SOURCE: Sayles, John, and Claudia Dreifus. “Interview with John Sayles.” Progressive 55, no. 11 (November 1991): 30-3.

[In the following interview, Sayles discusses the place City of Hope occupies within his body of work.]

John Sayles manages to do what no one else does in the world of the cinema: He calls his own shots, writing, directing, financing, and editing movies about the hidden corners of American life. In an industry in which Terminator 2 is the money-cow ideal, the forty-one-year-old Sayles somehow pulls off wonderful small pictures on themes that the rest of movieland ignores. Baby, It's You, his only major-studio production, sheds warm light on the big American secret—social class. His classic Return of the Secaucus Seven looks at a group of 1960s activists at midlife, still grasping for their ideals. Matewan, his masterpiece, concerns a coal miners' strike in West Virginia.

And this fall, we'll see Sayles's newest offering, City of Hope, a brawny meditation on modern urban politics. Like most of his work, this new one is gritty, tense, and complex, discarding the Hollywood formula of likable characters and happy endings. In many ways, it's a companion piece to Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and, as in Lee's films, there are few heroes.

Sayles also writes novels and short stories. HarperCollins recently published Los Gusanos, a broadly drawn epic about Miami Cubans who, like the characters in Return of the Secaucus Seven, are desperately clinging to their ideals. He wrote Los Gusanos over a twelve-year period in between film shoots. It briefly made several regional bestseller lists, and will appear in paperback next summer.

Sayles met me on a sweltering summer afternoon in an Italian restaurant in Poughkeepsie, New York. Long based in Hoboken. New Jersey, he and his companion, Maggie Renzi, had just moved to a farm in upstate New York so he could work in an atmosphere of serenity. He picked a restaurant for the interview because he is an insistent guardian of his privacy and wouldn't meet in his home. Or even near it. Over pasta and Diet Cokes, though, John Sayles was ebullient and open.

[Dreifus]: City of Hope is about the disintegration of a big-city political structure—and about the competing ethnic forces waiting to scavenge the spoils. It's a real 1990s kind of story, the kind of story being acted out in New York City as we speak. After spending so much time on movies rooted in the past, did you finally want to do a story more of this moment?

[Sayles]: No, I don't really think in those terms. Baby, It's You is supposed to be a young girl who goes from high school to college, from the 1950s to the 1960s in one jump. But in a lot of places, the 1950s never died. I go back home to where I grew up in upstate New York and there are people still listening to the current equivalent of Chuck Berry, which is heavy metal, and working on their cars. As to whether City of Hope is about the 1990s or not, I think it's about different cities at a different stage.

This city is in its Tammany Hall period. The main ethnic group is controlling the politics, but their numbers are gone. Their constituency has moved, and patronage has become a very ugly thing because it's a one-way street. There's no delivery anymore. For the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews, patronage worked, moving people into the system at the turn of the century. But then there comes the point where it's not working. They are stealing whatever isn't nailed down, and they know their days are numbered, and they are just stripping the city of whatever is left.

You see this a lot in Detroit and in Jersey. Look at Detroit. What's left of it? The old group is saying, “Now you [blacks] can have the city—what's left of it.” The new group is always faced with the fact that the previous group took the office furniture. City of Hope is not about the 1990s. It's about a kind of system that's been going on since, I'm sure, the 1800s in this country of ethnic groups. What's 1990s about it is that, all of a sudden, black and Hispanic people are getting their shot at power. In City of Hope, the blacks don't have the numbers to take over the city. They will only get to take over their ward.

You are one of the few directors around who's telling these kinds of stories.

Or who's getting to.

How do you feel about being one of the few who gets to make movies about coal miners, 1960s activists, academic lesbians, and now urban politicos?

Well, it's unconscious. I'm not consciously saying, “This is what they are doing, so I will do something different.” I'm a writer. I write stuff and then I realize, “This doesn't really fit into any genre.” Usually, when I have to pitch a script to a potential backer. I have to tell the story. I find I can't say, “This is a cross between Rambo and Missing.” My pieces tend to be in-between genres. They tend to be about characters, about situations, rather than, say, “an action-adventure-police story.” So the stories that I happen to be interested in telling are that way.

How do you manage to be a man with a 1960s consciousness who is directing?

I think I've been very lucky. For one thing, my bread job—writing movies for other people—was a lucrative one. So even when I first started and was getting “scale,” that was ＄10,000 a movie. Most people's bread job is waiting tables or teaching in some form, where you make a base pay of ＄10,000 a year. I can write a genre picture and do a bunch of those a year—so even when I was just getting scale, I could make ＄50,000 in one year. It only took me two years to get up enough money to do Return of the Secaucus Seven. I financed that picture myself. I financed The Brother from Another Planet myself. I was one of the major investors in Matewan. So rather than making that one independent film and having to sit around for another five years till someone gave me the money to do another one, I've been able to put myself back into the game by financing my films myself.

So when there's a story you want to shoot, you'll write a TV movie and then, voila, you've got seed money?

