Independent. The word echoes through the American mythos with a clatter of cowboy boots. “Independent filmmaker” carries the same smack of feisty, lone-wolf autonomy. But John Sayles, who writes, directs, edits, and frequently acts in his work, never claims an above-the-title credit (“A John Sayles film”); in conversation, he invariably uses the first-person plural: our film. Call him an interdependent filmmaker.
Since 1980, Sayles and his producer partner Maggie Renzi have made 16 films, starting with the shoestring-budget Return of the Secaucus 7. He’s supported his indie habit with Hollywood rewrites ranging from quirky B-movies (Piranha, The Howling) to blockbusters like Apollo 13 and The Mummy franchise; he’s also directed videos for Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” “I’m on Fire,” and “Glory Days.”
Between movie gigs, he’s published three novels and two story collections, most recently Dillinger in Hollywood. Like a latter-day Woody Guthrie, Sayles spins populist tales that crisscross the continent, from Alaska (Limbo) to Florida (Sunshine State), with pit stops in the Rockies (Silver City), Chicago (Eight Men Out), New Jersey (City of Hope), Cajun country (Passion Fish), Texas (Lone Star), and Latin America (Men with Guns, Casa de los Babys). He’s written about striking coal miners, Cuban immigrants, lesbian midwives, and alien slaves. Talking to him, it would seem that the only story he’d rather not tell is his own.
Affable and verbose, Sayles can shrug his way out of a personal question in seconds. Ask him about growing up in Schenectady, and after a nod to Proctor’s Theatre, he’s off on a tangent about Guyanese politics. Ask what background information he’d give to an actor who had to play him in a movie, and he’ll tell you about the character bio he wrote for Joe Morton in City of Hope.
Sayles has agreed to meet at Rhinebeck’s Upstate Films, where he’s screened nearly all his movies, often appearing at benefit screenings. He and Renzi have lived in a quiet corner of Duchess County since 1992. “We wanted a place in the country, not the suburbs,” he says. Writer Akiko Busch, a longtime friend who grew up in the area, introduced them to a realtor; they bought the first farmhouse they saw.
Sayles is an imposing man, six-foot-four, with the burly arms of an ex-jock and thick, mobile eyebrows. His manner is friendly, but far from relaxed. He gives an impression of restless vitality, of someone who needs to be working to know who he is. After a photo session in the theater, he stays on his feet, pacing constantly as he discusses his work. Only when we relocate to nearby Bread Alone does he settle reluctantly into a chair. He even answers a question or two about being John Sayles.
The Schenectady of his youth was a “multiethnic, multiclass place, a real cross-section of America.” His dad was a school administrator; in high school, Sayles played football, baseball, and basketball. He also wrote stories for fun. “As a kid, I thought books came from someplace like Battle Creek, Michigan, where you sent away box tops for things. I didn’t know there were professional writers who got paid for it. Writing was just something you did, like watching TV.”
At Williams College, he began writing more seriously. He also started acting, appearing in “Of Mice and Men” with fellow students David Strathairn, Gordon Clapp, and Adam LeFevre, all of whom would eventually act in his movies.
After college, Sayles did summer stock theater and honed his blue-collar street cred by working in factories and as an orderly at an Albany nursing home. “I was a great orderly, the Paul Bunyan of orderlies,” he reports. He also sent stories to magazines, including obscure literary quarterlies he found in the back of Best Short Stories anthologies. “I started getting rejection slips like, ‘Ararat publishes Armenian fiction. There are no Armenians in your story.” He hung them on the wall of his Boston apartment. “A handwritten ‘sorry’ was a big deal,” he recalls.
An upstairs neighbor flooded the building, destroying Sayles’s only copy of a 75-page story he’d submitted to the Atlantic. He called up the magazine. Editor Peggy Yntema suggested he cut his “novella” in half or expand it into a novel (“I recommend you put a plot in it,” he remembers her saying). But she liked his writing enough to ask for more stories. He sent two, and the Atlantic published both.
Meanwhile, he was laid off from his day job at a sausage factory. “So I got my first grant for the arts: Unemployment.” He nailed a board across the warmest corner of his kitchen to use as a desk, and set to work expanding Pride of the Bimbos into a novel. Atlantic bought it for $2,500, “which seemed like a huge sum at the time.”
