I was part of a five man team writing the script for Atanarjuat. However, that team was supported as well by the eight elders who had told the original legend orally to Paul Apak; by other elders whom Apak consulted periodically for advice on language or custom; and by our script editor in Toronto, Anne Frank, with whom I talked at length long distance by telephone from Igloolik at least once a week. So we could say the team that wrote this script numbered about fifteen people. My role in that was to write the English version. This was not a translation: first, I didn't speak Inuktitut well enough to translate it and second, we felt that wasn't the right way to do it. Instead, the five man team met together to discuss and debate each scene, in fact almost every line of dialog, and then Paul Apak wrote the scene his way in Inuktitut, and I wrote it my way in English. Sometimes, if the versions differed in ways we didn't like, we would try to coordinate both versions changing one or the other in the other's direction. But we talk about the two scripts as parallel screenplays: the one from which the actors would learn their lines, the other from which the film financing system would support the project. In the final edited version of the film, sometimes the actors are speaking the lines from Apak's script and we are subtitling them with the lines from mine.

2. What was it about this story that made you want to make it into a movie? Was it your idea, or Paul's?

Paul was the one who proposed this legend to make our first long dramatic film. It was a very very old story, all the Igloolik Inuit knew it from childhood and, as Zach often says in interviews, once you hear that story you never forget it. So Paul brought it to the table but we all knew it was a great story, very visual and dramatic with some fantastic events that would blow people's minds.

3. Did working with a script in a language you don't know affect you or the movie in any way? Did it make you view or interpret the story differently?

I worked from the English version, which I wrote. Some people used the English version and some used the Inuktitut. The actors learned their lines from the Inuktitut version but most of the scene setups and directions came from the English. To me, the duality made the story seem more universal, more a 'human' story than an 'Inuit' story.

4. What was it like to collaborate with primarily Inuktitut-speaking people on the script? On the movie? Did that affect how you worked together?

I've been working with Inuit for 17 years. When I first started I knew that if I didn't want to feel like a tourist, an outsider, it was important for people to speak Inuktitut around me without feeling like they had to speak English just for me. That's how we work: people speak English to me if they want but mostly Inuktitut to each other and it's my job to figure it out. That's the way I feel most comfortable, most part of a team.

5. Some people argue that the movie is too slowly paced. What do you think about that? Is the script as concise as you can imagine it being? What changes would you make to the script, and how do you think the movie would change?

The script is actually quite a bit longer than the film. We wrote more like a 5 hour movie and only got it down under 3 hours by cutting out large pieces of the script. This wasn't intentional: we had heard that a script should translate to about 1 screen minute per page, so we wrote 115 pages expecting it to come out at 115 minutes. But our style of writing and shooting - and especially the Inuit way of communicating so much by gesture and expression, by listening and pauses - made our script come out more like 2 minutes a page. So the film already reflects 'changes' to the script by what we left out of the final edit. But no, I don't agree the film is 'too slow.' It gives the illusion of being slow paced but in fact it isn't. That's because we use a video-verite shooting and editing style, letting shots run longer than usual as a continuous take rather than cutting everything into short cuts back and forth. This gives the impression of being 'slow' compared to the MTV Hollywood style of super fast cutting, but in fact letting shots run more in real time lets the viewer see more, and more convincingly, more actively, which actually makes the film seem to move faster, not slower. The paradox of course is that ours was one of the year's longest films but almost everybody sits to the end, and the vast majority of viewers comment on how it seemed shorter than it was, and especially how the last half of the film (i.e. the second hour and a half) seemed to go by very quickly. If the film were too slow the theatres would empty out halfway through. People vote with their feet. That's just another optical illusion in our style that makes us different.

6. What did you have to cut out that you wanted to keep in?

Nothing. Everything I wanted to keep in we kept in. Everything we cut out made the film better. Often a film doesn't need everything you think it will need to tell the story you're telling. Everything that didn't make the final cut either didn't work when we shot it, or wasn't necessary anyway.

7. What about upcoming movies -- will you be writing scripts for those? Alone, or in collaboration? If you are writing alone, what language will you write in?

We're starting to write our next film right now, which will blend two main story lines. We need a different process this time that adapts to the loss of Paul Apak who is irreplaceable. Our plan is to write in parallel: Zach and a team in Igloolik will write one story line, I assume in Inuktitut, and I will write the second story line, in English. Then we'll get together in April in Igloolik for a couple of weeks, and then I'll spend the summer in Igloolik, where we get them blended topgether, and living in both languages. We have to do the same thing again: Inuktitut script for the actors, English script for the bankers.

8. What process do you go through to write a script?

First you need a story. Then you need a 'treatment,' a prose version of your story with a lot of character details but not necessarily any dialogue. The treatment could be 50 pages, like a short story. Then you have to write a script, first a first draft, then as many as you need until it works. I guess most scripts, like most short stories or novels, are written in solitary. We seem to have a more collective approach.

9. Can you suggest any resources for aspiring young scriptwriters?

Lots of scripts are available in book form including ours. I would read as many as I can. then you'll see how different they are, realizing that the story is what's most important, not the format or the style.

10. Anything you need to add?