John Sayles

Interviewed by Keith Phipps
March 17th, 1998

The writer/director talks to The Onion about storytelling, politics in movies, the financial realities of filmmaking, and his new Men With Guns.

No filmmaker in America works quite the way John Sayles does. Uncompromising in his desire for independence, Sayles secures financing for, writes, directs, and edits each of his films, thus assuring that he makes the movies he sets out to make. In the meantime, he makes a living scripting and script-doctoring others' work, sometimes without credit, as with the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Apollo 13 (1995). Sayles began as a novelist before entering the world of film, churning out scripts for Roger Corman projects like Battle Beyond The Stars before directing, with a budget of only $60,000, 1980's The Return Of The Secaucus Seven, a film that recently joined the select handful preserved by the National Film Registry. His career, continuing through the new Men With Guns, has earned Sayles a reputation as one of the most shrewdly principled filmmakers working today. It doesn't hurt that his films have been among the most memorable of the last two decades: Highlights include Lianna (1982), one of the first movies to treat lesbians sympathetically; the coming-of-age period piece Baby It's You (1983); the racially and socially conscious science-fiction film The Brother From Another Planet (1984); Matewan (1987), the story of violence between miners and their employers in West Virginia; a version of the 1919 Black Sox scandal (1988's Eight Men Out); the urban drama City Of Hope (1990); Passion Fish (1992), an actress' dream starring Mary McDonnell and Alfre Woodard; the beautiful Irish fable The Secret Of Roan Inish (1994); and Lone Star, the best film of 1996. Set in an unspecified Spanish-speaking country, Men With Guns (now out in select cities and slowly opening nationwide) stars Federico Luppi as a well-to-do, recently widowed doctor who goes in search of students he trained to bring medical aid to the Indian villages. On his journey, he finds that his own country has been torn apart by conflicts between the army and guerrilla rebels—and sees that the lives of people who don't care about political conflicts have been destroyed by men with guns.

The Onion: Is the country in which Men With Guns is set intentionally obscure?

John Sayles: Yeah, I really didn't want people to be able to say, "Oh, this is Peru, and of course that happens; that's the kind of place where that can happen." Or, "That could only happen in Guatemala," or, "That could only happen in El Salvador," or "That could only happen in Bosnia," wherever it was. The incidents upon which the movie is based are things that have taken place all over the world at different times and places, and I really didn't want to get into the details of a specific place.

O: It also keeps people from feeling lost because they don't know the history of a particular country.

JS: Yeah. Maybe in certain situations, the guerrillas were more good guys or bad guys, or maybe the army was more good guys or bad guys. I really didn't want it to be a debate about a specific situation, but in a way, about that situation that's beyond ideology, where it doesn't matter what uniforms the men with guns are wearing. You just don't want them in your village. So many more non-combatants are killed in wars these days than people who are actually doing the fighting, and I felt like that's closer to the human condition than being an armed fighter for either the army or the people fighting against the army.

O: And you can't be accused of being historically inaccurate, which is a problem a lot of filmmakers who try to do political work run into.

JS: If I had set it in a specific place, I would have felt the responsibility to really get into the details of that particular place, and I would have had to do a lot more research. I would not have felt comfortable making the movie unless I was able to spend more time there and really feel like I understand it like an insider.

O: Where was it filmed?

JS: Mostly in Mexico. All of it was in Mexico, actually. We scouted some other places and shot in three different states of Mexico, which is vast country. It was a low-budget movie, so it was kind of difficult in six weeks to shoot it in Mexico City, Vera Cruz State, and Chiapas, which are about as far apart as New York, Cincinnati, and Wyoming.

O: What was the decision behind doing all the dialogue in Spanish? Did you have to fight for it at all?

JS: Well, I think an important part of the story is that, here's a guy who can go only one hour out of the capital city and find that he's a stranger in his own land, basically a foreigner in his own country. Eventually there's this irony that here's an educated doctor, and he needs this totally uneducated orphan boy to translate for him wherever he goes, because the orphan boy has been with the army and picked up a little bit of every Indian language that he's going to encounter. You just can't do that if you've got Jeremy Irons playing the doctor and Bob Hoskins playing the sergeant, and they've got different accents. That works for some movies, but it just wouldn't have worked for this one. As far as fighting for it, that was just always a given. I was ready to make the movie with my own money, if necessary, in 16mm on a much less ambitious scale visually. Luckily, early on, the producers were able to find investors for it. And once again, it's only $2.5 million, which is very low for an American film.

