An esteemed independent filmmaker and political maverick (by US standards at any rate), there may be only one John Sayles, but he’s something of a two-headed beast.
Starting his film career under the watchful eye of schlock god Roger Corman, Sayles quickly mastered the mores of the monster movie, creating such terrors of the deep as Piranha and Alligator. Indeed, in his shadowy life as a screenwriter for hire, Sayles has just completed work on Jurassic Park IV.
“I never mind being a writer for hire,” he told me on a recent visit to Dublin. “But as a director, it’s your name on the line and I always feel obliged to the actors I work with. You can’t guarantee that their efforts and yours will be served by a Hollywood studio and the only way to retain final-cut is to make the film yourself.”
“They’re playing a $1,000 hand poker game and they just can’t justify giving someone free reign,” he continues. “And I did love my time with Roger Corman. You’d write a movie and it’d be up there on the screen two weeks later. And monsters sure are fun to write around.”
No such creatures lurk in his directorial efforts, though Chris Cooper’s Bush ersatz in his latest, Silver City, comes close. Like many of Sayles’ 15 films as writer/director/editor, it touches on politics, greed, racial tensions and border-crossing.
“The biggest story in America at any given moment is immigration, which knots all of those together,” he explains. “It’s a nation of immigrants, so there’s always a focus on the current immigrants. The first of my father’s family to arrive had a connection in city government so he got a job picking up horse-shit off the streets and then moved into the police. How Irish is that? But of course it’s not the Irish any more. Now it’s people of Latin America and Asia, plus the African-Americans who get the shit jobs.”
Unsurprisingly, the little guy is frequently accorded star status throughout Sayles’ output and he himself has dallied in the blue-collar universe. Having graduated from college, he sought work in factories, packing meat amongst other unglamorous things, until the publication of his first novel.
“I wasn’t Steinbeck. I just didn’t want to have to wear a suit and tie,” he laughs. “I had gotten a high enough number in the draft so I didn’t have to go to Vietnam and I hung salamis until I had enough employment insurance to take 27 weeks out to write a novel.
“But there’s enough middle-class movies being made. To be honest, I never set out to make political movies or underdog movies. That’s how others see them. But I do find when writing scripts for other people that they expect me to walk all the way around the block to avoid something interesting that’s right there in front of you.”
As Bruce Springsteen’s video director of choice, Sayles has been working with The Boss for decades. Indeed, it’s tempting to see parallels between Silver City’s Bush-bashing (aimed squarely at the apparatus, not the man) and Bruce’s current polemical tour.
“Well, I think a lot of people are concerned. Bruce is a great guy and a private man. Before the last election he had never taken a public partisan stance. For him to do so, for him to be touring and asking his audiences not to sing along or cheer but to listen, that just shows you how concerned he is. Something is very wrong when that’s come to pass.”