Independent, not Bush-league:
A conversation with John Sayles
October 19, 2004
Charles Demers

For over twenty years, writer-director-editor John Sayles has been one of the most effective and lucid storytellers in American cinema. Notoriously and brilliantly independent, Sayles’s filmography encompasses many of the great sleeper classics of the past two decades – The Brother from Another Planet (1984), Matewan (1987), Eight Men Out (1988), City of Hope (1991), Lonestar (1996), and Sunshine State (2002), to name just a small selection of his work. Having just published a book of short stories, Dillinger in Hollywood (read last week’s review), and in the wake of the theatrical release of the spot-on anti-Bush piece Silver City (featuring Oscar-winner Chris Cooper’s already famous interpretation of a suspiciously Dubya-esque gubernatorial candidate), Sayles was kind enough to speak with our own resident Sayles fanboy, Charles Demers.

Seven Oaks: Thanks again for doing this. Although I guess I should have known from Silver City that you have a place in your heart for small, left-wing websites.

Sayles: [laughs] Sure.

SO: You’re doing a lot of press right now for a book of screenplays that’s been published, a book of short stories, the film – is it a nice distraction from the campaign, or would you rather be watching every minute of the train wreck?

Sayles: Well, you know, I can only stand to watch so much of things like the debates. And to tape them, and then watch as long as I can, and fast forward through it, then trying to watch a little bit more. You know, politics is – One of the reasons I think our voting percentages are so bad in the United States is they’re so disappointing. You know, they’re important, and it’s important that people try to take control of their lives and their country and stuff like that, but they’re pretty discouraging. You’re so often going into the ballot booth voting for the least of two evils, or somebody you really don’t care that much about, just because you dislike the other person even worse.

SO: Is Silver City your contribution to the campaign, to the election?

Sayles: At the time when we started to make it, the political conversation in the United States was kind of non-existent. There was a lot of tension and intimidation against anybody being critical of what was going on, and a lot of [Silver City] came out of just my feelings about what’s happened to the mainstream media in the last 10 or 15 years. That the combination of intimidation and the fact that the mainstream media is owned by corporations who are looking at the bottom line, and who are a lot more worried about their numbers than telling the truth. It has meant that nobody can rely on the mainstream media to have any idea of what’s going on anymore. I mean, when the Gulf War started, you know, the Iraqi war started, I had to watch the BBC. There just was nothing on American television that was telling you anything about what was going on.

SO: And this does seem to be a trend in North America generally, not only companies looking at the bottom line, but actually having stated ideological preferences. Fox News in the States…

Sayles: Yeah, I mean that’s – although they call it fair and balanced – I don’t think they care; everybody knows where they stand. It’s not like they’re trying to sneak it in. It’s basically been about a ten-year campaign for the right-wing by Fox News, or however long it’s lasted. But there are other ideological things that are unstated, you know, ideological biases that -- if you look at the guest lists of mainstream news, who’s asked questions, it’s a pretty small and ideologically-driven group of people who are considered experts, or valuable commentators, and whose voices should be heard. And that was a lot of the reason for trying to get Silver City or anything like it into the conversation.

SO: A lot of people are billing Silver City somewhat narrowly as an anti-Bush tract, but it seems to me that it also functions as a more sweeping indictment of the deregulation and privatization that really came en vogue under Clinton.

Sayles: Well yeah. For instance, the NAFTA treaty -- which was conceived by George Bush and people who worked for him, who immediately after they made the document and he was voted out of office, they went to work as lawyers exploiting it – was pushed through by Clinton. And it’s something the Democrats and Republicans are both at the trough profiting from, or their buddies are. I think that I didn’t want it to be so general that you could not draw lines between what’s going on in the country now -- the Bush administration who are the most egregious example of it – but certainly there’s bigger issues involved. The main one being: Are our politicians at all representing the American voter or are they really just representing the corporations that put them into power? And, what’s the role of the so-called free press in the middle of that? Are they just another game that’s being run on people, and if you do try to tell the truth at all, are you going to be marginalized to the point that the Tim Roth character is? It’s an interesting evolution, it used to be people were called ‘reporters.’ And then they came up with this idea of the ‘investigative journalist.’ And I always thought, ‘That’s what reporters do. [laughs] They find out what’s going on and they tell you about it.’

And then under Reagan – the line that Billy Zane has in the movie where he says “We used to have this phrase on the wall: ‘Don’t tell us how to stage the news and we won’t tell you how to report it’” – well that was on the wall in the press shack during the Reagan White House. And they started this campaign of calling people who questioned what they said “advocacy journalists,” and their right-wing foundation supporters would immediately have fifty thousand people write in to a newspaper if they didn’t like how it was reported, or fifty thousand people phone in to a TV network, and so those editors started getting intimidated. And I think that happened right about the same time that the corporations that run the networks started looking at the bottom line and saying ‘Well, real news is not only expensive, it doesn’t rate as well as this kind of confrontational sound byte news, which may not have a whole lot to do with what’s really going on, but seems to be more popular on so let’s go with that.

