John Sayles: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker John Sayles.


GUNS FOR SAYLES
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the April 1998 issue of Venice Magazine.

John Sayles is the United States' preeminent independent filmmaker in the truest sense of the word 'independent.' Since directing his first film Return of the Secaucus Seven in 1980, Sayles has raised all the money for his films from outside sources or from his own pocket. Born in 1950 in Schenetady, New York, Sayles studied psychology at Williams College during the turbulent late 1960's and early 70's. Following graduation, Sayles moved around the country, sometimes hitchhiking, working various odd jobs while pursuing his passion of writing. He began writing novels and short stories, which got the attention of Frances Doel at Roger Corman's New World Pictures. Sayles was hired to write the cult classic Jaws parody Piranha in 1978. He followed this with the gangster yarn The Lady in Red (1979) and the Star Wars-inspired Battle Beyond the Stars in 1980.

Armed with $60,000 he earned screenwriting, Sayles wrote, directed and produced Secaucus Seven, which won the Best Screenplay Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics. Sayles followed this with a string of audacious, ground-breaking independent features, each one of a different genre. There was Lianna in 1983, the story of a young woman's coming to terms with her homosexuality; Baby It's You, also from '83, about the ill-fated romance between a high school hood and a girl from the right side of the tracks; The Brother From Another Planet (1984), a sci-fi satire about a mute black alien who crash-lands in New York City; Matewan (1987), a riveting exposé of a West Virginia coal miners' strike in 1920; Eight Men Out (1988) based on Eliot Asinof's book about the 1919 "Black Sox" world series scandal; City of Hope (1990) the John Dos Passos-esque story of corruption in a fictional New Jersey city; the Oscar-nominated Passion Fish (1992), about a wheelchair-bound former actress and her nurse; The Secret of Roan Inish (1995), based on Rosalie Fry's children's book about a young Irish girl who discovers a link between Celtic legends and her family; 1996's Lone Star earned Sayles his second Oscar nomination in a tale of family skeletons in a tiny Texas border town.

Sayles makes his living writing and script doctoring (for no credit) screenplays for other people. Among his non-directorial credits are The Howling (1981), Breaking In (1989), and Alligator (1980). Recent script doctor duties were done on Apollo 13, among others. Sayles also has written for TV, creating the pilot for Shannon's Deal on NBC. He also directed three Bruce Springsteen videos from his "Born in the USA" album.

Sayles' latest film is one of his most intriguing, Men With Guns. Shot in three different states in Mexico and done entirely in Spanish (Sayles taught himself Spanish while researching his 1991 novel Los Gusanos, about Cuban expatriates in Miami), the focuses on a prominent physician (Federico Lupi) in an unnamed Latin American country, who goes out to find a group of his medical students that he has left at various clinics he's established in rural parts of the country. As he comes to learn of each of their individual fates, the doctor learns hidden secrets about his country, and himself.

Sayles, who has the unpretentious, casual appearance of a college professor crossed with a baseball coach, sat down recently in Santa Monica to discuss life as one of the last true independents in American film.

What were you like as a kid growing up in New York?
John Sayles: I was a jock, not an especially good one, but that's what I was into. Baseball, basketball, football. Mostly basketball. I went to the drive-in when I lived in the country, then later to theaters when I lived in the city. Watched a lot of television. Had insomnia (laughs), so I watched into all hours of the night. I read some books, but not as much as I watched television and movies.

So you fell in love with movies from an early age, it sounds like.
Yeah. Mostly when I was a kid I watched westerns, because they were in color and had horses going through water and people shooting each other, stuff like that. The black and white movie afterwards was almost always about the man in the gray flannel suit, and I didn't get it.

Do you remember what was the first film was that really did it for you?
Probably a cartoon, like Lady and the Tramp. I also remember seeing a trailer for a monster movie that scared the shit out of me. It was a giant locust movie, or something.

So the Corman influence started early then?
(laughs) Right. I loved monster movies. Mothra, Them, those kinds of things.

Why did you choose psychology as a major in college?
There wasn't even a drama major when I was there. I did do a little acting and directing my senior year in the theater, but I wasn't really a theater jock there, I was just a bad student, an all-around bad student! (laughs) Then I got into a summer stock theater company with some people there. I made a whopping $80 a week doing that for a couple summers, and did a lot of job-jobs: working in hospitals, factories. I was a meat packer for a while and got a union scale instead of an hourly wage, which was great. Then I started writing fiction and sending it out and was then able after a couple years to actually sell some short stories.

