
Then, seeing people that I felt like were representing something in the way they were making movies, someone like Spike Lee for instance. (Lee) was the only person of colour that I knew growing up.
I was really lucky. I was able to go to a different high school for a semester when I was in Grade 11. There we did media studies in the morning, and in the afternoon you had access to the cameras and editing the equipment and computers. And we're just supposed to make movies and that's what we did.
For me and my friends - whom I'm still friends with, still making stuff with - it was just a chance to kind of explore telling stories and getting that encouragement.
So, I went to film school actually thinking I might be an editor because that's kind of what I had fallen in love with. I thought it was such a creative process. I still think it's such a creative process.
But then that shifted. I also fell in love with producing, believe it or not, like budgets and organizing schedules and all of that. It was a process to end up here. But then, once I was up in a new group getting ready to direct this movie with these kids I've been working with, and it's this kind of movie in this place, it did feel like, “Oh yeah like this is what I'm what I'm supposed to be doing.”
ORIGINAL-CIN: It’s interesting how successful people always talk about how lucky they are and skirt over the work that went into making you who you are today. Am I misjudging how assessable things were for you in Nunavut?
INNUKSUK: The community we filmed in is not the community I'm from. The community I’m from is just as isolated as Pang (Pangnirtung, Nunavut), but I moved to Iqaluit when I was two. Still, not a huge place and but it has paved roads and is changing all the time and modernizing.
Then I moved when I was eight years old to a very small farming town in Southern Ontario, a place of 1000 people.
I don't want to make it seem like making movies is something you stumble into. It’s really, really, hard and nothing is guaranteed. Especially with a first-time director and a no-name cast. It's really, really, tough.
And then to actually make it. It is the kind of work that is intense, but also is—and I think maybe that's what I mean when I say I'm so lucky—you’re lucy to be able to do this as a job. Because there are times where you're with these amazing creative people that you really love. And you're sitting there having conversations about how the blood splatter is going to land over on this wall and you're like, “This is crazy. This is my life right now. This is my job.”
ORIGINAL-CIN: What is it about the genre that fascinates you?
INNUKSUK: I am a horror fan. It is so great in the way that it allows us to explore metaphor, explore some heavier themes in—for me at least—ways that are fun and entertaining, but still grounded or rooted in something with heart.
When I was younger—horror and sci-fi—I loved them because they were so much fun. Now I'm writing and directing and telling stories as an adult.
It's just a fun way to explore story and a way to handle different themes with some subtlety or nuance. Or getting to explore some things that I might not even want to make a movie about. Or something that I would want to watch a movie about, but I get to process a story that feels like something that can be fun.
Even with Slash/Back being this coming-of-age movie about teenage girls who are processing what it means to Inuit, and how that fits in with their identity, and any shame that they might carry in that.
And then there’s this journey towards being really proud of where they're from, and feeling like it's a place that's worthy of writing for them.