SO: You mentioned this thing about the Billy Zane character’s line – this is the great myth about John Sayles movies, that they’re fictional, but often the most frightening parts of the movie are taken right from real life. I mean, I saw Silver City just before this story about James Baker and the Carlyle Group broke – about this major kickback in the Iraq contracts, and the handling of the debt with Kuwait. That seems like something that could have been straight out of the picture.

Sayles: Yeah, I mean for instance 14 miles from Denver is a place called Rocky Flats, and the scene in the movie where Chris Cooper and Kris Kristofferson ride horses and talk we shot right across the highway from Rocky Flats. We used to make triggers for nuclear weapons at Rocky Flats and the people who were doing it were so sloppy in handling the radioactive materials, and so outrageous in covering up their incompetence, that the federal government raided their own installation, and shut it down, and for the past 25 years have been not doing an especially good job of trying to clean it up. But it’s now, of course, listed as a “nature preserve.” You can’t exaggerate too much, when you talk about this kind of Orwellian use of language; of allowing more emissions into the air and calling it the “Blue Skies Initiave.”

SO: One of the other stories that the film talks about is an increasingly important segment of American society who officially have no voice, which is the growing numbers of migrant labourers. You depict in the film the kind of terror regime that these people are living under.

Sayles: Well, it’s a long story -- and it takes place in Europe, and it takes place in Canada, and it takes place in the United States – which is this kind of internal outsourcing. Which is, as native workers start to have standards and say that ‘We won’t work for this little money,’ or ‘We won’t work under these conditions,’ the government is basically petitioned to say ‘Let’s let in a few people [who] will be willing to work under these conditions and for this much money.’ And in the case of the United States, because we have this policy on the border, and we’re supposed to be worried about terrorists and all this, it leads to this enormous hypocrisy of chasing people out into the desert, but understanding – and it’s a very, very implicit understanding -- that a high percentage of people are going to get through. And they’re going to find work in the United States, and we’re not going to raid the construction sites, we’re not going to raid the restaurants, and find the people who hired these people who aren’t citizens.

So it’s a method of wage control, and it’s one that the government is in a conspiracy with. One of the things that I try to do in Silver City is deal with this fact that people are given things as if they’re natural phenomena, like gravity. And it’s something like ‘Well, the minimum wage did not go up this year.’ Well, the minimum wage did not do anything. It’s not an active thing. The minimum wage didn’t go up because the people who want it low and want wages low are more powerful than the people who want a decent living. And it’s a struggle. And you can draw lines between the people who campaign to keep it low, and lobbied senators, and all that kind of stuff so if a vote even came up about it, it was voted down once again. But it’s not a natural phenomenon.

SO: You’ve long been a hero of the do-it-yourself, independent film crowd. Do you see the advent of digital technology as opening up possibilities for broader, more democratic participation?

Sayles: Yeah, I think it does. Finally, I don’t aesthetically particularly like video, but if that’s the only way to do it, do it. I shot my first two movies in 16mm, I shot my last two movies in Super 16, partly ‘cause I couldn’t afford to do 35. Someday, I’ll probably end up making a video movie and it probably won’t be because I like the look of it. Because I couldn’t raise enough money to use even Super 16. So yeah, it is democratizing – that doesn’t mean that the movies are necessarily going to be any good. But some of them might be, and if that’s the way they got made, that’s terrific. I do think there is one procedural problem that video brings up, which is that is allows and encourages a filmmaker not to make their decisions earlier. Because the video costs nothing, because you can erase it and tape over it, because you can have three, four, five cameras and just be pretty lazy about making your choices earlier on. What I hear from my editor friends is that they keep getting dumped 300 hours worth of footage, and given six weeks to edit it together, when it takes about six weeks just to watch that much footage. And the director has just made no decisions yet.

SO: I read you saying that editing was your true love, and that you write and direct these movies to get into the editing booth.

Sayles: Well editing is really where you’re doing the final draft of the storytelling. I like directing, and I like writing, but writing is always, for me, so speculative. You know, I’ve written things I’ve never gotten to make. And you can feel like a real jerk, like ‘Who am I kidding that I’m going to ever get to make this movie?’ When you’re directing, it’s fun, and the collaboration is fun and it’s very energizing and everything, but you’re always fighting time and money. You’re always making compromises. Even while I’m shooting something, I usually know there’s a better way to do it, or a way that I would prefer to do it, but we can’t afford it – we don’t have the time or money to do it. So when you’re editing, it doesn’t matter if the sun’s out or not. You don’t even know if it’s out or not. And some of the time pressure is off, you know you’re going to make the movie at this point, you know you’re not going to run out of money, so the pressure of production is off. But you’re still making the movie, and in fact you’re making the last draft of it. You’re making the final thing, and you’re putting the rhythm onto it. Silver City, the first two thirds of the movie, there’s probably not anything except for the very first scene that’s in the same order that it was written. So without losing scenes, I did quite a bit of re-writing in the editing process. And it’s about rhythm, and how you release information to the audience, and keep them wondering what’s going to happen next.

SO: The short stories that you recently released were published covering the time span that most of us came to know you as a writer-director. If we’re paying attention, will we be able to see the kinds of effects that the filmmaking has had on your storytelling in the short stories?

