John Sayles is a storyteller. Whether the medium is film, screenplays or novels, Sayles’ primary interest is in recounting the dilemmas people face and how they choose to act in response.
Sayles first film was “Return of the Secaucus 7,” a 1980 movie he made using his friends and $30,000 he had saved from working for legendary horror director Roger Corman. The latest of his 17 movies is “Amigo,” a fictional story set in the Philippines during the Philippine-American war.
His fourth novel, “A Moment in the Sun,” was published in 2011. It’s a historical epic set in the United States at the turn of the 20th century that stretches from the Klondike Gold Rush to the Wilmington, N.C., race riot to the military intervention in the Philippines.
His films explore characters in many different settings and cultures: 1970s Harlem in “The Brother From Another Planet”; a 1920 West Virginia coal mine strike in “Matewan”; Irish myth in “The Secret of Roan Inish”; and small-town Texas in “Lone Star.”
Sayles has received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, as well as numerous film and writing awards, including a best screenplay Academy Award nomination for “Lone Star.”
Sayles talked with Faith & Leadership while at Duke University to receive the Lifetime Environmental Achievement in the Fine Arts (LEAF) Award from the Nicholas School of the Environment. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: You have said that being raised Catholic influenced your storytelling. How?
Every week, the priest tells a story from the Gospel. Before I’d been told what those things were, I knew what allegory was, and I knew what a simile was and what a metaphor was, because those stories are full of them and some of them are very well constructed: The loaves and the fishes or the wedding at Cana.
Right from the get-go there was this idea that stories had power, and there was more than a surface meaning to them.
Stories are part of how people declare themselves to other people. Stories are a part of how we try to figure out the world and, finally, stories are also dreams of what could be.
Q: In your films and novels you use many different cultures and settings. Why?
Although I did grow up in upstate New York, I grew up in a fairly mixed society. I went to public high school. It was mixed racially and in terms of class -- we have class in America even though we don’t like to talk about it -- and eventually in religion.
When I went to elementary school, it was just Catholic kids and Jewish kids and then when we went on, there were more Protestant kids of various sorts, even a couple of Mormon kids.
I started traveling around the country when I was in high school and college, hitchhiking around the country, just seeing that this really is a country where people have had to work it out.
In many other places in the country it might be totally different ethnic groups working it out or trying to work it out or not working it out.
Because of that special nature of this very, very big, relatively empty, box that we had when Europeans came here, it has a very, very different history than almost anywhere else.
If you didn’t like what was going on where you were, you could just move over the hill and suffer whatever you suffered to do that -- but you could do it. Whereas in most European countries at that time, or in Japan or in a lot of other countries, there wasn’t that mobility.
For the people who are coming in, with all the assimilation, they have to give something up to get something. What do you give up? Is it worth as much as what you get?
Even my non-historical movies deal with this. “Brother From Another Planet” is about assimilation. He starts to pass as a human being but he has to give up certain things. He can’t show his talents in public, but he gets relative safety from wherever he ran away from.
I’m also interested in how human beings define each other, the things that we allow to separate us from each other, and the ways around those things. In many cases, it’s language. A bunch of my movies have been at least partially subtitled because people don’t speak the same language.
The audience sometimes knows that two people, if they spoke the same language, would get along much better than they get along with some of the people who do speak their language.
Another thing that fascinates me is that when people are in conflict, it’s not always just because they both want the same thing and can’t both have it. It’s often because they don’t even believe in the same world. They’re not even talking about the same thing.
Q: As a storyteller, how do you go into a culture? Your movies feel like they’re made by an insider.
You listen a lot. You do a lot of research. In the case of our movie “Matewan,” we had 10 to 15 speaking parts that we cast local people in. We lived in a hotel run by local people. We started talking about the story, and people started bringing out their stories and mementos from the Matewan massacre.
I always tried to start from what’s familiar rather than what’s exotic about people. What are the things that all people go through? What are the emotions that all people have, and their fears and dreams.
Then you start to say, What is it that make these people unique? Then you try to do really good research on that.
For instance, in the case of our movie “Limbo,” we were up in Alaska and I had written this character -- the David Strathairn character. He had been in a terrible fishing accident where a boat sank from being overloaded with fish and he hadn’t been on a boat for seven years and these two women hire him to go out and fish in their salmon boat.
