SOURCE: Sayles, John, Joan M. West, and Dennis West. “Not Playing by the Usual Rules: An Interview with John Sayles.” Cineaste 24, no. 4 (1999): 28-31.

[In the following interview, Sayles discusses his use of the threatening landscape of Alaska as the setting for Limbo.]

At a time when most American ‘independent’ films are conceived by their directors as stepping stones to an industry career, as audition pieces for the next available studio job for hire, the career of John Sayles is all the more remarkable. Over the last twenty years, dating from his self-financed debut effort, Return of the Secaucus Seven (1979), Sayles has written and directed a dozen theatrical feature films, including such memorable works as The Brother from Another Planet (1984), Matewan (1987), City of Hope (1990), Passion Fish (1992), Lone Star (1996), and Men with Guns (1997).

The award-winning novelist and short-story writer got his first filmmaking experience by writing genre scripts for Roger Corman productions such as Piranha (1978), The Lady in Red (1979), and Battle beyond the Stars (1980), and has since become one of the most sought-after screenwriters and script doctors in Hollywood. He has often plowed the earnings from that work back into his own productions and, apart from one unpleasant studio experience involving a dispute over the editing of Baby, It's You (1983), and with the collaboration of his producer and longtime partner Maggie Renzi, Sayles has always been able to retain the right of final cut and casting control.

Like many of his earlier films, Sayles's twelfth and latest production, Limbo, is distinguished by its richly detailed sociopolitical setting, nuanced character portraits, naturalistic dialog, impressive cinematography (by Academy Award-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler), and, in this case, a narrative which not only resists but also undermines genre conventions and stereotypes. It is set in contemporary Alaska, where the gold prospectors, oil drillers, fur trappers, and commercial fishermen who once exploited the natural resources of this rugged frontier landscape are being supplanted by the tourist industry and real-estate developers. The story focuses on the developing romantic relationship between Joe Gastineau (David Strathairn), a former fisherman with a troubled past now living as a handyman, and Donna De Angelo (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), a singer at a local bar, as well as a single mother involved in a difficult emotional relationship with her teenage daughter, Noelle (Vanessa Martinez). The second half of the film, arrived at through an unexpected melodramatic twist, could be said to involve more actively the film's fourth principal character—Nature. The ensuing, life-threatening ordeal becomes a crucible for their yearning but troubled emotional relationships with one another, especially that between mother and daughter. At a recent Independent Feature Project screening in New York, Sayles described Limbo as “a Robert Altman movie which midway turns into an Ingmar Bergman film by way of about two to three minutes of Quentin Tarantino.”

It is in a way a testament to Sayles's storytelling skills that he so thoroughly engrosses us in the emotional lives of his characters, and makes us so concerned for their fate, that the film's surprising ending will upset as many viewers as will be emotionally stirred by it. Indeed, for every viewer willing to appreciate the film's focus on the characters' complicated human relationships in lieu of a neat resolution of their suspenseful plight, there will be those who will be shocked and disappointed at the film's failure to fulfill generic expectations.

In the following interview, conducted by Cineaste Contributing Editor Dennis West and Joan M. West at the 25th Annual Seattle International Film Festival, Sayles discusses the thematic concerns and the controversial ending of his new film. Reader discretion, for those who have yet to see Limbo, is advised.

[West and West]: A strong sense of place characterizes many of your previous films, such as Matewan, Passion Fish and Lone Star. What attracted you to explore Alaska as a setting?

[Sayles]: I had traveled in Alaska about eleven years before I made the movie and two things in particular struck me. One was just how close you are to wilderness there. You're in civilization, but you take a fifteen-minute walk and there are wild bears, you can fall into a glacier, you can roll over in your kayak—nature is very big there. Alaska is our biggest state and there are less than a million people there.

The other thing that struck me was how many people have gone there to transform themselves, to become something they couldn't be elsewhere, and in that way it still is a frontier. If you think of America in 1492, what was the New World to Europe? You could start as a foot soldier in the army and end up as Emperor of Mexico. You could be an indentured servant who eventually owns a plantation. You could change your religion, your name, what you did for a living, your social status. Alaska, over the years, has been that kind of place, but because nature is so big there, because of the harsh weather, and the things that you do to make a living up there, you were usually risking your life. Gold prospecting, working on the oil pipeline, and logging are dangerous, and commercial fishing is still the most dangerous job in America in terms of fatalities. Alaska was traditionally a place where men went to risk their lives, to get a job, or to make a fortune. That frontier aspect interested me, especially in that I was about to tell a story about risk, and about the difference between true risk and the illusion of risk.

