Interview: “Northern Lights”
On July 12th 1978, the independent film “Northern Lights” had its world premiere in Crosby, North Dakota, where much of the film had been shot. This period drama about the Scandinavian immigrant farmers that founded the Non-Partisan League in early 1900s North Dakota would go on to win the Camera d’Or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival. As the film approaches its 45th Anniversary, it’s time to celebrate this landmark independent film that sadly has been out-of-print for many years. I was honored to talk with co-directors John Hanson and Rob Nilsson about their memories of making the film.
Let’s start at the beginning. You’re both from the Midwest, but where did you first meet?
ROB NILSSON: We met in Boston, right, John?
JOHN HANSON: Yeah, we met in Boston, when I was going to graduate school at Harvard in Architecture. And Rob was, what were you doing then? You were driving a cab, I remember.
ROB NILSSON: Driving a cab <laugh>.
JOHN HANSON: You were making that movie, The Country Mouse.
ROB NILSSON: The Country Mouse, yes, that’s right. Didn’t Skip Shield turn us on to each other?
JOHN HANSON: Yes. We had a mutual friend in Boston. We didn’t even know we had a mutual friend, until my wife and his wife met when they were in graduate school in Northeastern and introduced us. And then we met, that was about 1965 or 1966, somewhere in there.
And how did you end up working together as filmmakers?
ROB NILSSON: Well, that was later when we, John, you have a better memory than I, but we then migrated. My daughter was born in 1969, and I was already in San Francisco, and then John and I hooked up in Cine Manifest, which, were there any other sinews there in that vision, John?
JOHN HANSON: Well, we really remapped by accident thanks to David Schickele, a good friend of ours, or an old friend of Rob’s, but I had met him and I was looking for some video equipment to go back to North Dakota to my grandfather’s farm to do some shooting. And David recommended I talked to this guy Rob Nelson. In those days, his name was Nelson <laugh>. And there was an artist at the San Francisco Film Institute, I think, or the Art Institute, whose name was Robert Nelson.
ROB NILSSON: That’s right, yeah.
JOHN HANSON: I thought that’s who I was talking to. I called up and we started talking and suddenly we remember, there was a silence that went, Rob? John? <laugh> We met totally by accident again. And then we eventually joined Cine Manifest together, I think it was 1971, when City Manifest started.
You both had grandparents who were farmers in North Dakota. Were you always interested in making a film about that topic?
JOHN HANSON: Well my Grandfather was a farmer, and he actually was a member of the Non-Partisan League. And the whole idea for the film started because he told me stories, even before Cine Manifest, about those days. He was a just a poor dirt farmer, and the League gave him a place to have a chance of some little success. And he told me these stories and I had never heard of it. Well, then, much later in Cine Manifest, when we were all kind of coming up with ideas for movies, I came up with the idea of doing a movie about the Non-Partisan League, cuz I didn’t know anything about it. And then talk about your grandfather, Rob.
ROB NILSSON: Yeah, my grandfather, the family migrated out to North Dakota, initially to do a truck farm because my grandfather’s father was a prison warden in Bergen, Norway, and they had a great truck farm, so he thought he could grow cabbages, and he was wrong. And he didn’t know how to grow wheat. So my grandfather, as a young man, would go out into the homestead areas, out around Bismarck somewhere, and gathered the little locket pictures from that the women would have. And then he had, somehow he got ahold of blow-up equipment. So he’d blow these pictures up to the size that he could frame, and then he’d sell the pictures. That’s how he started off in filmmaking. And then he became the first filmmaker in North Dakota.
He had a company called Publicity Films, and he worked for the state, had contracts with the state to make films about the bustling little metropolises in the middle of the prairie. And so he’d gathered together all the Model T cars and get everybody dressed up, and they’d march back in front of the camera as if it was a great town. And then they were trying to get immigration to come to North Dakota. So that was my connection. My mother was born in Bismarck.
You started with The Prairie Trilogy, your short documentary films about the Non-Partisan League. Was that the first step and then it became Northern Lights after that?
JOHN HANSON: No, actually, Northern Lights was the original project. It was called something else: If We Stick, We’ll Win. I think we called it to begin with, cuz that was the motto of Non-Partisan League. And then we got a grant from the North Dakota Humanities Council to start the project. And we were working away and taking so long in their eyes that the executive director, who I’d become friends with says, guys, I need a film <laugh>. So he gave us more money to make just a half hour documentary about the non-Partisan League. So we stopped work on the feature, and we made Prairie Fire, and they loved that, and they gave us more money to continue on the feature. So this was like over a two or three year period we’re talking about.
