SOURCE: Sayles, John, Gary Crowdus, and Leonard Quart. “Where the Hope Is: An Interview with John Sayles.” Cineaste 18, no. 4 (December 1991): 4-7, 61.

[In the following interview, Sayles discusses the way his own views on the problems of urban life inform the film City of Hope.]

John Sayles is one of America's foremost independent filmmakers. His debut film, Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980; see interview in Cineaste, Vol. XI, No. 1), reflected the exceptional talents at dialog and characterization he had previously demonstrated in his novels Pride of the Bimbos (1975) and Union Dues (1977) as well as the short stories anthologized in The Anarchists' Convention (1980). Since the late Seventies, Sayles has also worked as a screenwriter for hire on a variety of films, from genre items such as The Lady in Red (1979), The Howling (1981), and Alligator (1981) to more offbeat productions such as Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1983), Clan of the Cave Bear (1986), and Breaking In (1989). Sayles directed his own scripts for Lianna (1983), Baby It's You (1983; see interview in Cineaste, Vol. XIII, No. 1), The Brother from Another Planet (1984), Matewan (1986; see interview in Cineaste, Vol. XV, No. 4), and Eight Men Out (1987). More recently, Sayles was the creator and writer for the critically acclaimed but short-lived NBC TV series, Shannon's Deal, and earlier this year published his third novel, Los Gusanos, on Miami's Cuban refugee community. Cineaste Editors Gary Crowdus and Leonard Quart spoke with Sayles about his latest film, City of Hope, shortly before its New York opening.

[Crowdus and Quart]: City of Hope presents a bleak but realistic view of contemporary urban political corruption. What message would you like the viewer to take away from the film?

[Sayles]: To me, one of the most distressing things happening in the world today is a breaking down into tribalism. You see it in Yugoslavia, you're going to see it in the Soviet Union, and you certainly see it here. It's something that's been encouraged from above, the idea that, “Look, we can't take care of each other, it's everybody for themselves, and may the best man win. If a few of you fall out at the bottom, well, that's tough.” That encourages a kind of tribalism which you see in old alliances and old tolerances breaking down, and so you get very strong movements within tribes. In City of Hope you see the black tribe, the Italian tribe, and the police force who are always their own tribe. I want people to think about those hard decisions of how you consider yourself. What I talked with Joe Morton a lot about in terms of his character was, “OK, am I a man of principle first, a black man second, city councilor third, and husband fourth? Or do those shift around? Is there a point where there are things more important than what's good for my ward? … because I'm also a city councilor who's supposed to be talking about the whole city.”

I've lived in lots of cities with this kind of politics. I've lived in Albany, New York, which had the longest running Democratic machine, even longer than the Daly machine in Chicago. I've lived in East Boston, and I've lived in Atlanta, right when they had their first black mayor. It's a very familiar idea that you can piece together coalitions among tribes and that within their little areas they will all get along and the whole will work. Well, it doesn't always work that way. People have to transcend that family blood, that tribal blood. What I'd like viewers to come away with is a sense of what has to be done, that help doesn't come from above very often—you know, at the end the homeless guy is saying, “Help! Help! Help!” People themselves have to find ways to make those bridges.

By the end of the film, Wynn, the Joe Morton character, seems to realize that he must master the art of politics as compromise. Do you feel that, in trying to deal with often conflicting demands for justice in society today, it's impossible for one to be an effective politician and at the same time remain a decent human being?

It's really hard. That's what some of the Joe Morton characterization is about, that politicians are human beings, too, and the best of them do a balancing act between being a leader and being somebody who just listens to his constituency, including all their prejudices and fears and their reluctance to go forward and be progressive. Franklin Roosevelt, for example, did a lot of good stuff but he was also a machine politician. That's how he got in. If you look at most politicians who have been progressive in any way, you see points in their careers where they really just voted the status quo. Now and then you get a secure politician like Teddy Kennedy whose voting record is excellent, partly because he doesn't have to worry about being reelected. He had it in the bag and he knew it for so many years that he was able to vote his conscience.

Yes, it is a very difficult thing, and you hope that in ten years Wynn won't be the mayor [laughs], or at least won't be like Mayor Baci, whether he's the mayor or not. He's realizing what the former black mayor tells him on the golf course, that “This isn't about testing your personal moral fiber. It will be tested, but that's not all it's about.”

The key incident in the film is a kind of riff on the Tawana Brawley affair. Did you feel that to be an important political point to make?

