FILM COMMENT HOME
TABLE OF CONTENTS
BUY THE NEW ISSUE!
ART & INDUSTRY BY AMY TAUBIN:
NEW: FATIH AKIN'S HEAD-ON AND DANIEL BURMAN'S LOST EMBRACE
ONLINE EXCLUSIVES
SIGN UP FOR
E-NEWS
READ MARCH E-NEWS
FORUM
ARCHIVE
NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
WALTER READE THEATER
FILMLINC.COM HOME
COMING IN March/April 2005:
Dustin Hoffman
Bulle Ogier by Gary Indiana
Hirokazu Kore-eda by Chuck Stephens
Amitabh Bachchan by David Chute
Lucrecia Martel's The Holy Girl by Kent Jones
And much more
FILM COMMENT
May/June 1996
"I don't want to blow anything by people"
john sayles
Interviewed by Gavin Smith
photo: Matewan
Will the real John Sayles please stand up? Novelist, former B-movie hack writer, studio rewrite ace (most recently, Apollo 13), bit-part actor --but mainly independent filmmaker. Meaning what exactly?
The first generation of independents (Cassavetes, Warhol, Shirley Clarke, Maurice Engel, Robert Young, Robert Kramer) represented a distinct break with the classical values of mainstream U.S. filmmaking. Sayles's generation, the second (including Jost, Burnett, and Nunez), withdrew from the avant-gardism and cinŽma vŽritŽ of the first, towards sociopolitical engagement and naturalism. They were free of the selfconsciousness and mannered styles of the third generation (Jarmusch, the Coens, Van Sant, Soderberg), and almost old enough to be fathers to most of the fourth (Kevin Smith, Tarantino, Hartley).
Unlike his peers, Sayles has found an autonomous niche between the studio major leagues and the indie minors. For him, the term "independent" surely has a political significance largely lost on or taken for granted by the next two generations. In fact, many of his films have internalized it thematically --the social and/or personal struggles in Lianna ('83) and Matewan ('87) are explicitly about gaining independence; his films ponder and problematize the relationships of individual/community and personal/social; and there's always an underlying dynamic between idealists seeking freedom and pragmatic realists who have attained a measure of independence. That last is worth noting because, as a filmmaker, Sayles himself is strikingly pragmatic, tailoring his screenplays and style to the resources available to him.
Indeed, Sayles's sensibility is, in the first place, a practical and organizing one (it's significant, I think, that he edits his films himself). Taken along with his flair for considered, critical reworking of narrative and social conventions, this may explain something: the curious dispassion and objectivity of his films. The risk-taking is discreet, embedded in the writing --there's rarely any nerviness in the directing, any feeling of a director getting carried away with the medium. Until recently, his films have been mainly prose, lacking in poetry. They can be compelling and moving, but for someone whose career began on the wild fringes of Corman exploitation flicks, Sayles is surprisingly respectful of filmic decorum and good taste. I miss the disreputable vitality and juicy, sardonic humor of his screenplays for Lewis Teague's Lady in Red ('79) and Alligator ('80) and Joe Dante's The Howling ('81). Ever since, apart from Passion Fish ('92), Sayles puzzlingly seems to have largely denied his innate sense of humor, while the comedic aspects of The Brother from Another Planet ('84) feel flat and labored. Nearly twenty years on, Sayles's scripts for films like Piranha (Dante, '78) exemplify the subversive potential of the pulp/exploitation/genre tradition. But like "independent," "exploitation" too has its own undeniable political significance, and having mastered this brand of fast-and-loose storytelling, Sayles turned away to more earnest, well-meaning --but at times impersonal --subject matter, and more quiet storytelling registers: Return of the Secaucus Seven ('80), Lianna, and Brother from Another Planet all shun or downplay the traditional principles of overt conflict and tension as narrative mainsprings. Is David Thomson correct when he writes, "There is an emphatic integrity to Sayles --it may be his greatest limit as an artist"?
Sayles was formed by the left ideals of the Sixties, but began making films at the dawn of a reactionary era. Secaucus Seven, still one of his best, takes stock of the diminished expectations and adjusted ideals of a group of former radicals; it gives flesh to the credo, "The Personal Is Political." Sayles's finest films are more concerned with messy journeys towards self-honesty and personal truth than with the struggle for social and political justice: the former makes the latter possible. And community matters to Sayles both as a subject and in terms of filmmaking practice --over the years, like Altman and Hartley, a stock company of regular collaborators has remained a constant: producer Maggie Renzi, composer Mason Daring, actors David Strathairn, Joe Morton, Gordon Clapp, and many others.