Sayles’s next novel Union Dues got him an agent, who opened the door to screenwriting gigs. He and Renzi moved to California, where he churned out three screenplays for B-movie maven Roger Corman. All three were made, and Sayles got to watch directors like Joe Dante and Lewis Teague on the set.
In Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie Matewan, he writes, “One of the main ways that storytelling on film differs from writing fiction is that the choices you make are extremely practical as well as aesthetic and intuitive. I’ve never had to change a line of fiction because the sun was or wasn’t out, because heavy machinery was operating in the neighborhood or union meal penalty started in five minutes.”
For the next two decades, Sayles was a mainstay of the indie film scene, making film after film without compromising his inclusive vision. But the industry’s climate has changed to the point where he’s finding it nearly impossible to make movies and get them seen.
“The average Hollywood film spends a third of its budget on advertising. It can be $30 million or more, $20 million on the opening weekend—that’s what you’re competing with,” he says. “Word-of-mouth movies can’t live on one weekend.”
In this bottom-line era, a distinguished track record won’t float the boat; though Lone Star and other Sayles/Renzi films did respectably, none was the requisite breakaway hit. And though younger filmmakers are flourishing in a new world of low-cost equipment and YouTube promotion, Sayles points out that such DIY tactics can’t recoup the expenses of using professional actors and crews, since the Internet isn’t monetized. The hope is to gain visibility, like a rock band launching a demo CD. But as he puts it bluntly, “We’re not new. They can’t discover us.”
For the first time in years, Sayles and Renzi don’t have their next project lined up. “I don’t know that we’re going to make another movie,” he says. “I just don’t know.” Many of the production companies that used to fund smaller projects have folded, and there are only so many corners filmmakers can cut.
“I can’t shoot fewer weeks. We did Casa de los Babys and Honeydripper in four weeks apiece,” Sayles says. He’s gratified that A-list actors routinely accept union minimum wage to appear in his scripts, but he wound up draining his own bank account to produce Silver City, a 2004 political drama in which Chris Cooper out-Bushes George Bush. He wrote more studio screenplays to pay for the blues fable Honeydripper, starring Danny Glover and a transcendent Keb’ Mo’. Unable to find a distributor, he and Renzi hand-carried the film to 35 cities and 8 countries. “I wrote a lot of my novel on delayed flights,” Sayles says, searching for some silver lining.
Some Time in the Sun is a sprawling historical epic set at the turn of the twentieth century. Sayles describes it as “a mosaic. Different chapters are written from different mindsets, so they’re in different styles. I have guys who are illiterate, Filipinos, African Americans, white guys. Mark Twain shows up, and Damon Runyon.” But the publishing industry is heading the same way as film, with everything between “hot discovery” and “proven blockbuster” teetering on the endangered-species list. Some Time in the Sun has been out for six months with no offers—”at least not from anyone who’s kept their job,” Sayles says, adding mordantly, “I’m too old to write fiction as a hobby.”
Without a new novel or indie film in the works, what will he do with his prodigious creative drive? It’s hard to imagine him being fulfilled by Hollywood work-for-hire. Tonight’s homework, he says, will be watching Transformers to prepare for a story pitch, since the current hot genre is toy-market tie-ins. “Hot Wheels will be a movie. Barbie will be a movie.”
Maybe so, but do they need a script by John Sayles? He shrugs. “It’s a job. It uses some of the same muscles as doing your own writing.” Sayles won’t write storylines he finds offensive, but he’s worked on projects that have racked up enough script doctors to turn them into Frankenstein’s monsters.
Hearing him speak, it’s hard not to picture some grizzled gunslinger, or maybe the cynical samurai played by Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo. He’s taking the work he can get, but you can’t help sensing he’s biding his time, and that under that crusty exterior the old fire’s still smoldering, ready to put up one hell of a fight.
If money wasn’t an obstacle, is there a movie he’d like to make next? John Sayles doesn’t hesitate. “Dozens,” he says with a welcome smile.
This article appears in March 2009.