ROB NILSSON: We made a version that had both documentary and drama in it. And he said, let’s get this drama out of there. We gotta show this in schools, guys.
JOHN HANSON: Yeah, it was quite a process. And thankfully we had this wonderful man, Everett Albers, who was the head of the North Dakota Humanities Council, who was really, in the credits of Northern Lights, he’s called our godfather.
ROB NILSSON: John was masterful in working that, making friends with Everett and everybody, and just making it happen through his own means. And without that, we probably wouldn’t have gotten very far. But I’ve always admired you, John, for how you handled that.
JOHN HANSON: Well, you know, part of it was that I grew up there and so, you know, even though I’d been gone for many years when I came back, you know, when you start a conversation out there in the prairie, you start with, you hunt for somebody you know in common, right? Where are you from? Where’d you grow up? I’d say, well, I grew up in McCluskey. Oh, I had a cousin in McCluskey, that kind of thing. And so the doors open, partly because I was an authentic North Dakotan, even though I was a San Francisco long-haired hippie, they accepted me. That helped a lot.
So how did you first meet Henry Martinson, who’s kind of the centerpiece of Prairie Fire and also part of Northern Lights?
JOHN HANSON: Well, there was a wonderful guy at the North Dakota Historical Society by the name of Larry Remele, who was the editor of their Historical Quarterly, and he was a State historian, plus he was very active in the Democratic Party. He knew the whole history. I got to become friends with him, and he said, you gotta go to Fargo and meet Henry Martinson. And so if we went to meet Henry Martinson, who at that time was 90. He was an organizer for the Non-Partisan League, even though he was a member of the Socialist Party, he was an old socialist. He was the editor of the Iconoclast, the socialist newspaper in Minot, and when the socialist leader Townley organized the league, Henry joined in because he saw that there was a chance of some success, cause the socialists weren’t having much success out there.
ROB NILSSON: And Henry also went to jail with the Wobblies up in Minot. I think that had there been a, well, I think there’s no doubt, his whole thing was socialism, and had there been less redbaiting and stuff, he would’ve probably been the socialist governor of the state.
JOHN HANSON: He ran for office a few times.
ROB NILSSON: That’s right, he did.
JOHN HANSON: He ran for Senator. In fact, you probably remember seeing in Rebel Earth when we took him into the Capitol chambers and he made his speech, his socialist speech. You said, how come you never got elected, Henry? He says, I never got enough votes! A wonderful man, had such a great sense of humor. He was a man of the earth. He was deputy Labor Commissioner of North Dakota for 30 years. Poet laureate of North Dakota. An extraordinary find. I mean, it was a magical match, wasn’t it, Rob?
ROB NILSSON: Yeah, it was certainly was. I remember one time we were sitting in the, what was the name of that cafe in Fargo where we’d go? I wonder if it’s still there on the main drag, where we’d have coffee and stuff. Anyway, the scene is that we were all sitting there and this woman walks in, quite a lovely woman, and all three heads moved in the same direction. I think Henry was on the left side, so we could see that Henry was the first to turn his head to beauty in the world, you know? Never forget that moment.
Was he excited to be part of a film about his life, but also about the Non-Partisan League?
ROB NILSSON: Well, John, I think he’s kind of took it in stride, right?
JOHN HANSON: At first, when we first met him, we had to kind of show that we were good lefties, right? I think I remember we were talking, and there was a pause, and he says, well, I think we’re probably talking about some of the same things. And he kind of joined in, and then when we proposed that he’d be in the movie, by that time he was 94, he says, well, that’s one thing I haven’t done. Why not?
ROB NILSSON: He did say, though, he had to go to work every day. He was a recording secretary at the labor temple, right?
JOHN HANSON: Yeah. The Fargo Moorhead Labor temple.
ROB NILSSON: So we’d have to work around his schedule.
JOHN HANSON: He was still driving then too. Lived in a little apartment by himself. Some of those scenes in Northern Lights were shot in his a little apartment, in the beginning of the movie, when he is sitting there looking through the diary, which was an idea that Rob came up with. And Henry was a writer too, of course, a poet, and so it was natural that he would’ve had a diary. And it was a perfect way to take us back into time.