The first one you published was in The Atlantic Monthly, right?
Yeah, they had a series called The Atlantic Firsts, where you could publish your first short story. That won an O. Henry Award. They asked if I had any more stories. So I sent them a few that they'd already rejected, but different people had read them and they printed those as well...then I began to write novels and I got a literary agent. The agent had a contact in Hollywood, and they wanted to represent my book as a possible film property. I told him I didn't think it would make a very good movie, but what's the guy's phone number, because I'm interested in screenwriting...so I adapted Eliot Asinof's book Eight Men Out. The agent I met with turned out to be Asinof's agent when he wrote the book and he said "This'll never get made, but you did a great job." So they took me on and I moved to Santa Barbara. Within a few months I got the job to re-write Piranha for New World...I had always had a vague idea that I'd be able to write my way (into directing) like John Huston had, David Ward, who did The Sting, he got to direct, Walter Hill, Francis Coppola, Oliver Stone...and that just wasn't happening as quickly as I wanted it to. So I took the money that I'd made and did what, I guess Stanley Kubrick is the oldest example I can think of, who took money that he made doing something else and made a first film with it.

Let's back up a bit and talk about your Corman days.
Well I was only a writer, so I wasn't there around the studio a whole lot. The great thing was between Roger and Frances Doel, the story conferences were very compact and very specific. I never got these very vague directions like "We've got problems with the second act," or something like that. I did a lot of re-writes based on very specific notes. The other great thing about working there was that Roger only paid someone to write a script that he was going to make. There's not a lot of development of material that's not going to be produced. So I wrote three things that got produced in a very short order. I wrote very quickly, usually two or three drafts, that made Roger happy because he got to see something concrete right away. Then you'd get the director on board and I'd get a panicked phone call from the director, like Lewis Teague, who did The Lady in Red. "John, I've got $800,000 to shoot this movie in Los Angeles. You've written a period epic 130 pages long with 68 characters. Help!" (laughs)...So I'd simplify things and you learn a lot doing that, what certain costs are, and so on. And the other nice thing was I got to work with good people: Lewis Teague, Joe Dante, Frances Doel, who's a very good script supervisor. And Roger made a lot of movies as a producer or as a director and had very good story instincts, about the rhythms of a script, about when the next attack should come. Maybe here you should have a fake attack or here give the audience a little breather. He always talked about the rollercoaster effect, bringing them up really high before you bring them down.

And then you took your Corman earnings and did Secaucus Seven.
Right. Then I did another job for Roger (Battle Beyond the Stars) so I could get an editing machine to cut Secaucus Seven...We were all really naive about filmmaking at that point. We shot Secaucus Seven in TV ratio because we didn't think we'd get a theatrical release. Then it played at Filmex out here and got a distributor and had to blow it up. I got a couple offers to do screenplays out of that, but no directing offers. It's not like today where if you get that kind of buzz, you've got a three picture deal...With Lianna, I put a little money into it and the rest was raised as a public offering.

Tell us a little about how you raise money for an independent film.
Well, you read the script, and if it has any commercial potential that the studios might be interested in, you run it by the studios first and say here's who we think of having in it. Here's the story. We want final cut and we know that usually you don't do that, but it's not going to cost that much for you. And usually they say 'no.' Then if you think it has enough of a commercial upside that it merits a sort of platform release like Miramax does, you may run it by them. For a while when Larry Estes was at Columbia-TriStar home video, they were pre-financing things you could sell at home video presales, then with them go look for a theatrical distributor. Both Passion Fish and City of Hope were financed that way, with a $3 million video pre-sale. So it's been every way you can think of, really. With Roan Inish, I put in 1/3 of the money and a cable company in Denver put in the other 2/3.

I read that your budget on Men With Guns was only $2.3 million. That's pretty amazing considering the final product, which looks like a big-budget film.
Remember, that's a healthy budget for a Mexican film, but most Mexican films aren't this ambitious with locations. And we had a Mexican crew.

Are you influenced by John Dos Passos at all in your writing?
I've read U.S.A., but not anything else of his. I imagine, given my shaky literary background, since I wasn't an English major, I was probably influenced by people who were influenced by him, in that kind of mosaic kind of storytelling. Certainly my fiction is more like that than my films are...the writer's I've been most influenced by directly are Nelson Albren, John Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, James Farley, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain. I've read very little world literature...a variety. When I went to college I hadn't read that many books and didn't go to that many classes, but I did go to the library a lot. I started at the "A's" and by the time I graduated I was about to "M" or "N." (laughs) I skipped ahead and did some Twain, but a lot of the guys later on in the alphabet I'm not too versed in.

