Yahoo News ‘Dark Winds’ Embraces ‘Navajo Noir’ in Season 2
Even fans of “Dark Winds” might be startled by the stylized opening of the show’s second season. Granted, AMC’s crime drama, about mysterious incidents on a Navajo reservation in the early 1970s, has always trafficked in bold cinematic gestures. When we meet tribal police officer Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) in the series premiere, he’s explicitly framed as a white-hatted hero from a classic Western, and as he tracks down murderers and thieves, the mythic cinematic images just keep coming. In Season 1, those moments might slip past casual viewers. In Season 2, they’re impossible to miss.
Take the new season’s very first scene. It’s almost entirely in black and white, and more specifically, it uses the vibrant, eerie black-and-white imagery created by an effect called a bleach bypass. This makes Leaphorn and his partner seem almost dreamlike as they move through the desert until they come to a trailer with yellow light streaming through the windows. The colorized element announces there’s something powerful in the modest mobile home, and that message is only strengthened once the officers go inside. As their flashlights scan the room, certain objects pop with color: a tangle of blue wires, the brown ticker on a metronome, the orange hair on a clown doll. It’s a disorienting flourish that climaxes when the villainous Colton Wolf fires bullets at the trailer, his face lit by the yellow explosions of his machine gun.
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“That scene is important because it tells you we’ve grabbed onto the film noir aspect and pushed it even farther,” said Chris Eyre, an executive producer and director of the season premiere. “We wanted you to know from the beginning that we’re really going after the crime and the mystery and the suspense.”
The colorized bits are key to the noir approach. “Zeroing in on them creates clues about the season-long mystery,” Eyre said. “When you suddenly see that blue wire, you can say, ‘OK, this blue wire is important. I need to pay attention. It’s going to come back around.’ It’s a way to make you trust us.”
But for all that planning, some of the show’s most potent noir elements emerged by surprise. The entire season was originally conceived in color, but when showrunner John Wirth and producer Peter Chomsky saw a scene of Colton Wolf cooking an elaborate meal, they thought it would be more impactful in black and white. That was no problem for Paul Elliott, the director of photography on “Dark Winds.” “The director of that episode, Michael Nankin, had already shown me a clip of a film noir movie [for inspiration],” he recalled. “I had already lit it so that you see the character’s eyes and the rest of his face is in shadow, like in a noir film. And then we found that by putting that in black and white [in the editing process], the scene took on a different mood. They actually showed it to Dan McDermott, [President, Entertainment and AMC Studios], and he loved it. He wondered if there were any other sequences that could benefit from that technique.”
Similarly, when Elliott was lensing the season-opening scene, he noticed Nicholas Logan, who plays Colton Wolf, cast an enormous shadow on the trailer while firing his gun. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, we have to use that,'” he said. “It was one of those great accidents.”
It takes a clear understanding of a show’s purpose to recognize which accidents are beneficial. Like Eyre, Elliott focused on crafting the right visual language for a story that’s set in the vast Navajo territory. “The buzzword we started using was ‘Navajo Noir,'” he said. “One commonly thinks of noir in wet streets at nighttime, with period cars and shadows from the buildings, but we don’t have that. In that opening scene, we were basically recreating moonlight because there are no other light sources in the desert. We put an 80-foot crane with lights on top of a hill because when Colton is firing his machine gun; I wanted to make sure we could see the beautiful landscape behind the trailer. Otherwise, you don’t get a sense of the landscape at all. It’s just a trailer surrounded by blackness.”
That wouldn’t have worked, he added, because the landscape is so integral to this particular story. “We’re stressing how many thousands of acres these Navajo detectives have to cover. They’re a long way from anywhere, searching for this trailer. We have to set up the mystery and the tension with that in mind.”
Season 2 of “Dark Winds” premieres Thursday, July 27, on AMC+ and airs at 9 p.m. ET on Sunday, July 30, on AMC. New episodes premiere Thursdays on AMC+, then air the following Sunday on AMC.
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