SOURCE: Sayles, John, and Trevor Johnston. “Sayles Talk.” Sight and Sound 3, no. 9 (September 1993): 26-9.

[In the following interview, Sayles discusses his writing and directing processes and the advantages and disadvantages of working outside the Hollywood system.]

As the latest young turks fight to see who can make the cheapest ‘guerrilla’ feature, John Sayles' position as the doyen of American independent film-making seems more than ever assured. Having started his career as a novelist and learned his screenwriting craft at the Roger Corman school of exploitation graft, Sayles' 1980 feature debut as writer-director with the seminal ‘reunion’ picture Return of the Secaucus Seven proved it was possible to finance your own movie, get it released and capture the attention of the Hollywood majors into the bargain. The ＄60,000 price tag gained as much notice as anything else, but in its ensemble structure, broadly liberal sympathies, tart dialogue and willingness to focus on the concerns of the over 30s, the film now stands as a fair record of the forms and questions its maker would continue to address. His subsequent output remains poised in both creative and budgetary terms between the mainstream's dollar-intensive factory product and the indie sector's modestly resourced pioneer activity.

Sayles' latest offering, Passion Fish, marks an effective honing down of his concerns to date. The film is founded on a wry, clearly delineated script and close attention to the performance of Mary McDonnell as an injured television soap star coming to terms with her new-found physical handicap under the care of Alfre Woodard's equally troubled nurse.

Where Sayles' earlier union conflict chronicle Matewan, baseball corruption story Eight Men Out and contemporary urban survey City of Hope pored over wider social and historical frescoes to pick away at the land of the free's obfuscatory ideological myth-making, the new film is scaled down in approach. Yet, as a wise spin on the problem pic, it still cloaks itself, like many of its predecessors, in approachable generic garb. From his earliest commissioned screenplays, Sayles has been nothing if not resourceful in his mastery of sundry genre formulae. His own films have injected familiar stylistic routines with a greater sense of thematic commitment—as in the science-fiction The Brother from Another Planet and the sports picture Eight Men Out.

In this light, it is easy to read Sayles' films as issue-led, each presenting the particular challenge of finding the right package in which to box a relevant social ill or question. While Return of the Secaucus Seven mines the insecurity of the 60s angry generation, The Brother from Another Planet tackles racial problems. Even Sayles' horror scripts for Piranha and Alligator are imbued with a whiff of eco-conscience, while the films where the genre element is less pronounced (Lianna's lesbian coming out, City of Hope's state-of-the-nation address) tend to leave the mechanisms of their ideological apparatus more vulnerably exposed.

To his detractors, Sayles' too-perfect liberal conscience can feel like over-earnest PC point-scoring, yet with Passion Fish, his human and societal insights are earned by the progress of the drama rather than willed into it from above. What's more, Sayles' unpredictability from project to project—who'd have guessed his next movie might be an Irish-set kids ‘n’ animals adventure—while still managing to retain an identifiable signature stands firmly in his favour.

[Johnston]: After Eight Men Out and City of Hope, were you intentionally looking to do a more intimate piece like Passion Fish?

[Sayles]: I never make the movies in the order that I write them or think of them, and Passion Fish harks back to when I worked in hospitals 20 years ago. People had seen Persona by that time and would go on about the symbolism. I thought it was about a nurse and a patient, and I always reckoned it would be a good idea to do a comedy American version. What influenced me more was not going from the social to the personal, but the fact that I'd done three ‘guy’ movies in a row, which is basically what politics still consists of. Maggie Renzi, my producer, asked me if I had any stories for women, so I thought we'd do the hospital one next. A lot of things clicked together: we were travelling down South and hooked up with a friend who plays in a zydeco band, we stayed in his parents' house and both the band and house ended up in the movie.

As in previous films you seem to be dealing with an area of American experience—the Cajun culture—that could be seen as peripheral.