Did you always intend to start and end the film with Henry? Or did that come out as you were filming?
ROB NILSSON: Probably not as we were filming, but
JOHN HANSON: I think as we were editing.
ROB NILSSON: As we were editing, is that when we brought it in?
JOHN HANSON: Yes, because we were shooting, Henry was such an amazing guy, we were shooting stuff of him along the way, even before we did further shooting on Rebel Earth and Survivor, I believe. It was a long process, but really the movie was found in the editing, because we didn’t shoot continuously. The first shoot was two weeks. That’s all we had the money for. And it was the dead of winter in 1975. We didn’t finish the movie till 1978. So we would stop, we’d go back to San Francisco, we’d edit those things together, figure out what to do next, go back out, shoot for a little while, run out of money, come back, raise some more. I mean, it was one of those stop and start processes, which in some ways gave us time to come up with the final form of it. What do you think, Rob?
ROB NILSSON: Well, I was just thinking when you were saying that, that we were lucky in the fact that we did go up there late in the year, we were looking for some wheat to thresh, and nobody had any wheat because it was past the threshing season. And we heard somehow, I don’t know exactly how, but we found that in Divide County, they saved some of the wheat, but it turned out in the end, after all the many, many years, we found out it wasn’t wheat at all, that it was barley.
JOHN HANSON: That’s right!
ROB NILSSON: They told us it was wheat, what do we know? But luckily we went up there and found that barley, that wheat, and so that we could shoot that scene in the winter and all that stuff in the winter. I think we were lucky. John, do you think we would’ve been wanting to shoot in the winter anyway, or was it just good fortune?
JOHN HANSON: I don’t remember, Rob. It was such a long time ago, and the memory isn’t what it used to be.
ROB NILSSON: You’re doing better than me.
JOHN HANSON: But the thing was is that, the key to the whole film really was that meeting the Norwegian community up there in Crosby. And the reason they had those wheat in shocks was because every July they had a threshing meeting. They pulled out their old threshers and tractors and stuff. And so July would be too early for that next year’s wheat to thresh. So that’s why they had it there sitting there in the winter. It was just stroke of luck. And the people who were still alive then, that we cast in the film, could still speak a dialect of Norwegian, and so it made it even more authentic, aside from the authenticity of those characters, the fact that they could speak Norwegian, which is what would’ve happened in 1915. A lot of people would still have been speaking their native language in those years.
ROB NILSSON: We were right on the cusp there, that wouldn’t be the case anymore.
JOHN HANSON: No, we got them just at the right time. We were very lucky in a lot of ways. We were also stubborn Norwegians, so we never gave up.
ROB NILSSON: Even the Swedish part of me didn’t give up.
JOHN HANSON: That’s right. <laugh>
I love that a lot of the film is in Norwegian. Was that always in the script, or was it because you found actors who spoke Norwegian?
ROB NILSSON: Well, I think they were the best people we could find, right, John? John traveled all over the state with Susan, right? I think you did the bulk of that work. But those characters, not that there wouldn’t have been people just as good, but they were, when you think about Thorbjorn, for example, who would’ve ever thought that Thorbjorn could do that grass story? Of course, what we learned is that the real juice of drama is embedded in people. It has nothing to do with actors. It has to do with what you’ve lived and what you can bring forward. When people can conquer fear and believe in a project, then they’re gonna be able to give you stuff that no actor could give. That was the big lesson that I learned, and I think we both learned. To trust the everyday person, because you know, Bruce Dern’s not gonna be able to — I worked with Bruce Dern, it was a great pleasure to be working with him on On The Edge — but just as an example, I don’t think that actors can do what, who was the old guy on the rock pile? Krist Toresen! I don’t think you could hire anybody to do that!
JOHN HANSON: You remember the guy in the rock pile who didn’t want to join? We met him in a bar in Crosby, and he was an excellent pool shooter. Remember that Rob? We could never beat him.
ROB NILSSON: No, really?
JOHN HANSON: We could never beat him. And that’s how we started talking with him. He had a powerful handshake. He just had a powerful hand. And he was just an amazing guy, and in fact, he didn’t wanna join the league in the old days, so didn’t have any problem playing that role. But he had such a great, the way he would say his lines, he’d spit his chewing tobacco off the side of his mouth and he’d laugh. What actor could do that?