One of Limbo's themes is that of nature and ecology vs. economic development in a frontier setting. One character sees the future of Alaska as a giant theme park, while others think of the state as a place to eternally harvest natural bounty, such as halibut, salmon, and lumber.

It's an interesting dynamic because this stuff is always in flux. When Joe Gastineau's half-brother comes to town and says, “I hear they closed down the pulp mill,” he replies, “Well, the town smells better.” It's tough on the local people that these original industries died off because they took pride in the fact that they took risks to make a living. In the last ten to fifteen years, more and more of those jobs have been economically phased out or have been regulated so that the risk has been taken out of them, and therefore the way people see themselves has suffered. There's a scene in the beginning of the film, where all those people in the bar are telling stories about plane crashes or ship wrecks or bear attacks, and then you see the woman who works for the cruise ship, and her stories are a little bit more like tales. Those stories that used to be about yourself have become commodities.

While in human terms there's something sad about that, in raw, ecological, ‘don't-cut-it-down’ terms, tourism might end up being a cleaner, less destructive industry. In Juneau, during the Gold Rush days, for example, they weren't finding veins of gold that you could chip out with a pickax. They were taking huge rocks and stamping them in machines that ran twenty-four hours a day, year after year after year, and the noise was deafening. That mountain is honeycombed with holes and is lucky it's still standing. In terms of fishing, the Tlingit Indians would put their traps halfway across the river, so half the fish would get through, they'd go upstream to breed, and there'd be another run the following year. When white people came up there to fish, they wanted to make a fortune, and they'd put their traps all the way across the river, and they almost wiped the salmon out. But the Indians went to court very early, the Tlingit really had their act together legally, and sued enough people to have some regulations enacted. The funny thing is that although these changes have been tough on some people, it may be better ecologically for the state. If you're a tree, you might be in better shape now.

Does the title Limbo refer not just to the principal characters but also to your view of Alaska's current socioeconomic situation?

Not in any conscious way. I was raised Catholic and a Catholic concept of limbo is the place where the souls of unbaptized people go, those who haven't officially been able to be good or bad. The thing that sets it apart from purgatory, which is sort of a waiting room where you do your time and eventually go to heaven, is that limbo is infinite.

For me, limbo is a state that people get trapped in. For example, I'm in this terrible marriage, but, you know what, it's just bearable, but it's bearable. If I get divorced, it's going to be awfully messy, and I'll be alone, and that scares me more than staying in the marriage. You're in a job you hate, but, you know what, I have to feed my kids, and if I quit today, and tell them to take this job and shove it, I don't know if I can get another job, so I'm going to stay in this job. I'm an Indian in Chiapas and I'm in a bad situation, the government is really fucking me over, but, you know, they're not killing me, so do I put on a ski mask and join Subcomandante Marcos, where I could get killed and lose my family and everything? Naaah, I'm going to stay here. So many people live in those limbos, where it's not quite hell, but it's sure not making them happy. For me, the sort of key to the film is that the only way to get out of those kinds of situations is risk, and risk involves not knowing what's going to happen next, or how it's going to work.

Why is Joe, at this point in his life, ready to take chances and risks again, both in work and in love?

Basically, I think, because somebody came along and rooted him out of the cave that he was in. Both he and Donna are people who have had big failures, but they respond differently. I really don't know why people have different reactions—sometimes it's sociology, or maybe it's chemistry. Joe's reaction to failure, to the pain of being burnt, is to not take another risk again, physically or emotionally, for twenty-five years. When Donna gets hammered, her reaction is to have like a two-day period of mourning, and then to get up and say, OK, new day, and lead with her chin again. And she's the one who pulls him out.

He's like a Conrad character—he's got this terrible past, he wishes there were some way he could redeem himself, in his own eyes, for what he feels responsible about, but not enough to risk being responsible for another human being ever again. If something falls in his lap, though, he might grab at it. These two women have to say, “Hey, we'd like you to work this boat for us,” and you see his reaction, “Ooh, wow, a boat.” He would never have gone and said, “Hey, Harmon's boat is available. Maybe I could get enough together to buy it.” Then this woman comes along and he doesn't want to give out any information. She asks, “So how come you're not married?” He is dragged, not quite kicking and screaming, into an emotional situation where he says, “OK, here I am, do you want to take a shot at this?”

Does Donna's outlook on life represent a genuine optimism or a kind of self-protective delusion?

I think it is a courage bordering on recklessness but, once again, I don't know where it comes from. I had an interesting experience in Guatemala, when I was doing research for Men with Guns. I was in a very small village, way up in the mountains, where I met a really nice woman. She had a baby boy in her arms and I asked her her son's name. She told me and I said, “Do you have other kids?” She said, “Well, I have two now, but I had five.” “What happened to the other three?,” I asked, and she said, “The first three died. Children here die because we don't have a clinic nearby, there are no doctors, so if children get sick, you can't get down the mountain in time to save them.” She was not broken up emotionally. You know that it hurt her, but she went and had two more kids.

