I am encountering a few technical difficulties getting through to John Sayles over video. Some bleeps. Some freezes. We are cut off. Now, he’s back, as rugged and charming as ever. Sayles jokes that Elon Musk might be behind the technological glitches. He has the money to make it happen.
“Well, it’s not just money,” he says. “Everybody rents satellites from him. So our ability to communicate or get GPS or those kind of things – he could put a big dent in that very quickly. There’s that feeling: If I’m this rich, I must be really smart.”
We wag our heads like two weary geezers watching the world go to hell from our bench in the square. No, that doesn’t describe Sayles accurately. He’s no slouch. For half a century he has been one of the most intelligent and persuasive voices in independent cinema. He began writing exploitation flicks for Roger Corman. He moved on to taut socially conscious dramas such as Matewan, Eight Men Out and Lone Star. He supported the career through script-doctoring mainstream work. Through it all, given any opportunity, Sayles will speak articulately – but calmly – about what’s troubling the United States. It has been nearly a decade since his last feature as director, but his conversation remains as fluent and engaged as ever.
“For the last 25 years it’s been hard for me to get even screenwriting work,” he says. “Much less actually get a movie made. It’s like: stand in line. I’m not the only one. Most studio filmmakers, as well as independent filmmakers, are having the same problems.”
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That partly explains why we have come here to talk about his latest novel, not a latest film. Save the Man, a fast-paced, densely researched historical saga, takes us among indigenous students at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania during the last decade of the 19th century. We learn about efforts to mould the “Indians” to the demands of US society in the run-up to the catastrophic massacre of more than 250 Lakota at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. This is the second novel Sayles has published in the past year and a half. Both Save the Man and Jamie MacGillivray, a Scots-American epic in the style of Walter Scott, began life as film scripts. That should tell us something.
One of our Irish people said: ‘This is the first time I’ve worked on a mixed crew.’ We thought: but there are no black people on this crew. No, they said: ‘People from the North and the South’
“Yeah, these are from screenplays I wrote 20 years earlier – maybe even more than that,” he says. “It’s not for want of effort to get them made, to raise money and all that. It’s always hard to get a movie made. It’s even harder now to get a stand-alone movie made that’s not a sequel to something that’s already been successful. We’ve never gotten to make expensive movies and neither of those would have been cheap movies. We would have had to raise $10 million. That’s way beyond anything we had before.”
So ink and paper beckons?
“Yeah. Maybe it could be a novel? Usually, I get a couple of hundred pages in before I can tell if it’s going to work or how am I going do this.”
He speaks of “we”. That first-person plural takes in a few collaborators, but none more so than his indomitable life partner, Maggie Renzi. In 1984 she produced Lianna, Sayles’s second film, and has remained in that role ever since. It was she who brought him to Ireland for The Secret of Roan Inish in 1994. She helped guide Lone Star towards an Oscar nomination in 1996.
Sayles is, however, on his own for the book tour. There are surprises in Save the Man. Hearing the book is about an “industrial school” – with all the grim connotations that has in Ireland – one reasonably expects a history of cruelty. There is some of that. But Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt, the school’s founder, was, by the standards of the time, relatively liberal in his approach. The aim is to integrate, not annihilate. Students are taught Shakespeare as well as vocational skills.
“Pratt was in his day, despite wanting to ‘kill the Indian to save the man’, a progressive,” Sayles agrees. “He really did think that black people and Native Americans were as capable and smart as white people. He personally would not have called it an ‘industrial school’, but the grounds belonged to the US army. Every year he had to go to the US Congress and ask for funds. He was always there, hat in hand.”
The book is, nonetheless, alive to the erasure that was at work in such schools. The story also offers a fascinating gloss on how the capitalist urge is wired in to contemporaneous definitions of the American way. The school sees acquisitiveness as a virtue. “We not only give him pockets, but the desire to fill them!” someone says.
“People didn’t even have the word ‘communism’, really. ‘Socialism’ wasn’t in the vocabulary,” says Sayles. “The Native people had been pushed on to these reservations to get even more of that land away from them. And the lever they used to open that up was to say: ‘Isn’t it awful? These poor Indians. They can’t own land individually. The tribe owns it.’ Yeah, that’s socialism. It horrified Europeans that they lived in this group society and shared things.”
Sayles, raised to educator parents in New York state, has been looking askance at the capitalist urge since graduating from Williams College in 1972. His first novel, The Pride of the Bimbos, was published three years later. He went on to find a home with Roger Corman, writing films about killer beasts from the deep (and from beyond the stars). Since I last met Sayles, Corman, mentor to such greats as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard and James Cameron, died aged 98. Every former collaborator has an amusing tale of his parsimony as regards production budgets. Sayles once told me they would hide any recently bought props if Corman came on set.
“There were a lot of jokes about how cheap Roger was,” says Sayles, smiling. “But, God, we were working in the movie industry. We’re getting to make movies here. I went out to Los Angeles, and, the first three things that I wrote for his company, I not only got paid, I got paid scale. I got paid $10,000 a screenplay. And those three movies got made. You talk to screenwriters, even those who later worked a lot, and that was unheard of.”
Sayles explains that now, with cheaper equipment, it’s easier to get a film made on a low budget, but it is harder than it ever has been to get such a film into cinemas. In the 1980s he and Renzi found ways. Matewan from 1987 told of a famous 1920s coal workers strike in West Virginia. The great Eight Men Out, released a year later, sided with the Chicago White Sox players accused of throwing the 1919 World Series. In the mid-1990s, some time before Irish cinema boomed, Sayles turned up in Donegal to shoot The Secret of Roan Inish, a lyrical folk drama with Mick Lally and Susan Lynch.
“We had this funny thing,” he says. “One of our Irish people working in the office said: ‘This is the first time I’ve worked on a mixed crew.’ We thought: but there are no black people on this crew. What? No, they said: ‘People from the North and the South’. We had the view if they had some talent and some experience, let’s hire them. We had British people. We had Scots. We didn’t bring many Americans. [Cinematographer] Haskell Wexler brought his camera operator. That was about it. And it functioned very well. It was a nice melding of talents. And very few films were happening in Ireland at all.”
Sayles argues that he and Renzi didn’t profit much from the ballyhooed boom for American independent cinema in the 1990s (the age of Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh and the now notorious Harvey Weinstein). But they continued to make fine films such as Lone Star and Sunshine State. Now, however, it really does look as if the franchise film and the rise of streaming is pinching. But Sayles has made accommodation with the new world. He was a writer on the recent period detective series The Alienist for Paramount Television. We can shortly enjoy his work on the civil war spy show The Gray House.
“It’s a very good historical civil war story,” he says. “I wrote the first drafts many years ago. It sat around. Then I heard it had been somewhat rewritten and put into production with Morgan Freeman’s company joining with Kevin Costner’s company. It was shooting in Bulgaria or something like that.”
Funny how this business works.
“I haven’t seen it, he says. “But Roland Joffe directed, who is good. So I have hopes. I’m not signed up to any streamers. So it might be hard to get a look.”
Now that is old school.
To Save the Man is published by Melville House on Thursday, January 23rd
