The Lost John Sayles Interview
God’s Gift to Indies becomes even more independent (with Maggie Renzi at his side)
(The following interview took place in 2007 at the Palm Springs Film Festival. All I recall of that day is winding up at a bar later that night, bantering around a tall round table with the affable life partners, when Ms. Renzi complimented me on my long eyelashes. I noted they were a side effect of my glaucoma medicine and had nada to with genetics. Nothing else below has been updated. Please read as if George W. Bush were still President.)
“I think there are ways in which John is somehow, and it is not what he tries to be, but sort of the conscience of the film business.”
One of the kings of independent filmmaking — up there for some with John Cassavetes, Steven Soderbergh, and Guy Maddin — director/writer John Sayles is still churning out the pictures, having begun way back in 1980 with Return of the Secaucus Seven. Then came the lesbian groundbreaker Liana (1983) and the sci-fi cult fave The Brother from Another Planet (1984). Add 14 more including Matewan (1987), Eight Men Out (1988), and the brilliant but often overlooked Spanish-language classic, Men with Guns (1997), and you have a helmer you wouldn’t think would have problems getting backing for his next project.
But that just isn’t the case for the man who also wrote the screenplays for Piranha (1978), Alligator (1980), and The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986). Sayles with his long-time companion, Maggie Renzi, put up their own diñero for Honeydripper, which hit DVD status this past June, but not before having played in 150 theaters in 100 different markets. Yes, the duo also self-distributed this last effort.
Honeydripper, a musical exploration of the black plight in the 1950s South, starring Danny Glover, Lisa Gay Hamilton, and Charles Dutton, seems to have been worth the effort, at least critically. The film’s won Best Screenplay at the San Sebastian International Film Festival and an NAACP Image Award.
Financially, the film might have left an ache in its producers’ wallets, having only racked up close to $270,000 according to imdb.com.
I, however, caught up with Sayles and Renzi at the Palm Springs Film Festival for the following chat (pre-DVD-release) when they were still hoping their celluloid child could grow up to be an adult art-house hit.
BJ: Are you sick of doing publicity for Honeydripper?
Maggie Renzi: You know we have so much money invested in this movie that we . . .
John Sayles: It’s our job.
MR: . . . that either one of us would be foolish to give up promoting it.
BJ: Now this film is being self-distributed by you two. Is this the first time you have taken this risky route?
MR: Yes, but we’ve put together a team on our own this time. We’ve certainly been very close to the distribution [in the past] as we were with The Secaucus Seven. But this time, we’ve actually put together a team with Ira Deutchman and four sets of publicists. Will Packer who’s the producer of This Christmas, and others. We’ve put together this team of people who are making all the decisions together.
BJ: Is it scary? In past interviews you have noted how distributors are unsure of how to market your productions. You think you can overcome that now?
JS: It’s not even “not know how.” It’s sometimes they just don’t have the resources. They just don’t have enough people to do that thing, and they have not decided to make our movie the economic priority of putting all their people on that or whatever. Sometimes literally, and a lot of young filmmakers who do get distributed have this happen to them. They’ve got another movie waiting to get into the theaters, and the [studio will] yank yours out while it’s still making some money because they got to get theirs in by a certain date. So you get bumped by your own distributor. There’s a lot of reasons. But most of them we’ve been dealing with for 30 years. The companies change, but the people running the companies are pretty much the same people who were around when we started. And we’ve worked with them all. Some of them are beyond working on a movie that’s this much work. And with some of them we just weren’t happy with their work in the past so why not kind of make our own all-star team, which is pretty much what Maggie’s been doing.
MR: Which is the way we cast the crew, the way we cast the cast. So it seems logical. What we were really hoping to get was corporate sponsorship. We had some idea that it could be ‘Delta Airlines Presents…” and I think that idea is a little ahead of its time or it will happen eventually, but not with an independent film. It will happen with a studio perhaps. Or maybe when Google starts making films or Amazon does. But it’s been fun to work with people who are into innovative ideas like that. Some of them work out and some of them don’t work out.
BJ: You have so many project or screenplays that are ready, including historical dramas. So how do you decide this is the one I’m doing now? Do you both sit down and discuss which screenplay is most plausible?
JS: You know I’ve got two big epic movies that I wrote. We’ve already tried to raise money for those and weren’t able to. This one, [The Honeydripper], we self-financed with money that we made back from other movies and money I made as a screenwriter. This cost about 5 million dollars. Those others are so big, there’s no way. I could write screenplays till the end of time and I’d never be able to finance them myself. So this is the doable one. So some of it is just what’s doable at this moment, and that changes with whether you are hot, whether the actor that you want to cast in it is hot. Somebody all of sudden gets a job at the studio, a green-light job, and they like you. Movies often get made accidentally. Even very good movies. You look at the long and sordid tale of how it got made. “Well, this is such a great idea. Such a great movie. Why didn’t it get made 8 years earlier when they started on the trail?” Then when you see why it did get made, it might just be a fluke.
BJ: Now since John has been turning to novels lately, is it your job, Maggie, to get out the cattle prod and say it’s time now to make a film?
MR: I don’t think we’ve ever been in that situation where you didn’t want to make another movie and I did. No, pretty much we have a couple of ideas that we’re floating around at any time. I’m not even going to bother to ask John this question about what movie we’re going to do next until maybe April when my head is clear enough to even begin to think about doing something else. There’s no point in me starting to go do something about it when I don’t have the time do it either.
JS: Yeah.
MR: And we’ve got this one big one that’s called Jamie MacGillvray. I’ve always got my eye out for somebody to play the lead, who might be an actor that John thinks is perfect for it who could help us to get the film financed.
BJ: It’s not historical?
MR: It is a historical movie. It starts at the end of the Battle of Culloden, which ended the highland tribes as we know them, and comes to the New World and ends up in the battle of Québec. So this is a juicy boy’s own story that happens .
JR: There are boats and the ocean.
MR: Yeah. It’s expensive, and it’s . . .
JR: We could shoot it all in Toronto
MR: It would be great.
BJ: When is John easiest to be around? When he’s writing fiction or directing films?
MR: When he’s in the editing room, he is happy as can be. When our lives are very . . . John likes to stay at home, and we edit in the garage. I’m making dinner.
JS: And we’re making another movie.
MR: And it’s financed, and you don’t have to worry about the sun or did we have the actor. Everything’s already happened. That’s when you’re happiest and you’re totally in control.
JS: And we like our assistant editors.
MR: We love our assistant editors.
BJ: Can you explain John’s relationship with studio heads?
MR: I think there are ways in which John is somehow, and it is not what he tries to be, but sort of the conscience of the film business. I think his very presence raises questions about how films are made and what their worth is. I think he does never intend to be but I think sometimes people think of him as a bit of a scold.
BJ: Is it true you’ve written the screenplay for the next Jurassic Park?
JS: What’s true is that I’ve done a couple of drafts for something. That’s the problem with the imdb.com is that they don’t give you the details. So like most writers, you do your drafts, and then you don’t hear until you read in Variety whether it’s been made or not — or whether you are one of the writers listed in the credits. They might be continuing trying to make it or not, but it was fun to work on. I’ve written almost every other animal. I have never written pterodactyls before.
(Mr. Sayles is one of those interviewed on the newly released Blu-ray/DVD, 1982: Greatest Geek Year Ever! (MVD Rewind Collection) along with Ron Howard and Paul Shrader.)
