The
interview was set for 10:30 AM. Usually
they run a few minutes late as the celebrity works his way through a call list.
When the moment arrives an assistant handles the intros. Not this time. At precisely 10:30:00, the phone rang and
iconic Indie filmmaker John Sayles introduced himself. And why not? A no-nonsense, get- it -done type of auteur, Sayles handles his own
publicity calls and was keen to discuss his remarkable and varied career in
advance of a weekend retrospective at LA’s Cinefamily February 18 - 20.
Sayles
broke into the business, like so many before him, by working with genre legend
Roger Corman who figuratively and literally wrote the book on low budget
filmmaking. “I got very lucky, didn’t
realize it at the time, “Sayles recalls. “I wrote three screenplays (Piranha, The Lady in Red and Alligator) and had them all made into
movies within the year.†The experience
helped shape him as a filmmaker. “A lot of it was learning what you had to have
money for and what was just labor intensive. What can you do with just good ideas and hard work?â€
He
immediately put his guerilla filmmaking chops to good use. “My first movie
(1979’s Return of the Secaucus Seven)
cost under $100,000 and was shot in five weeks, my last movie (2013’s Go For Sisters) was under $1 million and
was shot in four weeks.â€
Sayles’
facility for the unique language of screenplays served him well over the
years. His â€For Hire†literary work on
features like The Howling (1981), The Challenge
(1982) and The Clan of the Cave Bear
(1986) provided much-needed capital so he could make his movies like Baby, It’s You (1983), Matewan (1987), Lonestar (1996) and others. He also wrote an early draft of a Spielberg
sci-fi concept called Night Skies
that later became the worldwide phenomenon known as E.T. (Presumably that helped finance many a can of raw stock!) Through all of his projects Sayles keeps an
eye on the bottom line, asking himself, “How am I going to tell this story with
the means I have… and pay people decently and have it be a livable experience?â€
John Sayles on set of AMIGO. Photo credit Mary Cybulski
People
at every level of the film industry will tell you that “the business†has
changed. Sayles has directed 18 films in
a thirty year career and has his own take on how today’s new technology has impacted
the new indie voices trying to get heard… “Technology has made filmmaking
so much more democratic. We were just at Sundance and they get 2000-3000
feature films submitted every year. When
we started out, that would’ve been a dozen. It’s much easier to make a movie, but there’s a bottleneck in
distribution.â€
Sayles
has made his name by telling highly personal stories that get his attention. “Generally it’s something that I know enough
about to be interested in, but not so much about that there’s no investigation
left.†Then he asks himself two
important questions – “What do I really think about this?†and “What really did
go on here?†Sayles is drawn to characters
who feel, “Oh my God, if I turn left it’s not very good and if I turn right
it’s not very good.†He cites his 2010
film Amigo, set in the 1900 Filipino-American
war. His main character is a small town
mayor who finds himself walking a razor’s edge when American troops take over
his town. “How much can I cooperate
without collaborating… that’s not a tenable position,†is how Sayles describes the
situation. “That’s a real moral dilemma!†he adds.
When
hunting for material, Sayles frequently turns to history. “History is full of
great stories and you don’t have to make much stuff up,†the auteur explains. He dipped back into history for his current
project titled To Save The Man. It is set at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School
in 1890 where young Native Americans from various tribes were sent to suppress
their unique culture and become, essentially, “whiteâ€. According to Sayles, it’s “…political as well
as being a high school story and it’s set in the year of Wounded Knee.†Sayles is now engaged in the arduous task of raising
money to make their summer start date. But even with all the hardships of
modern indie filmmaking, Sayles is grateful for every chance to get behind a
camera. “If you get to make a movie, that’s a great thing.†And John Sayles has made some great movies.
Cinefamily’s A
Weekend with John Saylesruns February 18-20 and features the writer/director
introducing six of his groundbreaking films including Return of the Secaucus Seven, Baby, It’s You and The Brother From Another Planet.
(Thanks to Matt Johnstone for his help in arranging this interview.)
French
gangster movies about mobs, molls, and ingenious but ill-fated heists enjoyed a
big vogue in Europe in the 1950s and early 1960s, especially after the success
of Jules Dassin’s stylish “Du Rififi chez Les Hommes†in 1955. Opening
here a year later in an edited, subtitled print as “Rififi,†Dassin’s picture
drew a small but appreciative audience of critics and foreign-film fans, and
became a perennial favorite in American art houses, repertory theaters, and
film schools.
This
was a rare example of a “policier,†as French audiences called them, gaining
any critical and commercial notice on these shores even remotely comparable to
their popularity abroad. Although the genre owed a clear debt to classic
American crime films, it fell victim here, like nearly every other cinema
import from abroad, to a homegrown bias against dubbed or subtitled foreign
films in that more insular era of American popular culture. The vast
demographic of moviegoers in small-town America tended to be wary of movies
that they had to read as well as watch, or those in which stilted dialogue came out of unfamiliar actors’
mouths in interchangeable voices that didn’t match the movements of their
lips. If you were a crime-movie
enthusiast, you already had plenty of domestic product to choose from, anyway,
thanks to a wave of violent, “fact-based†programmers like “The Bonnie Parker
Story†(1958) and “Al Capone†(1959) that U.S. studios released in the wake of
high ratings for TV’s “The Untouchables.â€
The
policiers that crossed the Atlantic, if they made it at all, were likely to be
relegated to marginal, second-run theaters, alongside nudies and exploitation
pictures. Newspaper ads and posters
played up the sexier, grittier aspects of the films as lurid entertainment “for adults only.†For example, the blurbs on the posters for
“Doulos, the Finger Man,†a subtitled 1964 edit of Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le
Doulos†(1963), proclaimed: “Raw, Savage, Shocking†-- “So ruthless, untamed
women would do anything for him . . . and did!†In these days of graphic
internet porn, what may have been “shocking†50 years ago now looks quaintly
tame. Actual nude scenes in the original
European prints, which were modest to begin with by today’s standards, were
trimmed out of the American versions in deference to anti-obscenity laws. The sensual content that remained would
hardly cause a stir in today’s climate, but it was provocative for its era,
when married couples on TV had to be shown sleeping in modest PJs in twin beds,
if they were shown in the bedroom at all.
The
advertising strategy of implied sex turned a quick buck for distributors who
had little chance of seeing the policiers accepted by mainstream
ticket-buyers. However, the films’
reputation suffered in the larger court of public opinion. Middlebrow critics snubbed them as sordid
trash, almost beneath their notice. The
New York Times’ Bosley Crowther, for example, dismissed the Melville film as
“talkative and tiresome,†and seemed personally offended by the “mean and
disagreeable†title character portrayed by Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Some
critics have questioned whether Le Breton was telling the truth about his gangland
connections, and suspect that he coined the term “rififi†himself. Dassin said he was disturbed by racist
implications in the word, since Le Breton asserted that it referred to the
violent characteristics of Parisian gangs made up of North African immigrants
from the Rif area of Morocco. Accordingly, in the film version of “Du Rififi chez Les Hommes,†Dassin
downplayed the ethnicity of his characters. Sort of a Mickey Spillane of France, Le Breton became a popular
celebrity after the success of “Du Rififi chez Les Hommes†and made a lot of
money writing about hoods and tough guys. Many of his novels were branded with “rififi†in their titles, but aside
from certain shared themes and plot elements, the books were unrelated to each
other.