SOURCE: Sayles, John, and Pat Aufderheide. “Filmmaking as Storytelling: An Interview with John Sayles.” Cineaste 15, no. 4 (1987): 12-15.

[In the following interview, conducted in the autumn of 1986, Sayles discusses the story behind the film Matewan and the way it was translated into film.]

John Sayles' latest movie, Matewan, premiered at Cannes and opens this autumn in the U.S. With Haskell Wexler as cinematographer, a cast long worked with, and a feature role by James Earl Jones, the film tackles a piece of buried American history. It's about a 1920 conflict between coal miners in West Virginia and coal company private police. The lead character, Joe Kenehan, a union organizer for the United Mine Workers, is a pacifist and a veteran of Industrial Workers of the World (or Wobbly) struggles.

Matewan fulfills a dream Sayles has had to tell the stories he heard when, as a fresh college grad, he hitchhiked through the West Virginia hills and heard stories of that epoch. It also forms a marking point in Sayles' career, as a packed historical canvas on which many of the themes that Sayles has dealt with in earlier, smaller films are raised. The ＄3 million budget (the film was financed by Cinecom) was stretched to fit ＄10 million ambitions.

Sayles, a child of middle class babyboom culture, is a kind of popular chronicler of American culture. His early collection of short stories, The Anarchists' Convention, and his novel, Union Dues, both demonstrate a grounding in his concern for what some call “civil religion”—the values that a culture holds in common and that infuse individual choice, social priorities and political action. In films such as Return of the Secaucus Seven (his first independent film, made for a ＄67,000 pittance). Lianna, Baby It's You, and Brother from Another Planet, Sayles has gone to the heart—the lived experience—of issues that rile the surface of American life: countercultural activism; homosexuality; the cultural conflicts of class in America; and racism. His film style is conventional in a narrative sense, but it typically draws the viewer into an ensemble of characters rather than depending on genre-defined action.

Sayles sits with apparent comfort on the edge between commercial and independent filmmaking, working as a scriptwriter and script doctor for the industry while pursuing his own projects. And his own projects are designed to appeal to the same audience, but with a different product.

As Sayles was entering post production for Matewan in late autumn 1986, he talked about his latest film, his film style, and his objectives as a narrator of the drama called the American way of life.—

[Aufderheide]: You've been fascinated by coal mining history since long before Matewan. What intrigued you originally?

[Sayles]: The first thing that struck me was this dirty, dangerous job that people get hooked on. There's this incredible pride, solidarity and fellow feeling among guys who had done it. You get even these old guys saying, “It's nothing like what it was like for the old-timers.” It got me interested in the history. Also, just because West Virginia is isolated, there are things about people and the way they live and American character or whatever that are clearer there.

So what was it about West Virginia that was so clear about American character?

One of the main things that began to interest me when I got into the period was that you had the bedrock Americans, people so individualistic that they left the wagon train, stayed in those hills, and dug in. They have a history of resisting outsiders, including the American Government, but at the same time, when there's a war, they're the first ones to enlist. A bedrock individualism coupled with a kind of unthinking patriotism. So it's not like they're a bunch of freethinkers who never trusted the country. They're people who get misty-eyed every time someone raises the flag. That's a fascinating combination.

People are individualistic to the point where families can seem like a country. And that's a real strength, at the same time that you can really isolate yourself from other people. In West Virginia it's always been very difficult for people to subjugate their individuality to any cause. There's always this feeling that a strong individual can do it alone, unless there's a family crisis when you all pitch in. You try at all costs to avoid contention. There is a real avoidance of confrontation, and the drawback is that you hold things in until you burst.

What's the conflict in Matewan about?

A lot of what Matewan's about is that new people were coming in, blacks and immigrants from Southern Europe, and, along with new people, new ideas, and one of the new ideas was forming a union. That was a very new idea in southwest West Virginia, where the owners had had feudal kingdoms. West Virginia was a special case. There was a point where companies in other states told the UMW to organize West Virginia, because companies there were underpricing them so badly.

Some of it was company resistance, but there also was a natural resistance to joining. In the film one of the guys says, “I don't need some hunkie in Pittsburgh to tell me what to do.”

The union still has to face that. There wasn't a single authorized strike when Tony Boyle was in but there were a million wildcat strikes. If you watch the end of Harlan County, U.S.A., there were still a lot of people who were unhappy.

And you feel those issues speak to a larger nation as well?

I think this has to do with American character. I can't count the number of conversations I've heard all over the country, where people will say, “The damn government is too much in our lives, they regulate this, they regulate that,” and the last thing they say is, “They have to come in here and regulate prices so a man can make a decent living.” There's also a real patriotism that says when the final crunch comes, you have to be loyal to our President.

