John Sayles: 'It's kind of useless to resent Hollywood'

John Sayles is one of America’s most illustrious independent film directors. His movies include Passion Fish, The Secret of Roan Inish, Lone Star, and the forthcoming Amigo, a film set in the Philippine-American War and shot entirely in Bohol with a Filipino cast and crew. Sayles is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, a National Book Award-nominated novelist, and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. His work has been described as politically astute, dramatically gripping, and profoundly humanist.

Recently we talked to John and his producer and partner Maggie Renzi about working in the Philippines and about his status as the ultimate Hollywood outsider.

PHILIPPINE STAR: What have you got against Hollywood?

JOHN SAYLES: It’s almost a waste of time having anything against Hollywood because there’s kind of no “there” there. Occasionally there are moments, the Academy Awards being one of them, where there is an entity you can resent, but since the big studios disappeared it’s really a bunch of corporations. They do things besides movies, and they have a few people they hire to play with this movie thing because sometimes there’s some money in it. For me, what they do well is not what we do.

To make a living I make movies for them, when I can get a job, so I don’t have anything against them in that way. Most of the people I work with out there, I actually like quite a bit. It’s just that what the corporate world is trying to do more and more is to find the least common denominator and spend the least amount of money they possibly can. So the quality of movies has gone down, and like a lot of industries the concern is, “Can we cut costs and still have people buy it?” 

If they can, they’re gonna do that. There’s acceptance of that, and basically people get to work if they make a lot of money. So there are some people making really good movies, and they’ll get to do that as long as their movies make enough money.

When the writers’ strike was on two years ago, I talked to the guys on the central committee. They went to the first meeting with the producers, and on the other side of the table there was not a single person from the movie industry. They were all lawyers from the big corporations. It wasn’t even up to the studio moguls, such as they are, to make decisions anymore. 

So it’s kind of useless to be resentful of them—it’s their business and they’ve painted themselves into a corner.

MAGGIE RENZI: What I have against Hollywood is that they don’t make good movies anymore. And yet they’ve cornered the whole art form, if there is one, and all of the business. 

There was a time, before it became completely corporate, that Hollywood was a fat and lively place. Good things happened despite bad decision-making, despite market forces.  There was enough margin because there was so much activity and it would spill over, even if it just meant that John Sayles was getting enough money as a screenwriter so that he could fund his own films. 

Now it’s tighter and tighter and tighter: they’re spending less money on writers, they’re making fewer films than they ever have, and yet they’re still the industry. For independents it’s almost impossible to make movies anymore, and it’s really impossible to get them distributed.

JS: And it was more whimsical. There were guys who ran studios who would say, “Yeah, I’ll make that.” For good reasons or bad reasons. Now a film is test-marketed to death, which usually means that they don’t care or know whether the movie works as a story as long as it’s got certain elements.

MR: And they’re totally driven by a bottom line which isn’t even appropriate anymore. There’s a whole movie market over 30 whose needs aren’t being served anymore, and I maintain that the business is being run badly.

Don’t you get tired of having to raise the money for your movies?

JS: Sometimes we don’t even try, if I happen to have made enough as a screenwriter to fund a small movie.

MR: We’ve been funding our own movies for a long time. I hate fund-raising and I’m not very good at it. But screenwriters are making so much less money now and it’s not possible to amass the kind of money that we used to. We used to be able to make enough money so we could spend $5-million on Honeydripper. Now we’re down to what John has been able to make and save, and that’s a million and a half. Which is what we’ve made Amigo for.

Each time out it’s unclear whether we can find the money to make a movie. And it’s not just us. There are exceptions, and the Coen Brothers are a great example of that, because they do something that taps into a popular and younger audience than most independent filmmakers. . .

JS: And they use much bigger stars. What’s hard for filmmakers is that they’re almost always starting from scratch no matter how many movies they’ve made. Unless the last one just went platinum, they’re starting from scratch. 

We’re lucky. We’ve had gaps where we weren’t able to make a movie for a couple of years, but we’ve kept making movies. A lot of people haven’t. We know some very good filmmakers who haven’t made a movie for eight years. Like Nancy Savoca (True Love, Dogfight), who’s a good friend of ours.

Why are you making a movie about the Philippine-American War? This is a part of our history so hidden that we weren’t even taught about it in school. 

MR: Nor we.

JS: And that’s part of the reason I got interested in the first place. I was in my 30s when I first heard there was such a thing as the Philippine-American War. It really was a war, not an insurrection; a war that lasted several years, with probably a million Filipinos dying one way or the other from it. The question was, “Why haven’t I heard of it?” Why weren’t my Filipino friends taught about it?

Then it started to get interesting. Why was that history withheld? Why was it changed? Then I started seeing things about the story that I felt were like templates for events that happened later—Vietnam, Iraq. 

This movie could’ve happened in Afghanistan today. It could happen in any country being occupied. The civilians have to deal with the occupiers and with their own people who are in arms. 

MR: After Honeydripper came out and did so badly at the box-office, I started saying to John, “If we’re going to be spending our own money, we need to do it someplace where the dollar goes further.”

We had come to the Philippines for John’s novel, which is set largely in the Philippines, and we went around the country with Joel. John, inspired, wrote the first draft of Amigo. And that answered my demand. If we’d made Amigo in the States, it would be probably an $8 million movie.

JS: We’ve had a very good time working in other countries. We’ve worked in Ireland, Mexico, with actors we didn’t know about before, and they were great experiences.

You’ve also written a historical novel set partly in the Philippines.

JS: The novel began as a screenplay that included a part set in the Philippines. When I wrote it we scouted for locations a bit, then I realized that no one was going to give us the money to make something this big. So I put it away. Several years later I realized that the problem with that script was that I was cramming everything into two hours. If I made it into a novel I could expand it. So it expanded and expanded, and now it’s 900, 1,000 pages long. It’s going to be published by McSweeney’s in September 2011. It’s called “A Moment In The Sun,” a quote from W.E.B. DuBois.

Why did you choose Bohol as the location for Amigo?

MR: We didn’t want to work in a place just outside Manila where actors could go home for the weekend. By moving it to Bohol we were able to contain the event.

JS: We wanted it to be quiet, we needed ricefields in cultivation, and we needed at least one bahay na bato on the set.

MR: And we had high-level cooperation from the beginning from the mayor of Maribojoc, where we shot the film. He’s a cool guy. 

Why are you making this movie when it’s our history?

JS: It’s the Philippine-American War, it’s half ours. It’s been a long dance between the Philippines and the US. The dance hasn’t ended because the military bases have closed.