I had him going out as a captain of a purse seiner [boat] and all the local people said, “Nobody here would hire a guy who hadn’t been on the water in seven years to run a purse seiner. He couldn’t get a crew. However, you could get somebody to run a gillnetter.”
That is the kind of information that I’m always looking for -- very, very detailed.
Q: You put a lot of time and energy and years into research. Why be a filmmaker and a novelist versus a historian or an anthropologist?
I think my interest is still in the human story and not so much hard facts. For instance, in “A Moment in the Sun” I’m not just dealing with what happened but what people thought happened at the time.
We have to assume that’s true of today, too. Fifteen years from now we’ll be saying: “How could we not have seen what was going on?” whether it’s a scandal or an environmental issue.
I’m also interested in the human mind and human interaction and how it has changed as our culture has changed.
When you write a period piece, you have to ask: Is this before or after Freud?
Is this before or after the civil rights movement or the women’s movement? Is this before or after capitalism? Is this before or after people knew the world was round or that there was a new world?
All those things have a massive effect.
Q: Leaders in the church are often encouraged to help a community tell its story. What would be your advice to them?
One thing is to ask where you want to lead them. It’s important to know the whole story, including where you want to end it, because it might just lead back to bitterness and contention.
If it’s a ride, where do the people get off the ride, and how do they feel about it? It’s why the ending of a movie is very, very important.
First you take the facts, then ask: What do I want to do with those facts? If you just lay them on the table, everybody can have a different interpretation. For some, it won’t mean much while others are going to be up in arms.
So, do I want to present an alternative to those facts? Are there some mitigating factors? Is it more complex than it seems?
Really understand the story, but also think about your audience and what they’re afraid of, what they want, what they might need and where you want to take them.
Q: What do you see as sort of the core elements of a good and/or true story?
For me, the drama is in some kind of human conflict, and it’s in the acting. I like it best when we really don’t know which way the people we’re sympathizing with are going to go.
Robert Redford once said to a screenwriter, “I don’t want to be the guy who finds out. I want to be the guy who knows.” And in most of his pictures, he’s not in moral dilemmas. He’s the guy who handles the situation. Most movies are heroic in that way.
I’m interested in more common stories where there’s not a clear pathway of what’s the right thing to do and then, when there is a right thing to do, what’s the other side of it?
When you ask people to vote or to sacrifice for an abstract principle, you’re in trouble. You better find a way to make it less abstract -- even if you’re saying this may seem like the long run, but in two years this is going to be good for you.
Q: Your movies are known for having characters that are neither good nor bad, but morally complicated.
The way I see the world is complex. When I write screenplays for other people for straight Hollywood movies, very often one of my jobs is to get rid of all the complexity.
Q: I’ve seen a quote attributed to you giving a reference to yourself as a Catholic atheist. What did you mean by that?
I think I’m Catholic as an ethnicity just like a lot of people feel like they’re Jewish, even though they don’t go to temple.
I think that being an American has been as important to me as being Catholic, but they come with these presuppositions that as you grow up, if you pay any attention, you have to question. Then you start to have to define your own stuff, but it definitely shapes who you are.
Q: In your movies, guilt isn’t held up as a good thing but certainly as a question.
Guilt and responsibility are two different things. There are people who do all kinds of terrible stuff and feel no remorse at all. Then there are people who feel guilty for things they didn’t even do.
Responsibility is, Who did it? If they hadn’t acted, something wouldn’t have happened. So do they want to take responsibility for it or do they want to shuffle that off on somebody else or be cynical?
I often describe myself as a pessimist but not a cynic. I think there’s a really important difference there. As a pessimist, generally things aren’t going to turn out that well very often, but a cynic is glad that they don’t turn out because that absolves them of acting well. If it’s all going to go in the tank, why should I kill myself being a good person or even trying?
Q: Do you consider yourself hopeful?
I’m hopeful because there are no final victories and no final defeats. One of the reasons people like the movies is the movie ends and there’s a final victory. Then you don’t have to think any more about it.
But in real life, the couple breaks up or there’s some other problem or whatever. Life goes on, and there are no final victories.