What was your feeling about people accusing The Big Chill of ripping off Secaucus Seven?
What I felt like was that it was much more thoughtful than the usual Hollywood movie. It certainly shared the same genre, or sub-genre, "the weekend movie," "the reunion movie." But I really didn't think they were that similar...I mean, generic things are generic things, but what you do and where you go with them are very different. So I felt like, okay Return of the Secaucus Seven is about a bunch of people trying to hold on to their idealism and, for the most part, doing it, in spite of the fact that...the world hasn't changed in the way they wanted it to. The Big Chill was called that for a reason. It was about a bunch of people who realized that they've lost their idealism, or never had it in the first place. They're both really about people who were probably at the same marches. The Big Chill people have that upwardly-mobile drive, the Secaucus Seven people have been very consciously downwardly-mobile. So it's like their pasts were the same, then it just went (snaps fingers) like that, you know? I found it really a very kind of cool, very different movie.

What do you think has happened to the characters from Secaucus Seven in the past 18 years?
The people that the characters are based on are still doing jobs that are socially involved. They haven't actually gone corporate. They've had children. They've had a lot of problems with children and a lot of problems with their relationships...If anything they're a little more radical because they don't have a mass movement to plug into. So they're frustrated with politics, but still active, more on a community level than a mass march level...One of the things that inspired me to make the film to begin with were all the articles in publications like Time and Newsweek saying how all the 60's radicals had sold out and gone to work for banks and corporations, which just wasn't my experience.

A lot of your films seem to take a very grass-roots viewpoint, that of the "common man," as opposed to the white upper middle class, which a lot of mainstream Hollywood films tend to do. What do you think this comes from?
I think it comes from the fact that I don't have a heroic view of the world. One of the kind of backbones of motion pictures is a heroic point of view. You have individuals put in extreme situations, and those individuals triumph, against the crowd, against nature, against the bad guys, whatever. If Hollywood is doing a historical epic, they say "Okay, now let's get something heroic for Tyrone Power to do, so he can triumph and save the French, or save the Spanish..."

Whereas you send in someone who's very ordinary-seeming, like Chris Cooper (Matewan, Lone Star).
Yeah, and he's also not very heroic. Like in Matewan, he's a pacifist. And there's a good question in the end whether his pacifism, which certainly didn't do him much good, is possible in that situation. And there's even some question whether it's desirable in that situation. The heroic mode would be to say "Well, the mining company men are the bad guys and I used to be a pretty good shot and a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do..." and he takes the guns off the wall, says "I'm not a pacifist anymore," and he shoots the bad guys.

How did you hear about what went on in Matewan, West Virginia in 1920? That was a chapter of American history that was unknown to me until that film came out.
I had hitchhiked through the country a couple times. Going through Kentucky and West Virginia in the late 60's, there was a very violent competition between who was going to win the next United Mine Workers Presidency...eventually the one guy and his family were murdered by the other guy's people. I would get picked up by miner's on both sides and they'd say "Well, it's pretty bad right now...We're just hopin' it doesn't end in another Matewan massacre." Then they'd tell me the stories...I did some book research after that about that whole era. It seemed like a perfect historical story that epitomized America's labor history...nowadays manufacturing has really become international, so you really can't talk about the American labor movement anymore. They've just been busted by industry's tendency to say "Well, we'll just make it somewhere else, even if the raw material does come from here." I'd say the next chapter in labor history is going to be international.

It's evident from these last two films (Lone Star, Men With Guns) and your book Los Gusanos, that you're very interested in Latin culture. How did this come about?
It started when I was a kid and my mother's parents lived in Miami and I kept going down there every year before, during and after the Cuban revolution and saw the exile community growing...more and more in different places that I lived, my neighbors spoke Spanish and I got into it not only to find out, who are they? How do they think? How come they're here? I got into, which of them here are new and which of them have always been here? So really I think it's an admission by the United States that this has always been a part of our culture. And the United States as we know it, that territory, had a lot of languages that were native to it. Spanish was one of the main ones of the southeast and the southwest. Then that got kind of pushed back after the Mexican war and now with integration it's becoming more a part of the culture again. So do we recognize that? Do we punish it? What do we do with it? Certainly I don't see it as being interested in the exotic...I'm always interested in saying "How inclusive can you make us?" If you're in a city and it's a multi-ethnic city, where do you draw the line and say "us and them"? Los Angeles, for example, is one of the most segregated cities in the United States. How do you break through that and say "This city is about us and if anybody in this city isn't doing well, it's our problem. It's not 'their' problem."

