A GREAT ARTIST’S LEGACY
Earlier this year, Beau Dick died. Shawn Conner talked to Natalie Boll about the Kwakwaka’wakw artist and the documentary on Beau she co-directed.
Q What was your first exposure to Beau Dick’s work?
A It was through (co-director) LaTiesha Fazakas. She had approached me through mutual friends and asked if I would be interested in talking to her about a documentary on an artist named Beau Dick. I hadn’t heard of him before. She was aware of an APTN project I was working on. She said that she thought the best thing for me to do would be to come to her house and see one of his pieces. She took me downstairs and she had a huge mask in the stairwell. Immediately, I was like, “Oh my God, I’ve never seen such a powerful mask before.” It had such a spirit to it. I thought, “I have to meet him.” Q What was your first meeting with him like? A We travelled to Alert Bay. It’s a huge trek. He had a little studio underneath the bed and breakfast where we were staying. It immediately seemed like I’d known him forever. And it was interesting to see him in Alert Bay, where he was from, as a first meeting.
Q Was he hesitant about the film? Were there any areas of his life that were off-limits?
A No. LaTiesha had been developing the idea with him for a few years before I was introduced to the project. He was so much a part of it. He was pretty much game for every aspect of it. He was very involved in who we filmed and where we went. He would call us up and say, “Hey, there’s this person you have to meet. Can you come at one o’clock?” And it would be 10 in the morning. We didn’t have cameras on standby. But we would make it work.
Q What was it like to have your subject die before the film was finished?
A When we were filming, we never knew when we were going to end. Before he passed away he had gotten into Documenta, in Athens and Kassel (Germany). It was an extremely huge accomplishment. So he was really busy working on those masks.
This was a whole new chapter in his life so we were asking: “Are we really going to follow him to Documenta?” And budget-wise we were at that point. We had just finished filming him carving some of the Documenta masks. By then we had decided that the story had come to an end. We showed him our rough cut, and he really liked it. He recorded some music for the project (the opening and ending songs). We were in the very last stages when he became ill (Dick died of complications from a stroke in March).
It was really hard. We were so intimately involved with him and his family. At the same time, we had such beautiful footage of him. The film could be a legacy for him, and we could keep sharing his stories through the film. In that, we were happy that we had done the project. But it was very hard for us.