ROB NILSSON: This is why I’m still working with workshops, and mixing have some actors in too, I’m not saying that there aren’t wonderful actors, but the real people and what they’re capable of, they have no idea. And once you show them and allow them and stuff, you’re getting the benefit of seeing them emerge as versions of themselves, but kind of with the demonic capacity to transform it into something slightly different, but totally authentic. That’s the greatest thrill I’ve had, and all the workshops I’ve done around the world and in the films and stuff, that alone would be enough for a lifetime.
How did you like working as a directing duo?
ROB NILSSON: Well, my sense of it is that two individuals could not have been better suited to each other. I don’t know why that is, John, but
JOHN HANSON: We just had a good way of working, didn’t we?
ROB NILSSON: Yeah, we did, to the extent that that there was any division at all, John was really the Director of photography, as well as the co-director. And I think I was more involved in the acting side, if there was a division to be discussed.
JOHN HANSON: Yeah, we split it up that way. I mean, it was a good advantage because while I was working with the crew, setting up, Rob was with working with the actors, and then we would compare notes and, you know, when we were shooting a scene, we would have little discussions behind the camera about how it was going. But Rob mainly was working with the actors, because he was more experienced and better at it than I was, I thought. And I’d always had kind of a visual sense of the prairie, cuz I grew up there. I knew what I wanted visually in the prairie, and I wanted a lot of sky. We wanted black and white, of course, because of Bergman, we both loved Bergman. But also the advantage of black and white, if you’re shooting a period film, is that the blue skies are gray.
ROB NILSSON: Not only that, the yellow houses are gray. A lot of those old houses that we used would never have worked in color.
JOHN HANSON: And also I remember too that the great thing about that Crosby area is that they had buried all the power lines up there, it was very flat land before we even got there, so there were no power lines in the way. The only thing we had to watch out for were airplanes, the contrails of airplanes. But otherwise we could freely shoot a period film in the seventies, and make it look like it was the early days of the 20th century.
You made this film in the 1970s, when the independent film scene was still very young. What films did you look at for inspiration or guidance?
ROB NILSSON: I think our models among others were De Sica and Rosselini and the Neo-Realists, but in particular for me, Cassevettes, because Cassavettes was the first American director to show, in my view, what people are really like without the without the makeup, without anything, just allowing them to be and structuring the stories around who they were. So those were my, what about you, John?
JOHN HANSON: I went to Carlton College, and when I was there, I was the projectionist for the weekend movies at college. What was I projecting? Bergman. Fellini. They brought in the foreign films, and so I had that buried in me. But also, when we formed Cine Manifest, our manifesto was to make independent features which said something. And we all had slightly different views of what that was gonna be. We were one of the only groups at that time that were doing that. We found out later when we met them at film festivals that there were people in different parts of the country who were also making low budget independent films. We finally all met in New York and in different places, but Cine Manifest was really an umbrella that we worked under that made this possible.
ROB NILSSON: And there was the thought that we should be telling stories about working people like farmers and factory workers and stuff. That was a group that was not covered generally by cinema. And so our group’s first feature Over Under Sideways Down was about a factory worker who didn’t know whether or not he wanted to join a strike. Now that was directed by Eugene Corr and then also Steve Wax. But then our film was about agriculture, the labor of the agriculturist.
In 1971 and 1972, there was the films The Emigrants and The New Land that told the story of Swedish immigrants coming to Minnesota. Had you seen that film, and did it influence Northern Lights at all?
ROB NILSSON: When did you see those films, John? Before or after, or during?
JOHN HANSON: My feeling is it was after.
ROB NILSSON: Mine is too.
JOHN HANSON: I don’t remember, but they had some great casts in that. They were quite different films than Northern Lights, telling the story of basically our ancestors that came over from Scandinavia. My ancestors first settled in southwestern Minnesota, and then moved over to North Dakota and then up into Saskatchewan actually too.
Your film goes to Cannes and it wins the Camera d’Or, for Best First Film. It must have been an incredible thrill.
ROB NILSSON: It was a trip, yeah.
JOHN HANSON: Oh God. We never thought, I mean, we went to Cannes hoping to make deals, to sell the film, you know?