So individualism and patriotism go hand in hand.

There is a respect for institution and authority. There are terrible reviewers and writers for The New York Times, but once those writers get the job at the Times, a lot of people in New York respect them even if they wouldn't on the street. Certainly Reagan is an example of that. He's a spokesman for Borax, it's just that he's selling a different product now.

Your movies tend to deal with themes that typically get labelled ‘political’, but they're not explicitly political films.

What interests me is how personal psychology can get into the politics, and how the politics can get into the personal psychology.

I think the real struggle for audiences in Matewan will not be to understand the West Virginians but to understand Joe Kenehan as a pacifist. Usually this movie would end with Joe being discovered as having been in World War I, or having been a great gunslinger, and he'd say. “I've tried it the peaceful way and now I'll go away and blow away all the bad guys.”

That's the American movie scenario, and it's going to be hard to see that, hey, this guy really means it. They're shooting at him and killed his friends, so what's wrong with him? And he's a real American guy, not some foreigner. In West Virginia it wasn't people from Europe who brought these new ideas, it was Wobblies and coal miners and lumberjacks.

Your work is always at the intersection of culture and politics, but these days it seems like the line between pop culture, or media, and politics is fuzzy.

It's very hard to separate pop culture and politics now, because the way people get their information on politics is through media and especially TV. I wrote an article for The New Republic, the point of which was that there were two conventions. One was on TV, in which every speech had to pass through Reagan's committee to tailor it. You didn't hear volatile things like ‘welfare chiseler’ or ‘tax fraud,’ and you could tell the same hand had gone over those speeches. It seemed like this moderate Republican, let's celebrate America convention. On the floor, however, it was a Barry Goldwater convention. When Goldwater gave his speech, it was the most emotional thing I've ever seen. That was not the message sold through TV.

What politicians ask is. What is their media profile? No matter what our true policies are, what is our media profile? So politics is part of pop culture, and vice versa. On the network news there's so much entertainment news on what used to be straight news shows because they're struggling for ratings. And straight news, unless you can spice it up a little bit, just doesn't make it. The entertainment and politics get indistinguishable. It's no big deal that people are confused, given the places they get information from.

When you talk about your work, you rarely discuss the esthetic aspects of it.

I don't regard anything I do as art. That's a foreign world to me. I regard it as a conversation. Very often in a conversation, you tell a story to illustrate something you think or feel. The story has to be well told for people to stay. If you hand them a pamphlet on the street, they'll throw it away, whereas if there's some story about things they care about you can draw them in.

A lot of what I try to do in Matewan, for instance, is to have the audience spend time with people they ordinarily wouldn't spend time with, with history they either forgot or never knew, and make it have some bearing on what's going on today. Sometimes it's very subtle and I think people don't necessarily get it, because there are other things going on.

Let's talk a little about how you tell a story.

Most of my movies have had a guide who makes it easier for an audience to walk into it. In Return of the Secaucus Seven I had one guy who was very straight, and many people told me later that they could identify with him, that they at first didn't like these people who were hippies, very clannish and snobbish, but because those people were nice to him they began to like them. In Lianna there was Lianna's best friend who really likes Lianna but can't deal with her being gay all of a sudden. With Brother from Another Planet, he's from another planet because I wanted people to go to Harlem, but I wanted them to have a guide who would be accepted as black so people wouldn't act different like they do to whites, but because he's not from this planet he knows even less than they do. In Matewan Joe Kenehan starts out as a guide but I think the audience then realizes that they actually have more in common with the people of West Virginia.

You're not making message movies or art movies. What kind of movies do you make?

That's also what distributors have a hard time figuring out. As I suggested, my movies are like a conversation, like storytelling. You choose certain details to illustrate what's going on with this friend of yours, and the point is to convey to the audience what's happening with your friend. I'm not especially interested in what I think about things. What's interesting to me is how other people's minds work.

How does this affect the way you structure your films?

Because I write genre movies for other people, I know what works, and I resist it in movies I write for myself, because, in a way, it's too easy. You raise certain expectations and then you pay off. In the movies I direct and in my fiction. I raise certain expectations and I don't pay off. Then I try to show some of the reasons why the easy way of thinking about this thing won't work.

You know how in a movie scene people are walking along the beach and you can't hear what they're saying. That's one of the reasons why there are lots of people in my movies, so the audience can empathize with someone in them.

But in ninety minutes to two hours, with a lot of characters, it's hard to make you see what makes them tick. In Lianna you meet everybody twice. It's about a community of people and their reaction to somebody's change in their life. In Matewan it's a little different because there are bad guys. You don't want to have them to dinner. They knew they were right, though, because the world told them they were right. You don't like them but they believed in what they were doing.

