John Sayles is back in San Sebastián with frontier western Lone Star.
Jonathan Holland discusses Sayles' techniques with the indie pioneer
Somebody once described a foreigner as someone who is outside a culture whilst being inside it at the same time which describes pretty well John Sayles' position with regard to the Hollywood film industry. He travels around the interesting parts of it, doing as the Romans do and taking what he needs not snapshots but money and then goes home to be himself again.
Sayles has returned for a San Seb in which Name Americans have been thin on the ground after the 1994 edition devoted a retrospective to him. For many the prototypical US indie director, part of him makes the films he wants needs to make, while part of him directs Bruce Springsteen videos, or scripts (for example) The Clan of the Cave Bear, or rewrites the script of Apollo 13. In the States one critic, bowled over by the way Lone Star captures Americanness, was moved to compare it to Citizen Kane. And that never does any harm.
Sayles, however, is cynical on success: 'It doesn't make you a better writer, but my agent can charge more money. If you have a substantial financial hit early in your career, you can make flops for four or five years. Having made as many films as we have, it's made it easier for us to get our phone calls answered. Each movie should expand your audience a little.'
Sayles is a tall, rangy man, laid-back in body and edgy in mind, who confesses to being one inch shorter than the height at which basketball players can drop dead of a disease caused by circulation problems. He is intellectually curious, too, describing with enthusiasm in relationship to a project he is working on the peculiarities of a certain kind of termite, or noting with worry the decline of the steel industry in Bilbao.
Does he find the publicity circus a necessary evil? 'We've never had the possibility of saying 'we make the movies' and it's your problem to distribute them. We don't have huge stars, so we can't just send them to the junket and buy a lot of TV time. Typically I'll do between 200-300 interviews per movie.'
Sayles whose creative energy seems to have no ceiling at all, and who apparently has the ability to get inside other people's imaginations at will writes fiction as well. Though Los Gusanos, the latest novel, did take thirteen years to write. What connects all these projects? 'Storytelling. The only real difference is that when I'm working for someone else, I'm helping them tell their story. I was an actor before directing, and acting is really another way of helping someone else tell their story.'
His general reply when people ask him if he'd like to turn his own fiction into film is 'this is not a two hour movie, it's a fifty-hour mini series.' The only spec script which Sayles has written to date was Bill Forsythe's Breaking In which started life as a short story he couldn't get to work while 1987's Matewan is based on a section of his second novel, Union Dues. 'With someone else's project, you can't get as emotionally involved,' he says.
Lone Star has a complicated narrative structure, doing clever things with storytelling which novels are generally able to accommodate more gracefully than film. I am beginning to think that for Sayles, there is no difference at all between a movie and a book. 'The effects of a film have to go through your head first,' he explains. 'With a movie, you can go straight to the spinal column. It's a more visceral thing.' Ah.
'Emotional' and 'involvement' are words which many would associate with Sayles, and they apply not only to his material, but to his cast and crew as well. Any sharp-eared interviewer will notice that he uses the first person plural when discussing his projects, rather than the standard Directorial 'I'. The 'total control' over a project which is so important to him is rechannelled out, to the benefit of everyone involved.
'I know that the people who work with me could be making more money somewhere else. They're making a movie in five weeks which other people would make in fifteen. But at least they know that six studio executives who they invite to the screening in Minnesota aren't going to cut their best work out of the film for commercial reasons. I make a deal with the crew and the actors. I tell them it's my job to get their best work out there. This way, we get the trust of actors: with us, they know they're dealing with one-stop shopping.'
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