There are specific reasons why I chose that place. I wanted it to be very much somewhere that wasn't New York, so that it was evident that May-Alice, the Mary McDonnell character, had to change herself to make it in the city. And there aren't that many places left in the US that are different from McDonald's shopping mall America. In that part of the South people still speak French on the radio, they have their own food, their own music. I also needed a place where if you came back as an unmarried woman of 30 people would know about it and you would know they knew. I needed a place that was sensual in nature: here are two women denying their senses or closing them down—Alfre Woodard's Chantelle has decided to become a nun and keep herself away from temptation, May-Alice is drowning her senses in alcohol and soap operas. It needed to be fleshy and sensuous, so there are more dissolves in that movie than I've ever had before.

Your films seem to run counter to McDonald's shopping mall America in their examination of social, cultural or political specifics.

A lot of my movies are about community. Their culture is an attempt at community culture rather than mass culture. May-Alice is an exile from the mass culture of the soaps, but it's still coming at her through her TV. It's only when she turns that off that she's able to appreciate what's around her.

I'm aware of mass culture, and I'm aware that I'm part of it. The stuff I do goes into theatres, it's advertised, I do interviews. But I want my work to be about it, but not necessarily of it. What I do in film is not just another meal at McDonald's, it's more a case of opening a funky little restaurant that becomes a cool hang-out. One week you do Cajun food and the next you do something else, on the understanding that most people aren't going to eat there. The bottom line is that they don't like that kind of food: it's too spicy, it's too foreign, they can't find the address. Most people don't see our movies in a theatre because they can't get to them. We don't get played in the chains.

The film could be summed up in a soap opera way—alcoholic wheelchair-bound ex-soap star recovers with the help of ex-junkie nurse—but one of its aims seems to be to bring out the difference between the clichéd soap opera treatment of these issues and your own more sensitive approach.

One of the things the movie is trying to be aware of is people's desire to have an easy answer and not slug through things. To be able to place someone right away, to resolve a conflict that's not resolvable in a half-hour television slot. Even though they have the time, soap operas don't have the patience to have characters who develop in an organic way—instead, it's forget about the fact that you're only 16, the ratings are dropping so you've got to have a long-lost son.

So much American culture is market-driven. Demographics and research are getting everywhere. I can make my movie and sell it to Miramax, telling them that this is the final cut and if you don't like it, don't buy it. But they still bring in their marketing people, who say this is what people have said and this is why we want to cut this, and this, and this. What I'm hoping is to use that system to carry what I want to carry, but not to get eaten up by it. It's like surfing—the wave could kill you, but it could also give you a great ride.

Do you find it frustrating that people don't see your movies in cinemas?

I wish they could. Usually the cinema is a fuller experience, though the television screen is an experience too—it may not be like going to a rock concert, but I still like records. It's certainly much better than there being no video, the movie playing in 15 cities for two weeks and then hardly existing. Most of the places I've lived, like Jersey City, have never played one of my movies. People there have seen them because of video, and both City of Hope and Passion Fish were financed by home video pre-sales. That money has been vital for the independent American film movement.

Has that situation given you a greater feeling of security for the continuance of your film-making career?

I would say that the continuance of my movie-making career rests on whether I can write enough screenplays and make enough money to finance or be a major investor in my next film—which will still have to be made for very little money. Right now I'm broke—the last couple of movies haven't done very well. Who knows whether I'll make back the money I put into The Secret of Roan Inish, the one I just shot? I've made eight or nine movies, but none of them has gone platinum. What I have is a track record that's very good in some ways, in that I attract good technicians and actors because they think my stuff is good and interesting to do. And then I shoot fast, so it's only five or six weeks out of their lucrative schedules, which means that sometimes their agents will even allow them to work with me.

But as far as financiers are concerned, it's problematic; they see me as a guy who's had nine chances at bat and lightning still hasn't struck. I've kept being a director because I always had money to put back on the table. Right now I don't have any money left, so I'm looking for work as a screenwriter. Maybe my next picture will be shot on 16mm for ＄500,000. When we finish one movie, we almost never know if we'll be able to do another.

Do you rule out writing the kind of pieces that might require studio backing?