O: I can't believe you did it in six weeks.

JS: Yeah, well, we were pretty wiped out at the end.

O: How was the shoot?

JS: It was tough, just because it was a lot to shoot. We were very spread out, and the weather was not always cooperative. We had one period where there were four days of rain in a row, without a single let-up. We were in some pretty inaccessible areas. There was a lot of lugging equipment fairly deep into the jungle before you could set up and shoot. It was pretty labor-intensive.

O: How did you assemble this cast? You obviously didn't get to use any of your regulars.

JS: The guy who plays the doctor, Federico Luppi, I had seen him. He's kind of the Marcello Mastroianni of Argentina. I had seen him in several Argentinean movies and a Mexican movie. So I knew of him when I was writing the movie. Other than that, there are maybe a half-dozen guys who came through a casting director in Mexico City who worked regularly in the fairly small Mexican film industry. They're making maybe 10 to 12 movies a year; in the United States now, there's so much independent filmmaking that probably Rhode Island makes 10 to 12 movies a year. So it's really not that much activity for a huge country. And then there's this kind of strange phenomenon, which is that Mexico, although 85, maybe 90 percent of the people look somewhat Indian, if you watch their TV and their movies, you just don't see it. As my first assistant said, "If you came from Mars and watched our TV and movies, you'd think you were in Switzerland." There's a real kind of Baywatch look to the people who are on screen. So we needed people who looked Indian, and Lizzie Martínez—who had been one of our casting people in Texas for Lone Star—went down with her brother to a lot of communities in which usually nobody does any scouting for talent. She saw theater companies, dance companies, orphanages, schools, and open calls, so we cast an awful lot of people who had acted before but hadn't ever been in a movie. In some cases, they hadn't acted before, like the little boy, or the woman who speaks at the very beginning of the film and shows up again at the end. The guy who plays a deserter is someone who's just started to act, who's been in a dance company.

O: The film has an interesting framing device.

JS: I think one of the things you find in Men With Guns is that culture is not just language, clothes, and food; it's how you look at the world. It was important for me to have a character, or some characters, who didn't think like Westerners. A lot of the clash, and a lot of what's difficult about the doctor's efforts to understand what's going on, is that he just assumes everybody thinks the way he does—in Western terms—and that their values are Western values. He says, "I believe in progress; I believe in science." I think Westerners have this kind of linear way of thinking where they feel like if you're just rational, and you learn enough, and you study enough, and you do the right things, you can conquer anything: poverty, disease, and possibly even death itself. Whereas there's this older, more indigenous way of thinking that's kind of related to the Mayan book of the dead, in my mind, that's very cyclical. There's a certain amount of fatalism in it where, no, you can't conquer everything. There is doom built into the system. Death is acknowledged. That woman comes from that kind of mindset, so the doctor is a really a curiosity to her.

O: The importance of storytelling in culture runs throughout the movie, too. With that in mind, do you consciously think about what effect your films should have on people?

JS: You know, you're always trying to do that, both in a technical and a thematic way. In a technical way, even if it's just a movie-movie—like when I was doing The Howling and Piranha—you're timing your scenes, using the kind of visceral effects to play the audience. You get them relaxed, and then you surprise them, and then you build up tension, and then you release the tension. Just technically, you're always trying to be aware of the effect you're having on the audience. But also, you're trying, in the case of our movies, to make them think about certain things. Not necessarily with the answers: I think most of our movies just raise questions, and raise situations that are good to think about.

O: It seems like the endings are always unresolved.

JS: Very often, yeah. You really may come away from this movie saying, "Well, God, exactly what could the doctor have done if he had known what was going on, or if he had wanted to know?" Because I think one of the big points of the movie is that this is a guy who could have known more than he did. He just kind of assumed, "Well, hey, I'm from the dominant culture, and of course the Indians want what I'm selling here, what I'm handing out here." And, of course, he's a member of the ruling class, even though he's a liberal and has a good heart. He doesn't want to think too much about how the ruling class stays the ruling class, and about what the army is out there doing in his name in order to keep them on top. And I think that's something everyone has to think about, to ask that difficult question: "Is my good fortune based on somebody else's misery?" Whether it's your company that's out there doing something, or your army, or your university, or whatever. You really have to, I think, know that stuff, or try to know it at least; otherwise, if you didn't ask the questions in the first place, when you find something out that's awful, you don't have the right to be surprised if your army is doing something in your name that you don't like.