I thought of the mothers that I know in upstate New York. They have one or two kids and if they don't get into the right pre-school, it's a huge disaster. I can't imagine any of them having lost one child and not going into five years of mourning. Their reaction to that failure, to that pain, would be to say I'm not coming out again. Certainly none of them would have had three children die and then try to have another one. That comes from your experience, your world-view, and all that. Sometimes it's just personality, though. You can see three kids in the same family, and one of them is fearless, and the other two—same parents, same situation—really don't want to take a chance.

It's unusual in American cinema to feature forty-something protagonists in a love story. Why did you?

Referring once again to risk and failure, I'm interested in the way that, as you get older, and you're still looking for relationships, you're a more formed person. It's harder to find a good fit. You know what you don't like, what you don't want to do, what you don't want to be, plus you have standards. When you're twenty, you don't have that many standards. You've got a lot of time to try things, and you're not that formed yet. As you get older, it's kind of like late in the chess game, and there aren't that many moves left. Add to that having a child, and you're not just looking for a partner in life, you're looking for someone who can deal with your kid. That makes it even harder to find a fit.

I don't think you can do that with thirty-year-olds. By the time you're forty, you've had a couple of relationships that didn't work. Donna is reckless, she gets involved in all these relationships, but she also gets out of them quickly when she realizes they are going nowhere. She probably used to stay with guys—and this is something I spoke with Mary Elizabeth about—for three months or three years, not three weeks, by telling herself, “He's just acting this way, he's really a good guy, and this is going to work out.” Well, now she's learned, so while she still has this openness, she also has a quicker trigger finger than she used to. She hits the eject button when she realizes it's not working out, because she knows she's got better standards.

Would you comment on your use of the diary to characterize Noelle, the troubled daughter?

One of the things the movie deals with is how people use stories. The scene in the beginning of the film, where all these Alaskans are telling stories about plane wrecks and so on, they're using stories to define themselves, to tell the world and to tell themselves, “We're Alaskans, we're the people who live with danger.” Donna uses the stories in the songs that she sings. She talks about connecting emotionally with them and she picks the song for the moment emotionally—she even breaks up with her boyfriend through the lyrics of a song.

This young girl probably couldn't sit down and analyze those stories for you or say why everything was there. They're very creative, but they're also very emotional. This is how she gets her emotions out, and they are confused and angry and hurt. All that kind of raw teenage emotion is coming out of these stories, and she's starting to realize that they have something to do with her mother and this guy, so she picks her spots. Sometimes the storytelling just takes her and sometimes she looks at her mother and just lays it out, especially the angry parts. She could not have those literal conversations with her mother, but she can tell those stories to them.

And she's pushed. Her mother says, “Are you gonna read some more?” She could have said, “No, the diary is blank, I'm not going to ready any more,” and just sulk. But something clicks and she says, “You wanna hear some more? OK, I'll read some more,” and she just starts to free associate. What she's free associating on, however, is not something intellectual, it's absolutely raw emotion, and that's how she uses stories.

Limbo is an unusual film in terms of genre expectations—it's part romance, part crime story, part troubled teen biography, and part Jack Londonesque survival tale.

I think our movies have always been in-between genres. Matewan is not quite a Western. Lone Star is not quite a detective story. Sometimes you warn people very early on that's not what they're getting into. In Brother from Another Planet, for example, we have the cheapest special effect in the world for the crash. That's done on purpose, as if to say, “This is not Star Wars, folks. This is about these people, and not about the hardware they rode in on.”

In some of our other movies, we don't use those big action-adventure musical scores. At the beginning of Limbo we even have a kind of John Williamsy, big overblown fanfare type of score for the travelogue that introduces the film, but once you've made fun of that, you can't use it seriously. You've told the audience that this is not a movie that's going to have the Hallelujah Chorus in it. But it's a subtle thing, not something that they're going to be told overtly, but that they're going to feel.

One of the things that I think is odd about this movie, or different than a lot of movies, is that we are asking the audience to really take the same trip that the characters are, and that trip entails surprise and risk. I think the most important phrase in the movie is when the developer says, “What do you get when you get on a roller coaster? You get the illusion of risk, not real risk.” Most genre movies—and I write them for other people—are the illusion of risk. You've got your seat belt on, so, at the end of it, you know you're not going to be hurtled into space. You know that the hero won't be killed and that the nice young couple is going to get together, no matter how many twists and turns you go through with them. You know what ride you're getting on. You're told very early, “OK, this is the space mountain ride, or this is Mad Max, or this is When Harry Met Sally.” In Limbo, you get on one ride, and, all of a sudden, you're thrown into another. The only other movie like it that I can think of offhand is Jonathan Demme's Something Wild, which starts out as a screwball comedy and ends up as a thriller.

