‘Dark Winds’ Season 2: Director Chris Eyre Talks Classic Cinema Influences, Ahead of Finale (Exclusive)

Dark Winds Season 2 comes to a thrilling conclusion on Sunday night, with a tense and thrilling finale that fans will be talking about. Ahead of the big episode, PopCulture.com had a chance to speak with Dark Winds executive producer and director Chris Eyre. During the conversation, Eyre shared how he and the show’s creative approached the new “Native Noir” series and revealed some of the classic cinema influences they drew from for Season 2.

This season on Dark Winds, we find that Lt. Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon), Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon), and Sgt. Manuelito (Jesica Matten) are somewhat disconnected after the events of Season 1. While Leaphorn and Manuelito are still working for Valencia County Sheriff Gordo Sena (A Martinez), Chee has left the force to work as a private investigator. However, the trio reunites as their “separate cases bring them together in pursuit of the same suspect,” per an official Season 2 synopsis.

“There were so many things that we learned in season one, and I feel like we’ve got the show on its feet, and then I feel like if we get a third season, we’re really going to hit a new stride,” Eyre said of the Dark Winds leaving much more into a detective noir tone in Season 2. “I feel like we’re in a gallop right now. We’re in a gallop and I’m waiting for it to break open into a stride there, and then a sprint hopefully after that. But it’s going really well and it’s going well because of the love of it. I think Zahn loves it, Kiowa, Jessica, John Wirth, the whole team.”

Praising the locations they’ve ben able to film around, Eyre added, “I was watching some of it the other night, and the Southwest just lends itself to the beautiful atmosphere of the show. So I think we learned a lot from season one, and that was you take the Southwest beauty, which is hard to miss, you take the culture, which is very intriguing, you take the cop drama, which is meat and potatoes, and then you take this film noir, and we called it ‘Navajo Noir.’ We coined ‘Navajo Noir.’”

Pointing to some notable films that inspired them, Eryre first name-dropped The Maltese Falcon and Touch of Evil. “It’s really the detective milieu of, okay, the rich blacks and the Rembrandt fall off and shadows and obscure camera, and we leaned into that,” he explained. “We really did talk about it, the DP and the directors and the producers and so on. We kind of went that direction the first season, but the second season we really doubled down on that aesthetic and that milieu.”

Eyre went on to say that he’s glad to hear fans are really liking the new season — it currently has a 100 percent Critics Score and 90 percent Audience score on Rotten Tomatoes — because he’s a fan of it himself. “It’s mixing these things, which we’re all familiar with, but to see a Western noir, Navajo cultural, southwestern cop drama is really cool because we know these parts and we’re familiar with the hero’s journey, which Zahn is the moral compass of, and these characters and the family drama, the western. We have all these elements together and you put them together in this mix and you’re like, ‘That’s a pretty good ambrosia.’”

Elaborating more on the iconic movies that he and the other creatives were inspired by, Eyre said, “It’s interesting because… you do things like you look at old movies and when you look at movies like The Searchers or Unforgiven, even The Wild Bunch, they’re presented very matter-of-ffact. Cinema is very, very matter-of-fact, even Hitchcock. Basically, there’s an elk of that, which is we present the frames as is, and then you cant them to the noir. So they’re presented as is and then they’re obscured with a lower angle and a darker room, but it’s the melding of those two things in a very subtle way.

Finally, we asked Eyre about the approach the show takes to helming the individual episodes, which for the first two seasons has been Eyre handling the beginning and ending episodes, while other filmmakers handle the middle of the story. “I think the process is, and I mean this, I’m learning all the time, and what Michael Nankin did in the middle, episode 203, 204, was awesome. What Billy Luther did — who’s a Navajo director — in 205 is awesome. Then I’m coming back, and Zahn making choices about how his character would wrap up the season.”

He added, “I come to the end of it and emotionally it’s a lot of great content. So basically, I’m a receptacle, which I’m learning about the show like everybody is, but we love it. We’re loving it and learning from it, and like I said, I think it still hasn’t hit its stride, and I think if we get more seasons, it’ll get even better.” Dark Winds Season 2 finale is now available to stream on AMC+, and airs Sunday night, Sept. 3, at 9pm ET, on AMC.