O: You're one of only about a handful of filmmakers who unapologetically make... not necessarily political films, but films that deal with political issues.

JS: They're politically conscious.

O: Is it easier not to do those, and is that why there's only a few of you?

JS: It's easier not to, and sometimes it's really not the point of a movie. Sometimes it would really get in the way. I think more than being political or not political, it's often the problem of being complex: The characters aren't heroic. Sometimes they do things you don't like, even if you may like them, and it's hard to know exactly who the good guys and bad guys are, because everybody is a little bit compromised. And if you put that into your average adventure movie, it makes it complicated in ways that slow the movie down and really aren't appropriate for that particular movie. I think every movie is a universe, and when you invite people into that universe, you kind of tell them in the first 10 minutes, "This is what you're entering, and what you're entering might be something like real life or something that's more like an amusement park, where there are going to be thrills and chills, but you're not meant to think about it too much."

O: Your films tend to be described as novelistic, probably because you're also a novelist. How do those two parts of your craft relate to each other?

JS: What's interesting is that before I made movies, my books got called cinematic. I think some of why the movies get called novelistic is that they're ambitious in terms of the depths you go into the characters, and the number of people whose points of view are being examined. [The movies are] not just heroic, and about one or two people. But I think that if you read my novels, they're much more complex than the movies. They are very mosaic. You'll have 15 to 20 people, and each gets one or two chapters from his or her point of view, and you kind of put the story together from all those points of view. In a movie, really, you're dealing with two or three points of view. There's kind of the omniscient point of view, which is the wide-shot point of view, which is almost the filmmaker saying to the audience, "This is what I see," or, "This is what we can see from a distance." Then there's the protagonist's point of view, and occasionally the antagonist's point of view. And then with something like, oh, Roan Inish, or Lone Star, or this movie, Men With Guns, there's this kind of baton-passing every once in a while where somebody else will tell the doctor a story, or somebody else will tell the sheriff in Lone Star a story about what happened long ago. But then they always pass the baton back to that central character, and we start seeing the movie from his or her point of view again. I think most movies really are just from the hero's point of view, and we're meant to identify with the hero, and get nervous when the hero is in danger, and those kinds of things.

O: Your films work in part because they're well-told stories that also deal with provocative subjects, but often when films dealing with political issues come out, some feel they should be praised simply for taking on matters that don't usually get addressed.

JS: There is one strain of American movie criticism that's totally anti-content; some people feel like it's cheating to consider what a movie is about when you're considering whether it's art, or whether you like it or not. I don't pay that much attention to criticism, so it's not really a big factor for me. I like all kinds of movies, and I think an awful lot of audience members' tastes or minds are open enough that they can... As I said, you go to the movie, and the movie makes you enter its world. And it may be a world that's very much like our world, or it may be a totally fantastic world. It may be The Naked Gun; it may be a Coen Brothers movie—something that is kind of gritty, but very stylized. As far as I'm concerned, if a movie is successful on its own terms, I usually feel like it's a successful movie. It doesn't have to tell me anything about the world, as long as the trip it takes me on is a kind of consistent one, and an interesting one, and an engaging one.

O: You've done all kinds of movies. Has that been part of a conscious decision to avoid being pigeonholed?

JS: I don't really think in career terms very much; I mostly just think about, "Here's a story that I'm interested in," and try to get it told. I'm interested in a lot of different things. The movies kind of take me where they take me; it's not, "Oh, I just made one of these; I should make something different now." "I just made something that had female protagonists, so now I should make something that has a male protagonist." Plus, even if I did think that way, we really don't get to make the movies in the order that I write them. There's really not a consistent pattern, I think, that you could find. For instance, Men With Guns was scouted in Mexico and Belize before I conceived of and made Lone Star. After scouting, we got to Mexico, and it was the week that the Zapatista rebellion started in Chiapas, and we couldn't even get into that state—and I felt like that was where the locations for about a third of the movie were. Between that and a couple of other things, we decided it was just not time for us to make that particular movie, and casting around for something else to do, I remembered this idea I had about doing something on the border.