I want the audience to say, just as the characters are saying, “Wait a minute, how did these guys get on board? Who are they, where did they come from, and now we're in cold water,” without a whole lot of warning. The only warning you have is one short scene of a guy with a gun. I don't have anyone watching them through binoculars, you don't see them shooting on deck, you're just suddenly in the water with these people, wondering, along with the Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio character, “What is going on here?” In the same regard, at the end of the film, these people have come together as a family. They have taken an emotional risk, and now they're facing a very uncertain future, and I'm asking the audience to face that future with them.

As far as genres go, you don't want to stay on a genre too long, or else people are going to be very disappointed when they get out of it. The movie that Limbo starts out as is not your average generic movie, either. There are these parallel plots, you're meeting all these people, and I could have continued that movie, like City of Hope or Lone Star, and kept going with the parallel stories, and eventually some of them would resolve and some of them wouldn't. Instead I chose to have them run into a truck and their life is never the same.

If you think of most disaster movies, the first ten to fifteen minutes are very boring. You're just meeting people—they're mowing their lawns, they're not going anywhere. I felt that if I was going to yank people out of a movie into something else, I want them to think, “Well, I see where we're going,” and then, “Oops, we're not going there,” instead of, “Oh, we're just meeting these people, what time is it, when is the meteor going to hit, or when are the bad guys going to show up?” That's asking a lot of a mainstream audience, especially because they are so trained, and you almost can't help but surprise or sometimes disappoint people when you don't play by the usual rules.

What were your visual goals for the film? Much of the lighting and many of the colors seemed limbo-esque.

It rains twelve to fourteen feet a year in that part of Alaska, and, knowing that, you write it into the script. Those conditions create a misty look to the air and serve as a kind of natural filter to the light. That's also what's dangerous about the area—you're often wet and, if you're cold, you stay wet and cold and it's hard to find good shelter.

There were a couple of visual through lines that I worked on with Haskell Wexler. One was that, in general, when the characters are moving toward each other, even if it's angrily, the scenes are a little bit warmer. When they're moving away from each other, when they're isolated or alone, the scenes are a little bit colder, the tone in general is just a little bit more brittle.

The other through line was how nature was treated, but this is fairly subtle in the film and I hope that the audience feels it more than they notice it. This involves how you stage the action, compose the images, what filters or lenses you use, and how you use the camera. In the first part of the movie, generally speaking, nature is seen as more controllable, more packageable, more of a backdrop, like a picture postcard. The people in front are in control and there's all this beautiful scenery behind them, like at the wedding with these beautiful snowcapped mountains in the background. Or you go on this beautiful cruise that's almost like that little documentary you saw at the beginning, then, once they are yanked out of that world, where you think you can control nature, it is suddenly seen as looming over you. It is three dimensional, often dark and dangerous, and you are very small in it. Nature gets bigger and less controllable and people get smaller.

The thesis of that treatment is that human beings are romantic about nature but nature is not romantic about human beings. It does what it does and, if you can survive, terrific. If not, forget about it. And they don't survive if they're not prepared for it. That is something I talked to Haskell about, sometimes scene to scene, but also in terms of the general arc of the picture. By the end I wanted the viewer to realize that there's no way to control nature, it's going to do what it wants to do. Winter is coming, these people really can't stay here because they're not equipped. This is not the Swiss Family Robinson—he makes this puny little fish trap and they eat for a while but then the fish stop running.

Does the Kris Kristofferson character represent a type of shady adventurer who thrives in a frontier setting like Alaska?

The important line about him is what Joe Gastineau says—“I'm not saying that people don't like him. I'm saying that I don't trust him.” Certainly in Alaskan folklore the most famous figure is “Soapy” Smith, who was this famous con man/entrepreneur during the Klondike Gold Rush. Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller was kind of extrapolated from his legend. So, yes, he is based on a historical figure from Alaska, a guy who's willing to take a chance.

There was a time in Alaska when something like one out of every seven citizens was a Vietnam veteran. There was room to go up there and forget about the war, to grow your beard long, to have a gun, and go out hunting and fishing, and not have to deal with people very much. When you're in the wilderness there and you see a stranger, you're not quite sure—it's not like Deliverance or anything—but you're not quite sure if they want you there. They may want their privacy. So the further you get away from civilization, the more danger there is, not just with nature, but also with people.