Yeah. Or I'll doctor a script for someone else. And that's fun as a technician. It's not something you're going to put your soul into—because it's somebody else's story. When it's done, at least I have the money to get my own film started. With Lianna, we started out needing to raise a budget of ＄800,000. We ended up making it for ＄300,000, of which I put up ＄30,000. Now most people I know, when they start to make movies, don't have ＄30,000; ＄30,000 is as tough to raise as ＄3 million, if you're talking people into it. So that's one thing: I've had that economic advantage.

About Return of the Secaucus Seven: Were you yourself active during the 1960s?

Certainly. But only as a foot soldier. I was at events with 30,000 other people. On marches and things like that. I went to Williams College.

Williams? I had the impression you came from a grittier background, that your family was more blue-collar.

It's a long story how I went there. I really didn't know if I wanted to go to college, but I ended up there. I knew I really didn't want to be in the Army, whether there was a war or not. When the antiwar stuff happened, I would occasionally participate.

Williams was an elite school, but in a funny way. It wasn't very competitive. I had a guidance counselor say to me, “Here's two places I want you to apply—Williams and Colgate.” I ended up feeling like, if I went to Colgate, they'd want me to play serious football, and I had played much-too-serious football in high school already. So my place of education was accidental. Williams was the kind of place that, when the black kids took over the administration building, the first thing the white college president did was make sure they had enough food.

Were you involved in a march on Washington where a deer got killed en route? “Bambicide,” you call it in Return of the Secaucus Seven.

No, but we did get stopped on a couple of marches by cops, on the general theme of “I know where these guys are going—let's stop them and search for drugs.” The people the film is based on are not so much people I knew in college but people I knew afterwards, when I was living in East Boston. I knew a lot of people who were involved in the little city halls there, a bunch who had known each other in the 1960s.

No doubt you saw The Big Chill, which many critics noted was about a group of ex-1960s types getting together for a long weekend reunion, just like Return of the Secaucus Seven.

It's a different movie. It's called The Big Chill for a reason. It's a film about people who have either lost their ideals or are realizing they never had them in the first place. Secaucus Seven is about people who are desperately, desperately trying to hold onto their ideals. That's a very different group. Chill people are more upper-middle-class. The Secaucus group is more lower-middle-class; some of them are probably the first people in their families who went to a four-year college. And they've chosen to be downwardly mobile. The movie I think Return of the Secaucus Seven most resembles is a French one, For Jonah, Who Will Be Twenty-five in the Year 2000. It was the precursor.

Come on, admit it. Surely you felt a bit … cribbed by The Big Chill. The structure and the idea seem so similar: A group of ex-1960s folks get together for a long weekend and wonder what they did with their lives.

No. I actually didn't have any big problem with it. I thought it was a more-thoughtful-than-usual Hollywood movie. It's very much about people who do exist. It's just that they weren't my friends. It was not a rip-off. There's too much thought, and too much feeling, in that movie. [Director Larry Kasdan] sees the world differently. It was more: “Here's what happens when the people I know get together for a three-day weekend.”

But again, you're about the only bona fide member of the 1960s generation making movies. How come?

I don't think I'm the only one. Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese—they were very much of that moment and then they grew into doing different things. What was one of De Palma's first films—Greetings?—about, the draft? Besides, I keep running into these people who used to be in the Weather Underground who are producers now.

You're often compared to Spike Lee. Is that fair?

Well, he's doing things that nobody else was interested in doing for a long time. But he's been much more successful at getting out to a large audience than I have. He's doing pretty much what he wants to do and still reaching some kind of mass audience. It's not the mass audience that something like Terminator 2 reaches, but he's working on studio budgets now, and that's a real achievement: to be able to do that and still make the movie you want to make.

We've talked about my being the only one making these kinds of movies. I find that in this country there's a real suspicion of content. Sometimes, a real resentment of content. Some of it came out of the auteur theory. There is a whole raft of movie critics who basically feel: Okay, what we treasure a film director, an auteur, for is his ability to put his stamp on any material. The minute you're talking about that, you're automatically talking about style. On the other hand, there's a much smaller group of people who only care about content and whether you're politically correct or not.

I'm sure that Sam Goldwyn Sr. said a lot of intelligent things, but the one that we always quote is, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.” Haskell Wexler and I were talking about this once. He said, “All films are political.” I agreed. I said, “Beverly Hills Cop II is a political film.” If you look at it, it's about attitudes toward women and violence, and it says a lot. But nobody would look at the director of Beverly Hills Cop II and say, “Hey, that's a political film.” Because those are mainstream values, so no one notices them.

If you're working in the mainstream media, if you're going to story conferences, what almost always gets scarified is content. Because they distrust it. Because it almost always is secondary to making this great arcade ride that the people are going to pay money to get on.

You're still telling stories that no one else is, and you're constantly breaking formulas. In Matewan, the good guys lose and the community is shattered. That's against the Hollywood formula of happy endings for the protagonists.

In Matewan, the hero does not pick up a gun, and that was a problem most mainstream moviegoers had with it. “Now wait a minute,” they'd go. “The hero really is a pacifist. He's not going to turn out be a guy who's a great shot and who takes his gun off the wall.”