Sayles: Well, there is, I don’t think, a stylistic effect. The last story in the collection, “Above the Line,” takes place on a film set, and it’s kind of a ‘film-set-as-society-and-workplace,’ and I certainly couldn’t have written that before I’d been on a film set or on many film sets both as an actor and as a director. But I don’t think it’s actually – I think my style of writing changes from story to story, very purposely. And so I try and find the style that goes with that world that I’m writing about, and the rhythm of those people that I’m writing about, and that was true of Anarchist’s Convention, my first short stories collection, and my novels before I ever got to make a movie. And to a certain extent, I try to make it true of the movies that I make, and it may even be that different characters have different rhythms and styles within a movie. Because I’ve often done movies where there are two protagonists that don’t necessarily share the screen time. In Sunshine State, Angela Basset and Edie Falco are on screen for 10 seconds together. And in Lonestar, Chris Cooper and Joe Morton never meet. And there’s a slightly different style to their scenes, and that’s in the same movie.

SO: I wanted to ask you about purpose in your storytelling, because your last two films before Silver City really revolve mostly around women’s stories, and the short stories in Dillinger in Hollywood that I thought were the strongest all seem to revolve around the stories of women as well. A lot of male writers have a real problem writing for women – do you make a special effort in that?

Sayles: No, it’s just who’s in the world. It’s just who you run into, and who you’re interested in. So it’s not something I’m actually that conscious of. I might be a little more conscious of it when I’m writing movies. One thing you know is that if you have good parts for women over thirty, or good parts for African-Americans or Hispanic-Americans, you’re probably going to get really good actors to do it, because they’re under-employed, and they’re going to be willing to work for scale. It’s just the sad fact. And it’s probably going to be easier to get an actress of a certain status to work for scale if they’re over thirty than an actor of a certain status, because it’s just so rare that they have anything interesting to do. But that’s just a practical thing, it doesn’t actually affect the writing that much. I write about who I’m interested in, and who’s out in the world, and to a certain extent, you just have to be aware of what are the dynamics of these people coming together. So one of the things I dealt with in Casa De Los Babys, both the story and the movie, is that the dynamic between a group of women with no men present is very, very different than the dynamic of a group of women if one or two men are present, or if it’s fifty-fifty. And the same thing with a bunch of guys. It’s why the jocks were so upset when they started letting women reporters into the locker room. It’s not that they don’t like women or aren’t interested in women or anything, it’s just they didn’t know how they should act, because it totally changed the tone of – and then eventually, they just decided ‘Well, fuck it… they have to live with us, we’re the jocks.’ And so they stopped acting different.

SO: Well maybe one of the most obvious examples of what you’re talking about in terms of behavioural changes is “The Halfway Diner,” that story about these women going by bus to see their husbands and boyfriends in prison; how literally the whole tone of the story changes temporarily at this prison.

Sayles: And also just that what different worlds they live in, that they’re in this tiny bus and try to get along, and these guys – in a prison, but still, in a much bigger envelope – all the racial, all the divisive stuff is so much more exaggerated there. And also in “Above the Line” there is that thing of, right when I wrote it which was, I don’t know, 15 years ago was right when they started to be more women in traditionally male crafts. So you started seeing grips who were women or gaffers who were women, or even every once in a while a cinematographer who was a woman. And those were just guy-guy things before that. And it really shook people up for a while. And they didn’t quite know how to do it. And then they kind of dealt with it by making the women ‘one of the boys.’ So I just kind of figured ‘Well, what would be the complications if one of the boys started sleeping with one of the actor boys. And how that would upset everything.

SO: Your next film is the Carlisle School?

Sayles: No, these things get on the internet, and this is the problem with the internet – Certainly, half the information I’ve ever seen on the internet about myself is totally false. So that’s something I’m writing for somebody else. I’m writing that right now, and I’m working on Jurassic [Park] IV, but those are writing jobs, and you just never know if they’re going to get made, if you’re going to be the writer on them if they get made, it’s a process that’s ongoing. I guess those things get on the internet now. The only thing I’m really working on besides the epics that I’ve written for myself that we haven’t been able to raise money for so far is a thing that I may make if we can raise the money, kind of about the early, early days of Rock and Roll, set about 1950, before they were even calling it Rock and Roll.

SO: That story will let you get into a lot of interesting questions of race and appropriation?

Sayles: Well, you know actually I’m just kind of setting it in an almost totally black world. The only integration that’s happening in that movie is that the armed forces were being reintegrated, so instead of having all-black units and all-white units, right at the dawn of the Korean War, under Truman, they decided to reintegrate the armed forces, including the combat arm of the armed forces, and the army was the service that resisted the most, and they really kept to a strict ‘Only 10 per cent of our soldiers are going to be black,’ because they had fear that because it was a job, that they were going to have way too many black recruits inundating them, and they just didn’t really want to deal with that.

SO: Well the new film was great, and I really loved the stories. I hope we’ll be able to talk to you again in the future.

Sayles: Great. Thanks a lot.

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