When I'm working for studios or producers, people are always telling me you have to concentrate, focus, you've got too many characters. And I've got five characters. They say you have to have two people you can care about.

Baby, It's You was the one film you made with a studio. Did you have that problem there?

One of the big problems I had with Baby, It's You was that I had ambiguous feelings about both of the characters. It's like, your friends don't always act well. They fuck up, they don't always treat each other well, but they're still your friends. That was hard for the studio to accept. The preview cards we actually got—because the film didn't get much play—the people who liked it least were kids, especially boys fourteen to twenty-four. They didn't want to hear that stuff, because it was too real.

That's a risk you always run when you don't just tell the satisfying story. You can have different kinds of conversations with people—exactly what they want to hear, or a conversation that may bring up something you think they should think about, maybe if they want to know who you are. When you're working in a movie, you have to get them into a theater, and I prefer not to trick them.

So you don't feel a temptation to ‘sell out’?

When people say, “You've got all this integrity,” I say, “Hey, I'm just doing what I want to do.” I get to write a book or make a movie. I'm very lucky because I also write fiction, which doesn't require money. What I want to do is to tell stories to people and get them across. If I work for a studio and can't do it the way I want to, I just won't do it, because there's no attraction.

Is financing a big problem for you at this point?

I don't need that much money. You get too much for writing crummy exploitation movies anyway, and that's how I make my living. Although as a screenwriter you make a lot of money but pay a lot of it in taxes.

How do you choose your commercial assignments?

I try to pick the ones I'll do a good job at. Recently I've done a Wild Thing rewrite, it's kind of an urban Tarzan story. A kid is orphaned in the inner city, and, in my version anyway, his parents are hippies and they get killed in a drug bust, so he's raised by bag people and becomes a ghetto legend. And A Safe Place, that's about a guy who's a mercenary, he runs into Stone Age people, and they seem pacifistic. He starts rethinking his life, and decides to defend the place, and of course there's a big fight at the end.

How do you really feel about the kind of sheer entertainment that's a staple of the film industry?

Entertainment is not a bad thing. Movies made just for entertainment are not bad. Remember I said there are friends you like even if you don't like some things about them. You can be around warm people who are anti-Semitic or racist. That's something you'll always run up against.

I have that feeling about movies sometimes. A movie can be a nice entertaining roller coaster ride, and then you run up against some value you really don't like. Sometimes you can say, “Hey it's just a movie,” and sometimes it can just be too big.

So what's a ‘good’ entertainment film?

What distinguishes good entertainment movies is not being condescending. I don't know Steven Spielberg or George Lucas well, but I think one reason they have been so successful is that they made movies they would like to see. They haven't been making stuff by thinking. “What's good product, what will those suckers go for?”

They will take time to make a movie better even though they don't have to. Spending the extra ＄2 million only makes sense if it's gonna make another ＄10 million, but they'll do it because they want to make a better movie for those people in the audience. That's what I respect about those guys. I have different taste, and maybe different values, but I never feel condescension there. The most successful movies, no matter how schlocky, have that quality. Like Russ Meyer, who said, “Americans like square chins and big tits, and so do I.”

How do you define the difference between what you do and the ‘just good entertainment’ film?

I make movies that I don't think other people are gonna make. I could make genre films I would like to see, but plenty of other people are gonna make them.

How do you keep your focus on what you really want out of a film?

You have to have low expectations to begin with. I want people to go to my movies, but not enough to lie to them. That's the line I walk. I'll write a line in a movie and say to myself, “I just lost a million dollars.” Then I go back to the drawing board and say, “How much is this movie going to cost?” If we do OK with reviews and the distributor does a decent job, enough people will come to see this thing, and then, if I'm lucky, more people will like it and I'll get to make another movie. Basically I can't afford to think in terms of a career. I just have to say, “Once I start making this movie it has its own integrity and I'm working for the movie.” When I work for other people, I'm working for ‘the movies.’

When you're working on your own, you're working for and protecting the people in that movie. The characters become who you're trying to protect. Even if it's a character you don't like, this character has to have his day in court. With Baby, It's You, it's an egotistical thing to say, “I understand these characters and you're trying to cut them off and not give them their day in court.” You're saying, “I'm not working for you any more, I'm working for them.” I have also said at times, as a hired scriptwriter, “You're asking me to do a rewrite that will only make the movie worse. Somebody else can fuck this movie up. I'm not gonna.” It's a hard line to walk.

Matewan's a big budget film by your standards; you've got too many offers of work; and you're a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ grant. Does this add up to a sense of security?

I'll be lucky to do it again is how I feel. Every movie has been a roll of the dice. So far I've never crapped out. I often feel this is the last time, though. They're gonna find out and they'll never let me do this anymore.