In so many Westerns—Shane—that's the tension of the story. This guy has decided he's pacifist and there's this thrill in the audience when he finally straps his gun on one more time. It's a difficult thing to fight. When we were creating the film, it was hard to create a guy who is telling people something that might get them killed. We gave him a speech; he said, “Look, the way things are now, the coal owners are just waiting for a chance to tromp you. Yes. If you pick up the gun, you'll give them that excuse. If you do that, the war is going to start and you're going to lose.”

And they do—and that's what happens in Matewan. But to change the subject, you've just published a novel about Cuban-Americans in Miami, Los Gusanos. How is writing a book different? It must be a place where you have total control; after all, as the writer, you're God.

Well, I don't have to worry about how we can afford extras! In Los Gusanos, I do the Bay of Pigs invasion and I don't have to worry about how we get the tanks and the extras—all those practical things that make a movie difficult. What you don't have in a book is all the fun of a collaboration, and I do think movies are collaborative, auteur theory aside.

You wrote Los Gusanos between movies. How did you keep your concentration?

As far as research went, I never left the novel. Thirteen years ago, I had an outline, which I pretty much kept to. What I did was write the first few chapters and then I couldn't go on without much more research. So I did movies, and research while I did the movies. Whenever I'd run into people who were Cuban-Americans, I'd talk to them and that got filed. There were two long Writers Guild strikes and during them I worked on fiction. And then finally, after I finished Matewan, I took a year off and finished it.

But you know, nothing I've done is a career move. Every project, from the movies to the novel, were things I wanted to do. It's not, “How do I get myself to the point where I am going to be in the Hollywood system?” I never thought, “If I take a year off, I'll lose where I am.” Being a fiction writer is a nice net to have. If I have to spend two years when I can't get a movie off the ground, I can always write novels.

About Los Gusanos, I had this feeling that one of the things that appeals to you about Cuban-Americans is their commitment to a cause.

To me, the important spectrum in Los Gusanos is not right-wing or left-wing, because most of the people are right of center. It's between “believers” and “cynics.” A lot of what I'm dealing with is how do you still act once you know too much to be a true believer.

I'm interested in commitment, in how do we still have commitment. I have a character in the book who was in the Lincoln Brigade, and I have a lot of respect for those guys. In this nursing home in the book, you have this guy who's a veteran of the Lincoln Brigade right next to this guy who was in the Bay of Pigs.

My question is how do you keep commitment once you know? How do you not get cynical?

Were your folks movie buffs?

Readers. They really encouraged us to read. Both of my parents were teachers, and then my father became a school administrator later on. And both of their fathers were cops. The main way my parents were influential is just that they encouraged us to read a lot and they didn't lay on any big trips about. “This is what you are supposed to be or do.” Enough people in my family did things they didn't like, and they didn't want us to do that. I wanted to be a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

When I got out of college, it was a bad time to get a job. I ended up working in nursing homes and factories, because that was something I had done before. If I had gone into anything else that paid a little more, the employers would have said, “You know, you're signing up for the long run. We want people who will be here for fifteen years and be happy about it.” I wasn't interested in that. I worked as an orderly because it definitely was not a career decision.

In the entertainment industry, when I went into it, I was only interested in it for the work. I wasn't interested in getting a big house. All I was interested in was, “I think it would be really great to make movies. This is the kind of storytelling that I really like. How do I get to do that and do that on my terms?”

At first I worked for [B-movie mogul] Roger Corman, and it was really fun. It was the equivalent of working in a hospital. You didn't have to take it home. Nobody took themselves that seriously. They worked hard. Nobody fought about, “What does this movie mean?” What you knew was that every ten pages, or every fifteen pages, you were going to have some kind of animal attack and it's meant to be fun.

You seem so nonchalant about what you do, as if it's as natural as breathing air. Most film directors I've met are religious about their profession.

I'm not nonchalant. I'm interested in the stuff I do being seen as widely as possible—but I'm not interested enough to lie. There comes a time in any story when you say, “I know how to make this more popular.” But then, it's bullshit. I have worked on movies that were basically fantasy movies—where you try not to say things you don't believe in and you can do it because the whole thing is really about the genre. For instance, read the script of Alligator; if it's about anything other than being a kind of monster movie in the almost classic Japanese tradition, it is about how social problems start in the lower classes and nobody is really dealing with them until they start eating the rich people.

Battle beyond the Stars, to me, is about death, but finally it is just The Seven Samurai Go to Space. That's what was handed to me to write and that's why people watch it. That's what Roger gave me to do. Battle beyond the Stars is about how these different creatures feel about death.

Conversation is what I'm ambitious about, being a part of that. To a certain extent, so many mainstream movies are just consumable items. They aren't things people can remember and apply to their lives. I think, in general, consciousness is a really important thing and that's one of the reasons I'm glad I work in the consciousness industry. In a cumulative way, movies do have an effect. If you don't like the effect they are having, maybe you can do something to counteract it. At least you can be part of the conversation.

To me, the important thing is the conversation. The important thing is to get that moment when someone in the audience thinks, “I have never spent time with the people in this movie,” and then they realize that, because of the movie, they have.