MNN Extended Interview: Jonathan Thunder

Transcript

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Marie Rock: For Minnesota Native News, I'm Marie Rock. This week, we revisit producer Travis Zimmerman's interview with filmmaker Jonathan Thunder about his award-winning short film, Ish Meets A Mermaid, which recently had its Twin Cities premiere and has been selected for the LA Skins Fest in Hollywood scheduled for later this month.

Jonathan Thunder: My name is Jonathan Thunder, and I am a visual artist and visual storyteller from Red Lake, the Red Lake Nation. My home and studio is in Duluth, Minnesota. I've made films in the past on a smaller scale or that they've been animation and animation can be quite tedious and isolating. So, I started to get the itch to write a new short film and was more interested in acting and doing live action, you know, with cameras and people. And I started writing Ish Meets a Mermaid.

Travis Zimmerman: So maybe just talk about what a short film is.

Jonathan Thunder: Yeah, as a short film, I imagine the final edit will probably be anywhere between 10 and 15 minutes. There may be an extended cut because I'll try to show it, you know, at exhibitions as well. But for film festivals, generally, unless you're going to make a feature length, which is, you know, around 90 minutes, it's probably good to keep your short film under 15.

Travis Zimmerman: You're the writer and director?

Jonathan Thunder: I wrote it, I directed, star in it, because you just, I just was like, these are the resources I have, right? I have myself. And in creating it, I made an LLC, which is the production company. So, I started to write this thing. It went through a few phases and I knew that I wanted to shoot it in Duluth because, you know, I love Duluth's texture and it's just such a visually striking place. And this is where all of that mythology to me, kind of meets the shore.

Travis Zimmerman: So, who else has been involved with the project?

Jonathan Thunder: I started to mention it to more people that I know who are into filmmaking. It got more interest and it started to expand a little bit. I asked Jeff Saunders, who is someone that I've worked with in the past, and Jeff has a very nice selection of cinematography gear. I sent him the script at the time, which was pretty dark, you know, and cerebral. He said, yeah, I love it, let's go. So, we were just going to shoot it over a weekend. I just said, hold on, you know, like, let me just work with the script a little more and I want to talk to this other person, Vera Bianchini, who works at the Zeitgeist. And she said, you need a producer. And between me, her and Jeff Saunders and my wife Tashia, you know, we just started to roll into a more fuller production with this thing, which meant that we needed some zhooniya, you know, we needed some money.

We applied for grants. You know, I applied for a grant, which I did get from the Maada'ookiing Grant at the Northland Foundation, which still we needed more. You know that was a nice little chunk to get things kind of like situated. And we started a GoFundMe page, you know, which I've never tried for a project before, but that was really well supported by the community and people who were interested in seeing what I would do with this project. And that helped immensely to pull together enough resources for a team of people who we could pay. And we even had one private funder shell out almost 50% of our entire budget. Zeitgeist threw some money on the pot to have us bring on interns to expand I guess you could say professionals in the film industry here in Minnesota. And at that point, we just had to kind of figure out how to make it happen.

So, I'm also a producer, but the official role of producer goes to Vera, even though, like since we were a skeleton crew, there was, and I haven't listed everybody, a bunch of us pulling, some of that weight of organizing it and doing all the little minutia that goes into creating something like it because it's an imaginative and full wild ride for sure.

Marie Rock: That's all for this week's episode. Join us next time for more voices and stories that inform, uplift, and shape our communities right here on Minnesota Native News.

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