ROB NILSSON: Yeah. <laugh>
JOHN HANSON: And somehow it captured, well, it was part of the Critics week, which is the seven films that the international critics choose. And I forget who was our critic champion, who might have brought it in there. I know there was one, in London, that was a great champion of our film.
JOHN HANSON: Anyway, it became the darling of the international critics unexpectedly, and it started to get a little buzzed during the week after it was first shown. But I don’t remember us thinking that we have a chance for anything. Do you Rob?
ROB NILSSON: No, and to prove it, I remember running around in the streets there looking for a coat, because we were gonna be up there. This was the awards ceremony, I guess we knew before then. But anyway, it was sort of like, it wasn’t exactly black tie, but I found this kind of green sport jacket. I don’t know what you had to wear.
JOHN HANSON: I got a white tux jacket or something, I mean, we didn’t have any tuxes along with us. <laugh> We never expected we needed them.
ROB NILSSON: We didn’t, and we were up there with Coppola and who else?
JOHN HANSON: Malick’s Days of Heaven won Best Directing that year.
ROB NILSSON: Oh, it did, yeah. I was thinking of thinking of the German film.
The Tin Drum?
ROB NILSSON: That’s right. So we were kind slinking in the background there with our sports jackets and our cowboy boots.
JOHN HANSON: It was really quite a wonderful shock. <laugh>
ROB NILSSON: It was. The value of it is that you’re considered to be someone who knows something for about a year and a half. Then you gotta go off to after it again.
JOHN HANSON: Up until then, we’d been distributing the film ourselves. We started in North Dakota going from little town to little town, and then we were trying to get it into larger cities, including San Francisco, where we lived. And the Surf Theater was a great theater out in San Francisco. And Mel Novikoff, who ran it, we showed him the film. It didn’t have an audience, he wouldn’t book it. Then of course, he came to the Cannes Film Festival. So after we won the prize, he came up to us, and he says, oh, boys, I love your film. <laugh> I don’t know what changes you made, but whatever you did, you made it into a wonderful movie. Of course, we hadn’t changed a frame in the film. <laugh> People jumped on the bandwagon, and then we came back and it played in many theaters all over the country.
ROB NILSSON: But even so we had to distribute it ourselves, through New Front.
JOHN HANSON: Yes, we distributed ourselves, we formed a company to distribute it. So in fact, we still have the US theatrical rights ourselves. We never got rid of them.
Currently, Northern Lights doesn’t have a DVD or BluRay release, but the Prairie Trilogy has been restored and released by Kino Lorber. Is there a release in the works for Northern Lights?
ROB NILSSON: Yeah, we’re hoping that Kino will take everything. We’re talking with them now, and they definitely want it, so it’s just a question of when.
JOHN HANSON: Just a matter of time. It’s gonna be available at DVD and streaming, mainly streaming, because that’s how people look at films.
Do you plan to screen the film in theaters and attend screenings?
ROB NILSSON: What do you think, John? Can we do one more?
JOHN HANSON: They’re basically gonna run the thing. I mean, it might provide an opportunity to have some more theatrical screenings. We’re working with a company called Cinema Conservancy, they’re doing the theatrical bookings. And so, it might be an opportunity for them to dovetail with the re-release and see how much publicity we get. I’m a little beyond hitting the road again, the way we used to when we were much younger.
ROB NILSSON: We’ve had a champion named Jake Perlin, who has taken Northern Lights on a 20 or 30 city tour back in, do you remember the year that was? That was Cinema Conservancy, of course.
JOHN HANSON: Yeah, it had a re-release, because the Motion Picture Academy did a restoration of the film. And they made a new 35mm print. So at the same time, we scanned that print and made a new Digital master so that you could have a DCP, because that’s what you needed by then. And so Cinema Conservancy made the DCPs and they released re-released it in quite a few cities around the country. We had some really good response.
I really hope you do a screening here in Los Angeles!
ROB NILSSON: It’s probably gonna happen. There’s a number of things I wanna try to, I always thought that if you made a good film, it’s the systems business, but it’s not, it’s your business. And if it doesn’t get distributed, okay, so you didn’t get distributed. But still, in my old age here, I’m determined to push harder for that purpose. Not only for this film, but all the others that I’ve made, including Heat and Sunlight, which went to Sundance, which certainly should have been seen far more than it was.