The point of that—and I didn't actually follow the Tawana Brawley thing too carefully—is that, in today's overheated political climate, whether you're a black politician or a white politician, you have to have an opinion about this kind of thing. It used to be enough to say, “Oh, that's a police matter. I'll let the police take care of that.” Every time something happens now, the media call Dinkins, they call D'Amato, they call Spike Lee, and five other people who have to have an opinion, and they don't know shit about it. They weren't there, they haven't talked to the people in the neighborhood, and half the time they haven't even talked to the cops yet.

For some people that's not necessary.

No, not at all.

They have prefigured judgements.

Yeah, and one of the pressures on any black politician, as Wynn says in the film, is that, “At some point I'm going to be stood up in front of everybody and asked, ‘Do you think those guys are lying?,’ and that's a huge pressure to face, to realize I could lose votes over this.”

Do you see the politics of the black community itself as an obstacle to progress?

It's an obstacle and an opportunity. It's an obstacle to the extent that you have these factions fighting against each other. The film shows you the establishment politician, a guy who's in the middle range, and someone who's very much of a Muslim—a very newfound Muslim, so he's at his most doctrinaire. As I told Tom Wright, the actor who plays Malik, this is a guy who's really struggled in his life and he's just found religion, so he's at his most extreme. When people like that are pulling in different directions, it can be an obstacle to concerted effort or concerted voting, those kinds of things that help a tribe, a group, a minority, to develop some power within a majority structure.

The opportunity, on the other hand, is to take some of the energy and ideology from each of the factions to forge something very good. You say, “OK, we're stuck in this system, we have to learn how to work within it, but we can also use some of the militancy of these guys.” You know, there's that line, “If you can't get respect, you settle for fear.” That's what the Black Panthers were dealing with to a certain extent—“Hey, we're going to settle for fear at first, and maybe we'll get respect later.” What they got was wiped out, but there's an opportunity there as well as a liability.

A more important factor than the fragmentation of the black community is just brute economic factors, and there isn't much chance for me to talk about that in the film. The mayor at one point says, “Look, this city is going down the toilet. Anybody with any brains is going to leave and let the blacks and Hispanics duke it out.” If you look at Detroit and some of the other cities that now have black mayors, like East St. Louis, they're getting to run the city, but what's left?

There's nothing, no tax base.

Yeah, and so the biggest obstacle to advancement of those people in cities is that, when they finally do get power, it's only because everybody else has abandoned the place, including the tax base. Another thing that is posited in this movie is that we can't expect each new group that takes power to reject patronage politics, to say, “We're going to be a meritocracy, we're not going to just hire our relatives and friends and the people who got us into office. We're going to hire some outside experts, even if they're white, you know, even if they're not from our group.” It's just not going to happen and I don't think we can expect it to happen.

You have wedded the film's political mosaic to a family drama. What function do you see the relationships between Nick and Angela and Nick and his father playing in the context of the larger film?

In a small city, and I've lived in lots of them, the tribalism gets to the family level. One of the most difficult things is to expect people to transcend family. When I was living in East Boston, it was “If the mayor doesn't get in, your cousin Louie is going to lose his job as a teacher's aide.” In West Virginia, where we shot Matewan, half of the feuds were about that very thing, so if you got a sheriff in, all of a sudden you win the boundary dispute. Or if you get to be the vice sub-marshall or somesuch, then you get to collect graft from the guys who are moonshining. So it comes down to a family thing.

What's really awful about bureaucracy is that it's inhumane, and, on the other hand, there is this fallibility built into any kind of politics that includes personality, because people are fallible, and this is the reigning drama. What I wanted were these two countercurrents, with Wynn trying to get into something, trying to get more power, to become part of the establishment, in his mind to rise up, and then Vincent Spano's character, Nick, trying to get out of it, but for whom there are these responsibilities. He's like a prince who's been born into this complicated Machiavellian society, and it's not that easy to get out.

In most of your films you usually don't go in for this kind of melodramatic confrontation. Why did you use it here?

Well, it's what we kept calling the Arthur Miller part of the movie, which is that, once it gets down to family, things tend to be unavoidably melodramatic. There's a point where there's so much personal drama going on, which, although it's related to the larger story, is finally family drama, and it seemed artificial not to have some kind of resolution between these people. It's very emotional and very much tied into each other's business. This is more like Lianna in that it's more about the personal drama of power relationships—you know, “This is what he wanted me to be, but I'm not going to be that to punish him for what he did to my brother”—and all those kinds of things where you realize that there are bigger forces that Nick is fighting with. And those forces do eventually come down to two people who are related to each other battling it out.

Do you think that perhaps the character carries a little too much moral weight, that you're demanding too much moral resonance from him?