O: Has it been easier for you to get financing in the '90s than in the '80s?

JS: Yeah, a little bit.

O: I would think that after Lone Star...

JS: Yeah, Roan Inish was really kind of a nightmare with the financing. I ended up putting up a third of the money, and being in a very bad deal where I was the first money in and the last money out. But then, with Lone Star, that was actually fairly easy. I was writing something for Castle Rock, and they just kind of said, "Well, is there anything you're interested in writing and directing?" And I said, "Well, I have this idea set in Texas, and I'll send you the script when I'm done with it," and they just financed it right away. This movie, when we went looking for the financing... I think it's not just Lone Star; it's also that we've made 11 movies now, and every one of them has gotten some kind of theatrical release. In the independent-film world these days, Sundance may get 700 to 750 features in a year. Now, of those 750 features, maybe 50 of them get some kind of theatrical release, maybe fewer. When you're investing in one of our movies, you have an almost 100 percent chance of at least getting to the plate—at least getting up to bat and seeing if the audience takes to the movie.

O: You've made enough of a name for yourself that people would want to see it just because it's one of your movies.

JS: Yeah, but I don't think that's a huge audience. There's a ceiling on that audience compared to a Steven Spielberg movie, or whatever. It's a very small number of people, but if the budget is low, it can be significant. So there might be $2 million worth of admissions just because you've become some kind of small brand name, and if you make the movie for only about $2.5 million, it's significant that you're going to make money just on the people who want to see your next movie.

O: You're still writing scripts for other people. Is that something you still enjoy doing?

JS: Yeah, I do enjoy doing it. It's also how I make a living. I certainly don't make a living as a writer/director of my own stuff, or until recently couldn't have even thought about doing that. I think it's a good exercise. It's kind of like cross-training: You're helping somebody tell their story, so you're not as emotionally involved. But as a writer, I certainly work harder when I work for other people than when I work for myself; I'm trying to please them and me. I do more drafts, because if they're paying you for all those drafts, they're going to have you do them. I find that I learn a lot. You work with good people: Most directors don't even meet other directors, and because I still write films for other people, I get to meet other directors and see how they work.

O: Even your early horror stuff tends to be some of the most fondly remembered material from the genre. Why do you think that is?

JS: Well, I think the horror genre was a little bit stale when I came to it, and some of the directors I worked with were people who decided to revisit it in a new way, which was to say, "Well, what if the people in this horror movie have actually seen a horror movie? What if we bring a modern sensibility to it?" So instead of wandering back into the haunted house where six of your friends have just been ax-murdered, you say, "Wait a minute. I've seen a horror movie. I'm not going back in there." I think the most recent manifestation of that is probably Scream, where it's literally based on people having seen too many horror movies.

O: The Return Of The Secaucus Seven has just been selected for preservation by the National Film Registry. How does that make you feel?

JS: Well, that's great. We've been working fairly low on the food chain: About half the distributors that put our movie out are out of business. We haven't had the money to do any huge preservation of our movies, so it's great that with at least one of them, there's going to be a good big-screen print available. We have videotapes of some of our movies, and are trying to consolidate the old ones as the rights become available again, and find the materials. I'd say, like most filmmakers who have been around for a while, there are movies that just aren't available anymore.

O: What was the most difficult film for you to make, in terms of the filming experience?

JS: Probably this one, just because it was so ambitious. You're trying to get as much done each day as possible, and you've got a lot of environmental factors that are fighting against it. Language actually wasn't a huge difficulty for me. My Spanish is good enough that I was working with the actors and crew in Spanish.

O: You say you don't pay much attention to criticism, but do you have a film you feel was overlooked or underrated at the time, or now?

JS: Not really. We've always gotten kind of good, bad, and indifferent reviews, and from one city to another, you get better reception in some than in others. I never really read reviews or criticism, just as I don't watch hockey, even though I'm a sports fan. But some of our movies were not very well distributed, and could have been seen by a lot more people than they were in their theatrical run. I think both Matewan and City Of Hope really didn't get seen by as many people as would have really liked them the first time around.

O: City Of Hope was the one I was thinking of, as far not getting distributed.

JS: And we probably got the best reviews of any of our movies on that; it's just that they often said the word "grim" in them.