The trajectory of Sayles's work is one of progressive outward expansion from private to social realms --the intimate studies of personal self-discovery of the early films increasingly share screentime with wider social problems, from Brother from Another Planet on. Matewan (Sayles's first truly visceral film, and an important one artistically) and Eight Men Out ('88, a film too encumbered by schematic exposition) are historical/political chronicles, and what they gain in scale they to some extent lose in character dimensionality. But the multicharacter civic drama City of Hope ('91) strikes a remarkable balance between the two by the device of conflating personal and social crisis. From City of Hope on, all Sayles's films are about processes of recovery and reconciliation.
His newest, Lone Star, represents a breakthrough to a new artistic level. Its complexity and range are novelistic, and the film marks his most fluent and lyrical use of the medium. A Tex-Mex mystery/civic drama with Oedipal overtones, reminiscent of Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem, it concerns a smalltown sheriff whose investigation into the 40-year-old murder of the town's notoriously corrupt then-sheriff brings to a head his unresolved emotional conflicts with his dead father, another town law-enforcer of legendary stature. With an ambitious subplot set in the black community and the peacetime military, which rhymes with and echoes the main action, Lone Star manages to be at once a classical American drama of unreconciled family passion and an acute post-Bell Curve commentary on the racial stratification and cultural conflicts of contemporary American society. It may be Sayles's best film yet, and it's essential viewing. --G.S.
You've always talked about your work in terms of storytelling. In Lone Star you're examining the role of storytelling in shaping society's sense of itself.
Yeah. You know, history has the word "story" in it, and the main thing I was thinking about in writing the movie was: "What do we need history for, what do we use it for?" And that's history both in the kind of larger social sense of "Remember the Alamo," but also personal history. At what point do we say, "Okay, you can't blame history". Chet [Eddie Robinson] says at the end [of Lone Star], "My father says you have to start from scratch and pull yourself up from there" --which isn't true. Nobody does that. Everybody starts with some kind of handicap or advantage, and that's their personal history. And [there's] also social, group history. I was interested in the way those two things interact. But also, is there escape from that?
What about the moment in the film when Sam (Chris Cooper) talks about how his story is over?
Both Pilar [Elizabeth Pe–a] and Sam are people on the verge of accepting that they blew something. Sam is 40, and he's realized that he doesn't want to be sheriff, that that was something he had to deal with about his father, not something he wanted to do. Sam is trying to deal with a father who's dead, and Del [Joe Morton] is trying to deal with a father who's alive. Sam is going back into the past, digging the deepest, in a way. On the other hand, Del's son is looking for roots. But he's got the live museum, he's got Otis [Ron Canada], the grandfather, there. And it was very purposeful that I have Otis be a guy who's into this Seminole history stuff, and that their big talk finally be in front of a museum exhibit. It's about roots.
There's a positive side to remembering that stuff. A last line in the picture, which I once considered for the title, is "Forget the Alamo." For Pilar and Sam, to have their relationship --there is an extent to which romantic love is antisocial. Not marriage, which is very social. That's when you make it public, and say, "Okay, we're going to live in the community, we're going to follow certain rules, we're now allowing the rest of the community into our relationship." It's why a lot of people get along fine until they get married. It's a social contract, whereas this romantic love Sam and Pilar have is automatically antisocial. So, at the end they have to say, "Forget what society thinks --we are going to do this thing together." So, there is also that sense that sometimes what you have to do is just forget history; you have to escape it.
How did you approach structuring Lone Star? How did the Del-Otis and army subplots emerge?
When I write, having been an actor, I go through and play every part, and say, "Is there a three-dimensional character here? What are the connections between this character and the rest of the story, and can I have more than one connection, thematically and just in terms of plot?" So what tends to happen in my movies is that the secondary characters start moving forward and become primary. The average Hollywood movie foregrounds the stars, and everyone else is basically an extra. I remember telling the actors in City of Hope, "Look, we're doing these mastershots, and, yes, you wander off camera, but you have to wander off camera with the energy and knowledge of what you're going to say next, so that if the camera followed you we would have a story. Each one of you, no matter what your piece in the puzzle is, we have to feel like that's a story worth following. And the movie could be about just that."
As Lone Star started to evolve, I wanted to have these three communities; we were basically in a part of Mexico that somebody had drawn a line underneath and made into America, but the people hadn't changed. The Anglos got to run things, but it was still basically a Mexican town. And where do the blacks fit into that? Well, they're kind of mercenaries in this case. A lot of that thinking came out of the Gulf War. I saw, on television, black men and women being asked, "So, what was your part, why are you here, what do you think of this war?" and time after time I heard, "This was the best job I could get." Then I started seeing a lot of interracial couples, who were married and in the army. And I realized, here is what used to be, only a few years ago, one of the most racist and retrogressive parts of society, now being the place where even though it's about going and killing other people, there seems to be a certain degree of equal opportunity. Or if not equal, better than in the free market. You can move up as long as you're willing to be the Ariel of the piece, as long as you're willing to be the mercenary, the hired gun.