Well, I don't know, because he's so confused. I see him as representing the third generation, where people work in the factory but they don't believe in the union anymore, or they're in the mob but they don't believe in the mob anymore. They don't have the drive that the generation before them or the original immigrant generation had. The first generation ended up with just enough to feed themselves and the hope that their kids would get educated so they could become more than their parents. The second generation is the one that said, “I'm going to prove that my pop was right,” and they kill themselves to establish a business. With the third generation, you either get these disaffected people or you get somebody like Mario Cuomo or Doug Wilder, these guys who can say, “I had a lot of adversity and my parents had even more than me, but we're still moving forward.” Well, Nick is someone who doesn't feel he's moving forward, this is the decay of that kind of politics. When that kind of politics has been in for a certain amount of time, you get that Tammany Hall period which produces a lot of moral casualties, and that is what I think Nick, and to a certain extent his father, are. His father's still in the game, and he's doing things that he's realizing now are wrong, but his son is the moral casualty. Nick's not articulate enough or active in a sense of what he's going to do, he's just kind of reacting, and all he knows is that he wants out.

The only time he really seems to come alive with a sense of purpose is when he's courting Angela.

Yeah, and the whole thing with that is that he's desperate for somebody who's taking responsibility, to be part of that. The things that she says that usually scare guys away—“I have this awful life, I have this crazy ex-boyfriend, I've got this kid with cerebral palsy”—make her even more attractive to him because she's a serious person. At first, she's just beautiful and then he realizes, “Wow, she's somebody who's taking care of business, which is what I haven't been doing for ten years.”

You have a special gift for capturing the way sensitive but inarticulate people communicate to each other. There are two sequences with Nick and Angela that work wonderfully. Where does you ear for dialog come from?

I think just listening, really, and having been in a lot of places. Somebody was talking to me about Cassavetes recently, and that's the one thing that he always worked for. He'd have a little improvisation, and then write it down, then improvise it some more, and write it down again.

He worked more from theatrical roots.

Yeah, and mine I think comes from my novel writing, so I was doing it on paper when he was working it out theatrically.

What was your conception of Carl, the character you portray?

My basic character thought for playing Carl was Jackie Presser, who was simultaneously working for the mob, the Teamsters, and the FBI. He had to keep juggling those interests, but he survived. And Carl will survive because he'll always be useful to the cops and he'll always be useful to the mob. Unless he pisses off someone like Vinnie, who just shoots him, he's politically put himself in a perfect position as a conduit for information, deals, and other stuff that gets done.

How would you compare your perspective on the police and the white working class to that in other recent urban movies like Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever?

I like Spike's movies. I really think they're getting at stuff that needs getting at, but I always feel like I'm making movies out of my own experience and what I know, not reacting to other movies. The neighborhood in Do the Right Thing could be in City of Hope, and if I had chosen to be on just one side of L Street, I could have made something very much like that. From that perspective, the cops do look very much like they do in Do the Right Thing—as invaders who don't live in the community and who don't know anything about it. I'm trying to do a wider thing, so I want to get in the car with those guys and see where they're coming from. Both my grandfathers were cops, and I have lots of relatives who were cops. The police are a tribe but they do have disagreements among themselves.

There'd probably also be a diverse range of responses to the police among various members of the black community. Not everyone would see them as an occupying army.

Sure, there'd be those people who say, “How come it takes so long for them to show up?” You know, the 911 is a joke idea. Why aren't they on our side and when they do come, why do they leave so many dead bodies?

But what we're getting at is that while Lee's is a black perspective, you're operating out of a different notion. The police are not shown as stereotypes, there's always a sense of ambiguity. If they're not fully individuated as characters, you at least get them in the round as nuanced social types.

I have one older cop who says, “My father used to live in this building.” And there are cops who say, “People steal stuff because they're poor, period. Not because they're bad, not because they're genetically predisposed, but because they're poor, and if they weren't poor they wouldn't steal stuff. My job, unfortunately, doesn't have anything to do with curing that, it just has to do with sorting out the survivors and making arrests.”

When I had friends of mine from Jersey politics see the movie, the one thing they didn't believe was the cop in the car who refuses to go along with a coverup.

You mean the Hispanic cop?

More than that he's Hispanic, he's a newcomer. These are new partners and it's an uneasy marriage. But the only thing they said is that, “I don't think that would happen,” and that's a sad commentary.

It's reminiscent of Lumet's Prince of the City, where those codes are broken.

The Italian guys I know say, “That's a bullshit movie. The only guy I had any respect for was the guy who shot himself.” It's the idea that you don't rat on your friends, you take care of your own business. City of Hope also brings to mind On the Waterfront which deals with the same kind of divided loyalties, family vs. the greater good. On the Waterfront basically tries to have it both ways. First he rats, then they have a nice slugout so it looks as if he's not just a rat. He's also somebody who'll go in there and face physical danger and he gets to throw the guy in the water.

