Interview with Charles Richard

1.  Motivation for the story:  I started out with the desire to tell a simple story about efforts to preserve Louisiana’s boat building traditions and the unique way of life they point to. It was supposed to be just a modest movie about an 84-year-old Cajun craftsman, living in the Atchafalaya Basin swamp, teaching his three sons how to build boats the ways their ancestors did. But things changed when we began to appreciate the significance of exactly how he builds these boats:  he doesn’t use any blueprints or plans or pre-recorded measurements. Instead, our old boat builder creates an incredibly sophisticated, 3-D visualization of the boat in his imagination, and then just builds what he sees in his mind’s eye. That’s an unusual ability these days. So in the course of researching that “simple story,” we found ourselves facing much bigger, intriguing questions. Questions about the value of traditional knowledge and skills; about how memory and imagination work; about how the brain functions to create complex images in the minds of creative people like artists and engineers. And, ultimately, questions about the nature of creativity itself. What we learned is that you can find the answers to all those questions in one of the most unlikely places on earth: the swamps of French Louisiana.

2.  Things misunderstood about Louisiana. I was at the Cannes Film Festival in France this year, and people were surprisingly curious about Louisiana. There were people from all over the US and much of the rest of the world there at Cannes, and they all seemed to have their own ideas about what Louisiana is like. That’s based on what they’ve seen in movies, tv, books, and so forth. Few places in America have been represented in the media as much as Louisiana, and yet it remains one of the most poorly understood. It’s true that French Louisiana is unlike anywhere else in this country; in many ways, it’s very exotic, and there is a well-deserved mystique about the place. But there are also some towering misconceptions, and particularly about the Cajuns and Creole peoples. I think there’s a common perception that Cajuns and Creoles (and I’m one of them) are ignorant, uneducated, semi-savage; that we are drunken hedonists who live in squalor, and like it that way. We Acadians (a term we much prefer to the American slang word “Cajun”) have been in North America since before the Pilgrims, before Plymouth Rock. That’s about 400 years. So who’s more “American” than that? At the same time, we maintain a cultural continuity that can be traced all the way back to medieval France. That’s what unifies us. But we’re also a very diverse people. Some are educated, some are not. Some are rich, some are poor. Some do indeed hunt alligators and live the life of “swamp people.” Others are renown scholars and artists. If we accomplish nothing else with our film ‘In the Mind of the Maker,’we want to show that a defining characteristic of the Acadian people is creativity. And I think that this is something that might really challenge the perceptions of a lot of people who only know us from popular media.