In an era when last year's indie wunderkind is too often this year's studio sellout, screenwriter-director John Sayles stands apart, his rugged self-reliance a beacon to aspiring filmmakers wishing to make complex pictures that say something. His limited experience within the studio system (1983's "Baby, It's You" for Paramount; 1988's "Eight Men Out" at Orion) convinced him that easing the financial burden was not worth the resultant loss of artistic freedom; subsequently he has steered his own path, working in Hollywood only as script doctor or screenwriter for hire. Between assignments, Sayles has become America's most celebrated independent filmmaker, one who has not repeated himself, moving from one distinct subject matter to the next. Though his visual style has often seemed secondary to his literary concerns, his command of the camera has grown, thanks in part to collaborations with the likes of such esteemed directors of photography as Haskell Wexler and Robert Richardson.
After acting in school plays and summer stock while at Williams College, Sayles embarked on a career as a fiction writer, submitting stories to magazines and supporting himself as an orderly, day laborer and meat packer. His two novels, "Pride of the Bimbos" (1975) and "Union Dues" (1977), and his short story anthology, "The Anarchist's Convention" (1979), received critical acclaim for their honest characterizations and authentic use of dialect, although they did not meet with financial success. Interested in writing for film, Sayles adapted Eliot Asinof's "Eight Men Out" and, using it as a sample of his work, found a place with Roger Corman's New World Pictures, where he penned Joe Dante's "Piranha" (1978), Lewis Teague's "The Lady in Red" (1979) and Jimmy Murakami's "Battle Beyond the Stars" (1980). He also scripted two witty genre send-ups in 1981, "The Howling", reteaming him with Teague, and "Alligator", directed by Dante.
Taking $60,000 earned from screenwriting, Sayles directed his first feature, "Return of the Secaucus Seven" (1980), a witty, poignant look at a reunion of 1960s activists on the verge of adulthood. Praised as a more authentic and charming portrait of the same territory explored in the more commercially successful "The Big Chill" (1983), the film used few sets, unknown actors, sparse camera movement and little action, but it won the Best Screenplay award from the Los Angeles Film Critics. Sayles turned in a winning performance as Howie, setting a precedent for acting in many of his subsequent films, and David Strathairn, a familiar face from the Sayles repertory company, made his feature debut. He followed with "Lianna" (1982), a daring yet subtle examination of the changes a married woman undergoes following her discovery that she is a lesbian. Alternately praised for its sensitivity and derided as exploitative, the low-budget film ($300,000) contained another good role (as a film professor) for the director and helped him obtain Paramount's backing for his next project.
"Baby, It's You", the story of a doomed high-school romance between a college-bound Jewish girl (Rosanna Arquette) and a working class Italian youth (Vincent Spano), however, suffered from the studio's involvement (and later abandonment). The uncharacteristically frothy departure for Sayles was his least successful feature. He dropped out of the Directors Guild as he couldn't afford to remain in the union as an independent. "If I was going to do 'Brother From Another Planet' (1984) for $400,000, a production manager, first assistant director, and second assistant director"--all jobs required by the guild--"were going to cost me a third of my budget." The prestigious MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" which came his way in 1983 provided him with a tax-free yearly stipend of $30,000 over a five-year period and greatly facilitated the making of "Brother", an unlikely story of a mute, black alien (Joe Morton) adrift in Harlem. "Every month this check would arrive that would pay the rent and the bill for renting the editing machine. I always walk a tightrope financially, but this was like having a net."
Finished screenplays for two pet projects, "Matewan" and "Eight Men Out", had long languished due to their perceived commercial inviability. Sayles finally made the former in 1987, exploring the personal and political dimensions of union making and breaking in the West Virginia coal mines of the 1920s. A complex study of individual integrity and community solidarity, the film, typically for Sayles, is largely dialogue-driven--although the director succeeded, with the help of Appalachian locations, Wexler's cinematography and Mason Daring's lively bluegrass soundtrack, in creating an evocative setting for his narrative. His ambitious "Eight Men Out", an account of the 1919 scandal that rocked the baseball world, examined the controversy through the eyes of individual ball players, each having complex reasons for agreeing or refusing to throw the World Series. Sayles (aided by director of photography Robert Richardson) relied even more on visuals, using impressionistic lighting and scrupulous production design to help capture this period of American history. Though it was an Orion film, the studio's sole provision was that he keep it under two hours, a feat the director claims to have accomplished by having the actors talk fast.