So I knew the social thing first --that I wanted a ruling class that was having to give up the reins and the Mexicans, who are taking over the reins. And then I wanted there to be this mercenary class. The black people would be an enclave, one small neighborhood and an army base --these artificial little worlds. The driving narrative is this murder mystery, but I also wanted, in each of those groups, to have a personal story that was important.
And then I basically had the idea, "Well, what if Otis isn't just this guy who's seen it all and owns the roadhouse, but has something to deal with, which is a live son." It also interested me because it's more moving. Sam's dealing with a father who's dead --it's history, and there's something always slightly removed about history. There's nothing we can do about history. We can learn what really happened. His father's dead. He can't change that relationship. He can change how he feels about it, but he's not going to have that scene with Dad or anything like that. But if Otis, this bar owner, has a son, and they've had this totally chilly nonrelationship for years, and now they have to deal with each other, that's got to be more moving, because it's immediate.
Lone Star has the most complicated narrative articulation so far in your work. Sam's role is to assemble this story from a series of witnesses, a story he becomes the protagonist of.
In my novels I can deal with multiple points of view. With any history you have to factor in who's telling the history and how they see the world, what's their agenda. If they're obsessed with father-and-son relationships, it's going to be all about fathers and sons. If they're obsessed with great men, it's going to be a Great Men history. One of the ways I try to get out of that in my fiction is by usually having a very large-cast canvas, with maybe fifteen, twenty-five points of view. Each chapter will be written in a different point of view, not in first-person but third-person. Every once in a while there's a little bit of omniscience. When we are in the scene with a person, the style of the writing changes according to who that person is and what they see. They often reappear as just a character in somebody else's point of view, in the next chapter or six chapters down.
Whereas in movies, it's very difficult to get away from three principal points of view --difficult for the audience to follow, difficult for the filmmaker to do. There's the omniscient point of view, which is kind of the wide shot. And then there's the protagonist point of view, which I always think of as a Halloween movie: the person looking around in the corners and hearing little creaky noises and being worried, or being inside a closet when the chainsaw rips through it. And then there's the antagonist's point of view: the guy in the hockey mask, looking for the victim. Rarely can you get away with a movie with more than those three points of view and have the audience still follow. It's just tough, you know?
Lone Star withdraws from omniscience into a more subjective reality.
Because it's involved with history, I wanted to keep that idea that the answers he's going to get will always be influenced by the person who's telling them --like Citizen Kane, where the faceless quester keeps getting a little bit more complete a picture of Kane because a different person knows a different side of him. Kind of like The Secret of Roan Inish ['94], where the grandfather and the crazy uncle are telling stories, I wanted there to be that guide who starts you into the story. And then you get into it, and you live it immediately. I wanted there to be that little residue of somebody watching.
So when we see Aladia Cruz killed, we cut away to the guy who started the story, hiding under the bridge. And that's where his story is coming from --a witnessed murder. When Hollis [Clifton James] and Otis tell the story at the end, Otis introduces it, but when we come out of it Hollis is also telling the story, so we start changing points of view within the telling of it. When you see the closeup of the gun firing, the one that kills Charlie Wade [Kris Kristofferson], there's one shot of it shooting left and there's another shooting right. The audience doesn't know what direction it's coming from. Two people, different points of view.
Your use of fluid transitions in and out of the past suggest a kind of magic-realism style. Were they all written in from the start?
Yeah. I wanted the past, those stories about his father, to be so much more present than when you play the harp and do the lap dissolve. Because Sam is still about the past; as quiet as he is, he is still an other-directed individual. He carries his father thing with him, mostly in a resentful way --he has to live under this guy's shadow. Same thing with the transitions from piece to piece in City of Hope --they were all written as well. You don't cut to another part of the room; you are brought to another part of the room, and then the camera just wanders off with a new group of people. It's about people thinking that they are in these little enclaves, but they really are stuck together. What they do affects somebody else, even if it's like you send your kid to private school, instead of public school --it may seem very personal to you, but it is a political act whether you like it or not. That was the point of City of Hope, and I wanted that feeling of "We don't have to cut." A cut is very much a tear. You use a cut to say there's a separation between this thing and that thing. And so in Lone Star, I didn't even want a dissolve, which is a soft cut, I didn't want that separation if I could avoid it.
Could you talk about the significance of the titles City of Hope and Lone Star?
