Sayles’ magical mystery tour
By Lael Loewenstein
Daily Bruin Staff
It could be an image from a John Sayles movie: in Hoboken, N.J.,
on a street lined with brownstones and double-parked cars, sits
Marie’s, a tiny bakery brimming with customers lured by the smell
of warm bread. There a tall, lanky, middle-aged man lines up with
the rest of the locals to buy some foccacia from the Neapolitan
proprietor.
In its very simplicity, the scene evokes the kind of mood
director Sayles has patented in his acclaimed films Return of the
Secaucus Seven, Matewan, City of Hope and Passion Fish Â
honest, socially aware films about American individuals and
communities.
But although it might have come from a movie, it is instead a
moment from the director’s own life, and it seems emblematic of his
personality: a Hoboken resident, Sayles lives far from the clamor
of Hollywood. He doesn’t delegate to an assistant but runs his own
errands, stopping often at Marie’s bakery. When he flies, Sayles
goes coach, not first class, and when he travels to Manhattan he
takes the public bus, not a limo.
Sayles is an American original, as earthy, frank and
unpretentious as his films.
"I really don’t miss Hollywood," says Sayles, 44, who lived here
for a time in the 1970s when he wrote screenplays. "I don’t resent
the way they make movies here, but it’s not the way I want to
work."
In town to promote his latest film, The Secret of Roan Inish,
Sayles is unfailingly generous with the press, having given scores
of interviews in the 15 years since Return of the Secaucus Seven
catapulted him to the center of the independent film movement.
Since then he has made seven more films, at a total cost of around
$30 million  the cost of an average Hollywood film.
"I don’t particularly like it (giving interviews)," he admits.
"But since I don’t really use any big-name actors, I guess it comes
with the territory."
Sayles not only promotes his films, but he is personally
involved in every stage of their creation, from the concept through
release. Maintaining creative control has only been possible by
keeping a distance from Hollywood.
Although he has had offers from studios to work here, he has
always insisted on having artistic control, making casting
decisions and keeping final cut. An often-told story goes that when
he made those demands, a studio executive responded, "But if we
gave that to you we’d have to give that to everybody." And so
Sayles has continued to work on his own terms.
That is no small feat. "Every time I finish a film, I’m never
sure if I’m going to make another one," Sayles says. "It’s a
constant struggle to raise money."
He is able to finance his films by working as a screenwriter,
having written and revised a number of scripts over the years.
Among the eight scripts he’s done in the past year, one is Apollo
13, the forthcoming Ron Howard film starring Tom Hanks and Kevin
Bacon. One of several writers on the project, Sayles knows he may
not be credited for his work, but he is undeterred.
"Writing is my bread job. It enables me to keep doing what I
do," he says.
It is also what he does well. Sayles, who counts a pair of
novels among his credits, has a knack for writing in dialect. His
characters’ speech seems eerily authentic.
Such is the case in Roan Inish, written in Irish dialect. It
would seem a monumental task for an American writer to recreate the
banter of a 1940s seaside community in Ireland.
"Since I’ve done it before, I was prepared," he says. "Eight Men
Out (about the Black Sox baseball scandal of the 1920s) was written
in a sort of Chicago-ese dialect, and Matewan (about a 1920s West
Virginia coal miners’ strike) was written in a West Virginia
dialect."
Reading local literature was one way of familiarizing himself
with Gaelic speech patterns. "I went back and looked at the work of
Liam O’Flaherty and other writers from the coast of Ireland. And
then I would adapt the idioms. And I would talk to the people who
live there and ask, ‘Was this how your grandfather spoke?’
Sometimes it was right, and sometimes it wasn’t."
Setting Roan Inish in Ireland was, he says, "a philosophical
choice. I didn’t want to make an Anglo-Irish movie or an
American-Irish movie. I wanted this to feel like an Irish film. And
that’s why we wrote it in that way and used Irish actors."
The other half of the "we" Sayles is referring to is Maggie
Renzi, his longtime collaborator, producer and partner in life.
Renzi is integral to Sayles’ work and helps him to choose
projects.
They were attracted to Roan Inish because they had loved the
children’s book on which it is based, "The Secret of Ron Mor
Skerry" by Rosalie Fry, recounting the Gaelic legends of a fishing
community. But although the film unfolds through the eyes of a
10-year-old girl, Fiona, it doesn’t feel like a children’s
movie.
Evidently that was also a concern of First Look Pictures, the
film’s distributor. The poster for Roan Inish bears a striking
woman, a Selkie, who is half-human, half-seal. Although she appears
in the film, the Selkie is only incidental; it is really Fiona’s
tale.
"I guess they (First Look) felt that adults would be put off by
the image of a child on the poster," he says. "And if you look at
the successful films that Miramax has released (The Crying Game,
Enchanted April), almost all their posters prominently feature an
attractive woman."
Although it deals with themes of community similar to those
Sayles has treated before, Roan Inish is unlike his previous work
because his past films have seemed almost peculiarly American.
"That’s the biggest difference, I guess. But in the mixture of
the super-real, the magical and the real, it’s a lot like Brother
from Another Planet," an allegorical movie about a black alien who
lands in New York City.
Like that film, Roan Inish blends supernatural elements with
reality as Fiona learns the legends of the land and sea, portrayed
in striking, visually seductive images. And like Brother, a
wide-eyed innocent is the protagonist. Sayles’ ability to write in
the voice of astonishingly diverse characters  a lesbian in
Lianna, a soap-opera actress and a nurse in Passion Fish  is
one of his greatest assets.
Because he has worked outside the Hollywood mainstream on
small-budget films with repertory casts, Sayles’ career has
somewhat followed that of the late independent filmmaker John
Cassavetes. Sayles admits that Cassavetes inspired him.
"When I first saw his movies, I thought, here’s someone who
doesn’t use stars, whose films are about recognizable human
behavior, whose films seem technically not all that expensive. And
I thought, this is a possible thing."
But the comparisons end there. "His films are more
psychologically complex, whereas I think mine tend to be more
socially complex," he says.
He has long downplayed the idea of his films as artistic
products. "Really, all I’m doing is telling a story. And I hope
that when people walk away from my movies they can somehow think
about them in relation to their own lives."