That's what City of Hope was about.
Absolutely. It was interesting, coming here (in 1990) talking about City of Hope. We did a panel discussion with the pro-police and the anti-police and city councilmen, poverty workers...and it was very clear that most of them just viewed one small neighborhood as being Los Angeles, and the rest of it was just some other place.

Another theme I see in a lot of your films is people searching for home.
A community, I think. The United States, the culture that we know, is really not a traditional culture. It's fairly rare nowadays for someone to do what their grandfather did or even live where their grandfather lived. But when you don't have a traditional culture and you have a restless, mobile culture, the idea of community becomes something very different. It's not a geographical community anymore, it's a community of people who're into stock car racing, or Miss America contests, or into cyberpunk, or into a certain religion...these communities aren't linked by living together, but by a similar way of thinking about the world...so I think that many people are really hungry for a sense of community and at a certain point in their life, sort of grab onto anything there is, whether it's a Nazi hate group or something more positive.

Where do you see the assimilation in this country going? Will we ever find home?
Well, I think that it goes very, very slowly. If you look at where media was, say twenty years ago, when there were almost no black filmmakers, and most minorities had just a small chance to even get into the conversation, or into the business world...so that little wedge, talented people are going to fill that wedge. Same thing for the Hispanic community. But it takes a long, long time. And certainly there is that kind of Pat Buchanan backlash of "Let's forget all that multi-cultural stuff. I'm fighting a holy war here for my values, which don't include those people!" So there's going to be a lot of conflicts. But I think the important thing is if you're really serious about this American dream shit, about this democratic country shit, you have to include as many people as possible in the weave.

What's next on your slate?
We're going to be making a movie this summer up in Alaska that's based on a script I've written called Limbo. And it's a very strange story...(laughs) It's hard to describe, but the main characters are a commercial fisherman who hasn't been back to sea in 25 years because he had a couple guys drown on his boat. He hooked up with a woman who's a lounge singer who's a lot more positive and optimistic than she should be, considering what her life has been like, and she has a daughter that has psychological problems. They attempt to form this kind of new family, with all this baggage that they carry into it. It's going to star Vanessa Martinez, who was in Lone Star and Elizabeth Peña, David Strathairn, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.

Do you rehearse a lot?
Not a lot. The only rehearsal we really do is on the set when we're setting up the lighting. I think there's two ways to do that: rehearse the hell out of it and get to a certain point where you're doing different versions of a performance that's been very thought out, or have the actors really know who they are and what they're doing and then have that sort of shock of discovery on camera. So I prefer to end up using one of the first three takes...I write a biography of all the characters for the actors, as well. It gives them their backstory, what the relationships are that maybe aren't spelled out in the script. We'll talk about those things a lot together before we get onto the set, so that by the time we're on the set, it's really just the logistics and the blocking. If I have a certain technical idea of what I want to do, I don't burden the actors with that. I try to give them something physical to do that will put them in the places that I need them to be.

Any advice for first-time directors?
I think the main thing is if you haven't worked with actors a lot, really try to think as though you're that actor. How would you want to spend your energy during this day of shooting? What I find is that often first time directors have a bunch of shots in their head and they, just because it's convenient for the day, start in the wide shot and do eight takes of the wide shot, which might be an emotional scene, and they go until they have a perfect take...and then they're gonna cut back to the wide shot and the actors are emotionally spent from having done that scene, and you're not even into a two-shot yet! Think about "Where are my actors going to have to do their most emotional stuff? Where would I like the camera to be when that first moment of recognition, that first moment of tension happens?" Because that may be your best stuff, that first time they say those words to each other. Also, you've got to scope your actors out very quickly. Ask them, and they may all work differently. Some may need a little rehearsal, a little warming up. That handicapping of actors and how they work is really crucial. Also it's good, if you can avoid it, to not leave the set...so if your crew has any questions or things they want to do a certain way, it won't be a surprise to you after you've come back from your trailer and start to shoot. If I'm there, I find that the lighting and the rest of the technical stuff goes much quicker. Try not to waste the crew's time, just like you try not to waste the actors'.