I write things because they're fun to write, because I want to tell the story. Then I look at them and think, “How the fuck am I ever going to get to make this?” So rather than writing studio movies, I do movies of a certain ambition. It's a mutual thing: they're not all too interested in what I want to do and I'm not too interested in what they want to do. Every once in a while there's something close, I run it by them and the answer is “Gee, I wish we could make movies like this! I really wanna see this movie!—but I'm not gonna give you the money to do it.” That's fine, that's a legitimate answer. As far as being a director-for-hire, I don't get many offers. I usually get asked to do things I'm writing, television movies or cable movies mainly. After Secaucus Seven Roger Corman offered me Mutiny on the Bounty in Space … I sometimes wish I'd written that one!

In terms of writing, what gives you the confidence to connect with individuals whose experience is completely alien to your own? That's a common thread in many of your screenplays.

First of all, I'm not afraid of failure. I don't get upset if people don't like it: I'm doing it because I'm interested. Second, you build up your confidence by doing your legwork. You spend time with people, you read more than one source and you always remain suspicious about anything anyone else, has written. When I wrote Los Gusanos I had to learn Spanish to get to the books I needed that weren't translated and to get to the people I needed to talk to. It's like being a reporter in some ways: I'm a conduit for people's voices. Like the disclaimers the networks put on some of their documentary programming, the views expressed in the movies may not necessarily be mine. Often some of my wackiest dialogue is verbatim—for instance, most of the dialogue in the car shop in City of Hope is just the flavour of the garage in Jersey City where I go to get my car not fixed—including my favourite line: “Benny, you fat fucken haemorrhoid, get in here!”

For me Passion Fish is successful because of a combination of that kind of authenticity and the fact that it is extremely well constructed. Do you think the early part of your career—whether it was writing novels, theatre or exploitation pictures—was a good school for learning your craft?

It all contributes. Certainly acting helps, in that it forces you to think about point of view, so when you write different characters they don't talk in the same way or want the same things. Novel-writing helps in a lot of ways too, because it makes you think about rhythm, though instead of it being a matter of words on the page, in film you establish rhythm in lots of different ways: there's camera movement, the way characters speak, cutting, music, the variation in framing and so on.

I learned a lot from the directors who made the Roger Corman movies, because they'd be straight on the phone to me, screaming for help: “I've got ＄800,000 to shoot this epic you've written. It's set in 1933, we've got 68 speaking parts and we start filming in two weeks. Do you know anything about the movie business? You're killing me!” Then I'd do a freebie rewrite so the movie could be better, rather than them just tearing out pages of the script at will. That way you learned what was capital intensive and what was labour intensive: what you had to throw money at and what you could overcome by ingenuity.

Do you have work that you're more proud of as a director than as a writer?

It's not that interesting to me. You just try to tell the story as best you can, using all the weapons you have at your disposal. For each movie you have a different team, different demands, different logistical problems. At every point I try to zero in on the most important thing in the scene—sometimes it's the camera, sometimes it's the actors. When it's the acting I tend to keep things simple and I don't cut very much. I don't make movies because of some technique I want to try; I try a technique because there's a story I want to tell and that seems the way to do it.

When you started out as a novelist, what kinds of movies led you to want to write screenplays and eventually direct?

I have wide taste. I like everything from Cries and Whispers to Enter the Dragon. I like different things in those movies, obviously—the acting in Enter the Dragon isn't my favourite thing about it, and the karate in Cries and Whispers is like nothing, whereas the storytelling grabbed me. Whenever a movie could get me into the story so I'd stop thinking about how it was made, that interested me.

Has your career turned out the way you imagined?

I didn't know anyone in the movie business and I didn't know anyone who was a writer, so I had no role models. When I first went to Hollywood, I did think it through: I want to write movies and I want to direct the movies I write. How do I get to do this? They're not hiring theatre directors, they're hiring producers' sons, stars, people who work their way up through TV, and writers. Hey, I'm a writer, I can write my way to it. I'll do original scripts and assignments and if any of them make any money maybe I can suggest that I direct the next one. It was clear after writing three movies for Roger Corman that those were not the kind of movies that got any attention, so I went the Stanley Kubrick route and made my own fucking movie with Secaucus Seven. That was the start, because even if I hadn't got it released, at least I'd made a movie I wanted to make.