John Sayles has spent a lifetime working on the outer limits of Hollywood. So why will you find him credited on Jurassic Park IV? He talks to Curzon about what it takes to make it in America’s independent film scene.
Words by Omer Ali
Now aged 57, John Sayles still practises his art in much the same way as when he was a young psychology graduate in the late 1970s. He made his directorial debut, Return of the Secaucus Seven, a template for The Big Chill, using $40,000 he’d saved writing film scripts, including archetypal creature feature Piranha for the original indie king, Roger Corman. It was followed by, among others, alien-in-Harlem flick The Brother from Another Planet and Eight Men Out, about the Chicago White Sox baseball scandal.
Thirty years on, and Sayles is still writing or fixing scripts for other people so that he can make his own films. “It’s much harder than it used to be – and it was always hard,” he says. “The last two movies we had to finance ourselves. Although we do make some money back on our older movies, I basically did it by writing lots and lots of screenplays for other people.” Even with star Danny Glover onboard, Sayles and producer-partner Maggie Renzi struggled to secure funding for their latest, Honeydripper, set in the cotton fields of America’s Deep South. They missed one year’s harvest and had to wait another year; Sayles wrote eight to 10 other scripts in the meantime.
He’s lucky, however, with the range of jobs he gets: “It’s as easy for a writer to get typecast as for an actor, but because there have been hints of different genres in the movies I’ve made myself, that’s opened up those genres as a writer for me.” He’s one of three credited writers on The Spiderwick Chronicles, and there’s a script for a fourth Jurassic Park instalment lurking somewhere. “I did a couple of drafts several years ago and I have no idea if they’re pursuing that movie. Writers read these things in the trade papers; once you’re done writing, you lose track and they lose track of you.”
But he’ll keep on working for other people if it lets him do what he wants to do. “When I’m writing movies, I’m just an employee,” he notes, “it’s nice to be the author.” He’s working on another novel, too. “At least you don’t have to raise money to do that; it may not be easy to get it published, but you can make the thing itself without raising a large amount of money.”
On-set collaboration seems to fire him most, however. In Lone Star, casing US border country long before the Coens, Alaska-set Limbo, Florida real estate drama Sunshine State, and now Honeydripper, the dialogue is always sharp, the performances ever more relaxed (he’s not a bad actor either), and the camerawork increasingly fluid. “There is a hybrid vigour that comes in movie making where you’re getting to work with really talented actors, a composer, cinematographer and art department, and you are directing their talents, which is very different to doing everything yourself. Even though I am the writer-director-editor, it’s absolutely a collaborative event when you make a movie – there’s something really exciting about that.”
