John Sayles
By IFQ Critic Todd Konrad
A genuine independent film legend, John Sayles has seen many of his best-loved and controversial films grace the Cannes Film Festival’s screens. Starting with Lianna (1983) and followed by Matewan (1987), Lone Star (1996) and Limbo (1999) which was also nominated for the Palme D’Or, Cannes has provided Sayles with a platform to first showcase films that have become universally admired works in his career. IFQ caught up with John Sayles to discuss his latest film Honeydripper, starring Danny Glover and Stacy Keach. Honeydripper itself will be apart of the 2008 Marche du Film, courtesy of Emerging Pictures’ line-up. In addition to discussing this latest work, Sayles also candidly discusses his own working methods and his thoughts on the ever-shifting nature of the independent film business.
IFQ: For our readers, could you discuss first the film’s plot briefly and moreover, what was the impetus for you to take on this project?
John Sayles: Honeydripper is set in this little crossroads town in Harmony, Alabama in 1950 and Danny Glover plays a guy who runs the Honeydripper Lounge, which is not doing so well. He’s still got live music in his club and he’s featuring a blues singer from the ’20s. But his rival across the street has a brand new jukebox and it’s packing them in. So Danny’s character is about to lose his club. And more than that, he’s about to lose his place as probably the only independent, self-made black man in Harmony, Alabama in 1950. So I think my way into the story was basically through the music; I grew up in the ’50s listening to Top 40 Radio and you don’t think about it much when you’re a kid. It just exists and then as you get older, you start to hear hints of other things and say “Hey, maybe there’s something in that direction” and so rock n’ roll led me to gospel and blues, which automatically leads you into the past. In my case, it was the recent past because I was born in 1950 and started thinking about what it must have been like not so much for the audience but for the musicians when they heard that first solidbody, electric guitar and realized “Oh my God, it’s all going to change, and we better get on board this new thing or else we’re going to be left behind. What do I do now?”
IFQ: One commonality that runs throughout your body of work is the highly tuned level of both acting as well as writing that your films achieve. Being a writer first, how do you work with your actors in regards to their handling of the text? Do you allow much improvisation or do you have them stick closely to your script?
JS: I may change one or two lines per movie and that’s after a lot of discussion [laughs]. Sometimes it’s just a tongue-twister and I realize that as people try to say it. But usually if I do change something it’s because an actor, before we start shooting, says, “I’m not sure about this line. What does it mean?” and as we talk about it he asks, “Well, would my character really say that?” And then I realize probably not or he wouldn’t say it that way. But yeah, I basically write things the way they’re written for a reason so I don’t really let the actors paraphrase or expect them to paraphrase or improvise. Within that though, you can say the same exact lines and play a scene twenty different ways.
So you start with that and you start with very specific dialogue with people. And then when I work with actors, truly, I send them the script and I send them each a biography of their character and you know with a character the size of Danny’s character it might be seven or eight pages long. And I also sent him a lot of music to listen to and think about; his character’s around 50 years old in 1950 so he’s somebody who grew up with the music and has played everything. He was there when swing started and when it ended. And then for the smaller characters, it’s usually a shorter bio so that they come to the set having a good idea of who their character is.
Then truly what you try to do in the first couple of takes is see what they’re going to do with it. They’re actors; they bring something to it. You don’t teach people to act as a director; you direct their talent. So sometimes it’s just “You know, consider this in this scene” or “Try to do this in this scene with the same lines.” Sometimes it’s just a blocking thing of “Move left, instead of right,” but very often it’s “OK, we’ve got that version. Let’s do one where you don’t show him how angry you are, where you hold it just under the surface,” “Let’s do one where you’re a little more ironic with him,” “Let’s do one where you show your contempt for this person a little bit more.”
IFQ: You’ve been in the business for thirty years now, and as such are regarded as one of the few, truly independent filmmakers who’s managed to survive and create films on your own terms. From the way the actual business-end has changed from when you first got in to how things are now, where do you see yourself fitting into that continuum and moreover what are your thoughts on just how things have changed in the intervening decades?
JS: Everything is always changing. If you look back into history, you realize that and it’s something that’s in this film regarding the aspect of music. The music keeps rolling on so really I think we’ve been very lucky and sometimes our timing has been really perfect like showing up just when video was invented so that the theaters that showed The 400 Blows and The Seven Samurai every year realized these audiences can now rent these movies. They don’t have to come to us every year. What else can we show? They weren’t going to be rep houses anymore; they had to have open runs. What else can we show that the studios don’t own because we’re not in that system. And that was the beginning of what is now considered the American independent film movement. Although there were certainly a lot of independent filmmakers before us, there just wasn’t a movement of them.
So basically what’s happened is we’ve had to reinvent ourselves every couple of years. The movie business is volatile, but the independent movie business is even more volatile. Of our first eight movies, I don’t think any of those companies are still in business except for Paramount Pictures and that was not an independent movie, Baby It’s You. Some of the same people are in business but not at the same companies, so a lot of what you have to do is just say, “Look I like to make these movies, where’s the money coming from now? We’re going to have to learn about that.” Certainly a really nice thing that’s happened to us that make movies outside of Hollywood is that very well-known actors now consider those movies and their agents allow them to do those movies [laughs]. We used to run into people we offered parts to and they said, “Oh I didn’t know that,” and it turns out their agent had said they turned it down and they never even showed it to them. That doesn’t really happen anymore, especially with us now that we’ve done sixteen films. So that’s a new opportunity for us to get really experience, well-known actors in a movie where they’re basically making scale.
The other side is that as making movies has democratized because more people come through film schools, more people gaining skills at younger ages, and equipment getting cheaper especially with Hi-Def Video, there is still only a small percentage of theaters that aren’t chain theaters tied to the studios. So there are a limited number of screens, a limited number of weeks in the year, and there are now five thousand filmmakers making films every year that are outside the Hollywood system rather than when we started when there were twelve or fifteen. And you’ve got foreign movies coming in and some of them are very good; so the competition to hold a screen for more than a week is really tough. The toughest thing for us theatrically is we used to get two or three weeks to build up critical mass, [and now] you don’t get that anymore. You’re being judged on the first weekend like a major studio release and so what we’re trying to do with our own self-distribution is find a way around that paradigm which if independent filmmakers are going to survive they’re going to have to do. Some of that is going to have to do with building up your DVD sales afterwards, the long tail as they call it. Some of it’s going to have to do with getting to those audiences that have stopped going to the theater and getting them in to see your movie. It means we’re doing a lot more leg work; we’re doing the same kind of leg work we did with our first two or three movies and this is our sixteenth. You can’t just cop an attitude and say, “I’m beyond that.” If you want people to see the movie, you have to work to get them in the theater.
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