Sayles continued to forge his own distinctive path in the 90s. "City of Hope" (1991) was a somber study of life in a mid-sized contemporary American town, weaving together several storylines to create a bleakly complex picture of corruption and decay. "Passion Fish" (1992), about the relationship between a paralyzed former TV soap star and her live-in nurse, earned praise for its central performances by Mary McDonnell and Alfre Woodard while garnering Sayles his first Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. "The Secret of Roan Inish" (1994), reteamed him with Wexler and was a real change of pace, as it was filmed on location in the wild western islands of Ireland. Adapted from Rosalie Frye's novella "The Secret of Ron More Skerry", the story centered around a girl living with her grandparents in County Donegal and incorporated mystical and whimsical elements unusual for the writer-director, which he handled superbly.
Sayles, whose films had consistently scored with the critics but performed meagerly at the box office, registered his biggest commercial breakthrough with the gritty "Lone Star" (1996), earning a second Oscar nomination for his original screenplay. Mainstream audiences responded enthusiastically to the richly textured, thoroughly engrossing drama that featured a strong ensemble cast including Kris Kristofferson, Chris Cooper, Elizabeth Pena, Frances McDormand, Joe Morton and rising star Matthew McConaughey. Its story followed a Texas sheriff (Cooper) trying to unravel the life and death of his father (McConaughey) who had been sheriff of the Texas border town 15 years earlier. For several scenes, Sayles moved his camera from a long shot in the past to a close-up in the present, allowing both eras to exist simultaneously in the same tracking shot, a device that proved quite eloquent in his hands. Unfortunately, his next film "Men With Guns" (1998) did not fare as well commercially, its lack of name actors and Spanish dialogue dooming it to the fate of so much of his previous work.
Sayles followed up with the haunting and ambiguous "Limbo" (1999), set in an Alaskan community where everyone keeps their secrets closely guarded. And while the plot initially seemd very Sayles-ian, with a large ensemble headed by David Strathairn as a former all-American-athlete-turned-handyman after a knee injury and Mary Elizabeth Mostrantonio as an unlucky-in-love lounge singer; hoever, the writer-director turned the expected love story radically on its head, confounding convention and venturing into continually surprising territory, thematically reflective of the dangerous, unpredictable nature of the Alaskan wilderness. Sayles then delivered another thoughtful, finely etched multi-character story with "Sunshine State" (2002), set on a Floridian resort island caught up in a development conflict and populated with characters seeking to reconcile their pasts, presents and possible futures. Sayles assembled an exceptional cast-- -including Edie Falco, Angela Bassett, Timothy Hutton, Mary Steenburgen, Gordon Clapp, Mary Alice, Ralph Waite and Alan King--and again bucked traditional narrative and thematic conventions to delivering an engrossing and realistic social portrait. Lower key and less plot driven was his next effort, "Casa de los babys" (2003), which followed six white American women (Marcia Gay Harden, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Daryl Hannah, Susan Lynch, Mary Steenburgen and Lili Taylor) trapped in bureaucratic limbo as they wait in a South American hotel to adopt Latino infants. Although a bit more fragmented than Sayles' usual efforts, it nevertheless featured the expected whip-smart distinctive dialogue and all-too-truthful obervation on personal politics.
The filmaker next turned his attentions to the controversial "Silver City" (2004), a political satire/mystery set against a Coloradan backdrop starring Chris Cooper as "Dickie" Pilager, a doltish, English-impaired second generational gubernatorial candidate with a more than passing resemblance to George W. Bush. When Pilager accidentally fishes a corpse out of a river while filming a TV spot, it sets in motion a labyrinthine investigation by a world-weary p.i. (Danny Huston) that reveals a deep abyss of corruption. With a cast that also featured Richard Dreyfuss, Maria Bello, Kris Kristofferson, Daryl Hannah, Billy Zane, Miguel Ferrer, Michael Murphy and Mary Kay Place, Sayles delivered one of his most pointed and important films, released at the time of a hotly contested U.S. presidential election.
Sayles' contributions to other media are less well-publicized, but in addition to his novels, he has written two one-act plays, "New Hope for the Dead" and "Turnbuckle", which he directed in NYC's Boat Basin Theatre in 1981. He helmed three popular Bruce Springsteen videos, and his TV work began with "A Perfect Match" (CBS, 1980), for which he wrote the screenplay. Sayles created the 1989 pilot and was creative consultant on the highly-acclaimed but short-lived series "Shannon's Deal" (NBC, 1990-91), about a disillusioned Philadelphia lawyer scraping by on small cases in his own small walkup practice. He also wrote and acted in the Vietnam vet drama "Unnatural Causes" (NBC, 1986), played a baseball player on "Mathnet: The Case of the Unnatural" (PBS, 1992) and turned up on the documentaries "Naked Hollywood" (A&E, 1991) and "Baseball" (PBS, 1994).
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