He also finds in some vague way a moral alternative to Johnny Friendly.

To pure violence as the only way to do it. The message at the end of New Jack City, where the old guy shoots the drug dealer, is that what we need are better vigilantes. Most urban movies deal only with making it in the business world—the Working Girl type movie—or crime. City of Hope tries to deal with a lot of other things as well. Crime is one part of it but it's not the main part. You can't separate crime from urban life, especially because of what some of these characters are into, but it's not a gangster movie.

The only other American movie that this reminds me of more than On the Waterfront is Force of Evil. That's about numbers running, but it's about that sense of one guy who squeezes another who squeezes another. I think American filmmakers tend to be afraid of politics. I certainly find that in most of the reviews that I read. There's a whole raft of American film criticism that's anti-content, whether it's political or not, because they feel that it's a betrayal of pure film.

To get back to your other point, one thing that we tried to do with the Italian family is that the guys I know in construction do fairly well, if they're working, so we gave him a nice house. You know, everything isn't covered in plastic. The mother and father have a fairly good relationship, so they're not screaming at each other all the time, and waving their hands around and stuff like that. They're really becoming kind of upper middle class in income, and their roots have been sold in some ways, they've made these deals with the devil, and that has to come back to haunt them.

In your scripts for hire—like Alligator or The Howling—you do your best to deliver the genre goods, but in your own films you do your best to subvert or at least go against the grain of genre conventions. The result is a much more politically and emotionally challenging kind of work. City of Hope is not the feel good movie of the year.

Yeah, we were thinking of calling it the feel bad movie of the year.

In this regard, have you resigned yourself to being a more socially conscious version of Woody Allen—with a smaller, more discerning, better educated type of audience—or do you think that Hollywood has sold short the mass moviegoing audience and that they can respond to and appreciate a higher quality film?

What I know from having worked out there in various capacities is that if you want a mass audience for something like City of Hope, you hire stars. There's a selling aspect to all this, it's a product, and you want to get people into the theatre during its theatrical run, rather than insidiously creeping into their lives through video and cable TV, which is kind of the way that Matewan and some of our other movies got seen. The problem with trying to use stars is that there are very few of them who are also right for the part. Once you've started to invite people to the party who shouldn't be there, it changes the movie, and it's no longer what you wanted to make in the first place. There's usually a short list of stars who are right for the part—it may be two deep or only one deep—and we usually go through that list very quickly.

We've been lucky to get actors who don't necessarily sell tickets but who are considered names that people like to see, such as Tony Lo Bianco, James Earl Jones and Gloria Foster. These people could make a lot more money doing something else but they're willing to work with us because they thing it's a good part and a good project.

What prognosis do you think your film makes for the future of the city?

I think that some cities, because of the economic factors I mentioned, are doomed, especially small cities like Chelsea, Massachusetts, or Camden, New Jersey, or East St. Louis. There's just no money there and the federal government, which has taken a very Darwinian attitude toward their survival, is making no effort to help them. What's been happening—just kind of mindlessly in the economy but also with the support of people in power—is that since we need less and less people to run the things we really care about, the attitude toward those kind of body jobs is, “Let 'em go to Haiti, let 'em go to Costa Rica, let 'em leave.” I think you pay for that eventually, because stuff like that just doesn't take care of itself, and in about five to seven years there's going to have to be some kind of conscious effort to find purpose and employment for people.

Do you see a kind of de facto apartheid?

Well, what you're seeing is more and more communities which, out of their own pockets because they have the dough, pave their own streets, send their kids to their own schools, and start their own security forces. It's like the Philippines. If you move there, you're told right away that you have to have servants, a guard, and Dobermans, period. Because everybody else is so poor, and the government doesn't want to know about you, you've got to take care of protecting yourself. And if you don't have servants, people will throw shit at you on the streets, because it's your job to provide some employment.

I do feel that that is happening. If you go around some of those dying cities, you find communities like that. But you can't keep that down forever, and the hope is that the disenfranchised within those communities will have the energy and the talent and the intelligence to say, “OK, they abandoned us, but we'll run the show, we'll do something here. Things are fucked up, but we can take care of this block.” If you go to the South Bronx, there's a couple of blocks where people just said, “Fuck it, we're going to make something out of this.”

Like Kelly Street and community organizations like Banana Kelly that involve sweat equity efforts to restore buildings.

And you wish there were more of these people and that they got more encouragement when they're starting out.

So you wouldn't say that the cities are beyond redemption?

No. There is hope. The title is not only ironic. They're not getting any help from above, but there are those connections that people can make, so there is hope, and the hope is coming from within. Nobody came down from the heavens and tapped them on the shoulder and gave them the idea. It came from themselves, and that's where the hope is.