Flashback

The flm director John Hillcoat remembers camping in the Smoky Mountains, 1966

My father was hooked on camping, and we went to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park quite a lot. This was in a Native American village, a Cherokee preservation area where they had restored the traditional ways. I have photographic memories of some of the cabins and the tools they used to grind the corn; they were giving demonstrations and posing for pictures with kids. My youngest sister, Marie Louise, was four and so terrifed of the chief – ‘the savage’ – that she wouldn’t be in the picture. My oldest sister, Johanna (she was Joanna then, but changed her name because of the Dylan song), on the right, was eight. I was six and my brother Greg was seven.

We did a lot of travelling all through the Appalachians, up and down the coast – my parents loved educating us through the land. My father was a medical student at Yale but he was originally from Rockhampton, in Australia, and my mother was from Brisbane. In the mid-1960s we were living in New Haven, Connecticut; my parents were big fans of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan and we would all go to Newport Folk Festival. They got involved in the civil-rights movement – my babysitter was Fred Harris, one of the Black Panthers. I remember a lot of rallies and people with megaphones when I was a young kid, and our whole family went on Martin Luther King’s funeral march after he was assassinated. We almost had to move out of the neighbourhood because the riots in New Haven came right up to our doorstep. My parents were so horrifed at all their heroes being killed; they were crushed by it – the Kennedys, King, Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. By 1968 things were escalating on the campuses and Yale was one of the epicentres of the anti-war, civil-rights movement. My parents thought it would change everything forever, and when that was stomped on so brutally they despaired and retreated to Canada.

I was enormously impressed with the chief. From that moment on, I did loads of drawings of Indian battles. I became obsessed with Wounded Knee and Native Americans and the frontier in general – those dramatic worlds colliding. I felt connected with African American civil rights too; it was a formative experience. My ongoing interest in these subjects has fed into my current flm – in Triple 9 we reference America’s violent underbelly with its rich mixture of ethnic communities still under fre. My fascination with violence stems from that upheaval in the ’60s. I only made sense of it all when I was an adult.

I was enormously impressed with the chief. From that moment on, I became obsessed with Wounded Knee and Native Americans and the

frontier in general – those dramatic worlds colliding

John Hillcoat’s flm Triple 9 is out now