City of Hope can be taken literally or it can be taken ironically. So much of it is about believers and cynics. The character I play, for instance, is a cynic. I only play characters who don't change throughout the movie, because I just don't have the time to do the actor work, of knowing where I am if there's a character shift throughout the movie, from scene to scene. If Joe Morton's character says, "I want to make this a city of hope," you believe it. If the mayor, who is a cynic, says it, it's ironic. A city of hope according to him is a city where you take everything that's not nailed down and then you leave the blacks and Hispanics to fight over what's left. That's real politics, patronage politics when it goes bad. What is interesting is that people had two reactions to the movie. People would either say, "I felt like some people are lost, and some people find themselves, or you feel like they're going to make it," and then other people said, "Wait a minute, where's the hope in this movie?" It's the same movie --it's a litmus test. It's how do you see the world? These very same scenes, are you hopeful or are you hopeless?
Lone Star's title has an immediate visceral thing, and then there's the historical thing. Sam is very much the loner in the Western tradition. It's kind of like High Noon, the man against the town --that's how he sees himself. By the end, what you hope is that he doesn't see himself that way anymore. He's starting to reintegrate himself in society. "I've got to leave you people alone with your legend." Texas was the Lone Star State, before they were part of the Union, after they had kicked the Mexicans out. They were a republic. Because they had their eye on becoming part of the United States, they said, "We're going to be the Lone Star --the individual that is eventually going to join the society."
At the time it came out, I felt City of Hope was a sort of response to Do the Right Thing. There was also a strong influence from TV's Hill Street Blues.
Sure they were. In the case of Do the Right Thing, which I liked quite a bit, I felt like this is a complex situation seen from one block. And I felt some of the characters were one-dimensional. The cops, for instance: Many of my older relatives are cops, both my grandfathers were cops. I kind of know a little bit more, and care a little bit more about where they're coming from. And they don't say, "Let's get in the car and beat some black people up." I want you to tell me where they're coming from, and also what they're getting. The question is, is it that the edgy guys choose to be cops, or is it that after three years of being a cop, you become that way?
Do the Right Thing was a great microcosm; City of Hope is an expanded microcosm. It's not national, but it is citywide --it's not just that neighborhood. Spike did a great thing, which was to get it down to that block, which looks like a set the way that Ernest [Dickerson] lit it. It could almost be a play, set in the pizza shop. People could come in and report the scenes. And you could have more scenes in the booths and all that kind of stuff. The riot could be in and outside of the thing.... It was influential in my thinking, but City of Hope was a story I've been thinking of doing for twenty years. A city thing, that was about all the levels of the city, and how it's connected.
The Hill Street Blues thing is kind of unavoidable. I liked that show, but I didn't get to see it very much --I basically am not a regular TV watcher. What I liked was that it was much more realistic about the way that police work, detective work, is...you don't just have one case. Something comes up on a case that happended two weeks ago --that's ancient history. There's not that dramatic focus on one thing.
When you made Return of the Secaucus Seven, did you have a model?
Yeah, it's one movie where the philosophy was "I want to make a movie myself. I may only get to do it once in my life. So, yes, it is an audition piece, but on the other hand, this may be the only time I get to do this. So why make somebody else's movie?" Which is why I didn't make a story about an ax murderer in a haunted house. It's not what I want to spend a year of my life doing. Even though the ax murderer may have been a quicker ticket to getting to direct movies. I always say I was catapulted from total obscurity to relative obscurity. I had x amount of money: $40,000 in pocket. Who can I get to be in this movie? Well, I know all these actors who are not in the Screen Actors Guild yet. Well, they're all 30. I'm not going to be able to move the camera, I just don't have the time and I'm not going to be able to get an experienced crew. Nowadays you could, because everyone's gone to film school. But in those days, our crew were people who had shot 30-second spots for TV in Boston. They'd done commercials. The model was basically Nashville. And that came out my not so much saying, "This movie is going to be like Nashville in spirit or anything," but saying, "If I can't move the camera, how can I have any movement? Well, it'll have to be a cut. What motivates a cut?" And in Nashville, a million subplots motivated the cuts. I'll always have a reason to cut if I'm going to another subplot.
Had you seen Cassavetes's films at that point?
Yeah, and those were very influential --not what they were about, but more in that you could have recognizable human behavior on screen. And the fact of Cassavetes's movies, that here was a guy who took the money that he made in a different part of the industry, and he put it on the table and he made his own movies. That was a great precedent to have, the possibility of those movies. That I actually saw them in a theater. It was not easy for him to get them distributed, but he got them distributed. There were other movies besides his where there was recognizable human behavior, but usually it was movie behavior. When people leave the theater I want them to be talking about human beings, about their own lives and the lives of other people they know or could know. Rather than thinking, "Oh, that was like Citizen Kane" or "That was like Raiders of the Lost Ark."
© 1996 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Read the entire interview in the May-June 1996 issue.
