There has always been a polemical edge to the films of John Sayles, but his latest is his most political, writes Donald Clarke
John Sayles - skin burnished by the sun, crumpled shirt open over thick, greying chest hair - looks as if he has just come in from a day chopping wood or shearing sheep. Like Bruce Springsteen (for whom he has made several videos), this other champion of the American working man proudly displays his allegiances through his appearance and demeanour. Knock a few teeth out and he could fit quite nicely into the background of a Dorothea Lange photograph.
Films are not just luxuries or entertainments to this cinematic labourer. They can be tools or weapons as well. His latest picture, Silver City, a vast, sprawling detective story revolving around a right-wing Republican's attempts to become governor of Colorado, was released in America just before the 2004 election. Sayles and his long-time producer and life partner, Maggie Renzi, worked furiously to get the film ready in time for polling day. Featuring a savage caricature of George W Bush and an even nastier one of Republican spin-doctor Karl Rove, Silver City was intended to sway minds. It looks as if it didn't work.
"Well, in that sense I suppose not," Sayles says with a resigned smile. "But we did a bus tour with it and we used it to start a conversation. And we actually got to register a lot of voters. America is a very divided country right now. Not only are there red states and blue states, there are now red facts and blue facts. The right-wing believe in creationism. The left in evolution. It is a very strange time."
This suggests a real challenge for political cinema in America. A film such as Silver City will surely play largely to audiences who are already on Sayles's side. An independent picture by the director of Matewan (the system beats down the miners), Eight Men Out (the system beats down baseball players) and City of Hope (the system beats down everybody) will not attract many members of the John Birch Society. Is he not, like Michael Moore, preaching to the converted? "Well, a lot of people who were once Democrats ended up voting for Reagan," he says. "Those people changed their minds at some point. Unless you believe that nobody ever changes their mind then you have to accept there is a conversation going on."
He takes a rare breath as his mood darkens slightly. "But, yes, I guess there are people you will never get into the theatre. I remember covering the Republican convention in 1980 for a magazine. There were a bunch of very young girls wearing buttons opposing the Equal Rights Amendment. I asked them why they were opposed to ERA and they said: 'Oh, they will make us use the same bathrooms as boys and force us to have abortions.' I asked had they read the amendment. 'No. Making you read it is how they get hold of you.' So there are some who will just not listen."
JOHN SAYLES WAS born in Schenectady, New York in 1950. A multi-racial locale that suffered severe hardship when General Electric moved its business to South East Asia, Schenectady helped form the young man's radical perspective. After college, Sayles worked in blue-collar jobs to support his artistic ambitions. At first he wanted to be an actor, then he turned his focus to the writing of fiction. Eventually one of his stories caught the eye of a talent scout working for the great cinematic schlock-meister Roger Corman. In the amount of time it takes for mainstream studios to clear their throats Corman commissioned and shot three of the young writer's scripts: Battle Beyond the Stars, The Lady in Red and Piranha.
"Steven Spielberg was kind enough to say that of all the Jaws rip-offs Piranha was the best," he laughs.
Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme all started their careers with Corman. What lessons did they learn? "You learned an awful lot about what can be done with no money, but with a great deal of hard work," he explains. "Everything you wrote for Roger got made and that does not happen in Hollywood. But he used to say he didn't trust anybody who worked for him more than twice - if they were any good they would surely be picked up by somebody with money. Basically if you wrote something out of which Roger could produce a good trailer he was happy. If you actually made a good film that was OK too. But it wasn't necessary."
In 1980, using $40,000 dollars of his own money, Sayles put together his now-legendary first feature Return of the Secaucus 7. Telling the story of a reunion of 1960s survivors - very obviously the model for Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill - the film emerged at a time when there was no map available to the young independent film-maker. The Sundance Festival had not been launched. The Weinsteins were yet to emerge from the undergrowth.
"It was the beginning of the independent film era," he says. "There had been people like John Cassavetes. But we really hadn't had theatres that specialised in independent cinema. We originally thought there was no way we would get distributed, but we were lucky. Now you have 8,000 entries for Sundance each year. But you will not get distributed unless your film is sensational in tone or form. In fact Secaucus 7 would never get distributed now. It's strange."
SAYLES EXPRESSES CONCERN that so many young directors now seem to regard that first low budget film as a stepping-stone to Hollywood. Sayles and Renzi, by contrast, made an independent film so that they could make more independent films. They always have final cut and never compromise on casting. It helps that Sayles has been able to pursue a parallel career as writer and script doctor on Hollywood films. His credits include Clan of the Cave Bear, The Howling and - coming to a cinema near you next year - Jurassic Park IV. It is even rumoured that he worked on an early incarnation of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. So, is this the day job that supports his vocation? "I work harder for other people, but it is fun," he says. "But, yes, that is how I make a living. You have to remember that you are telling somebody else's story. Really what you are doing a lot of the time is helping them get the green-light. You are struggling to make sure their story will be understood. But I actually have to be more disciplined writing for myself, because I know I won't have the budget."
Does he ever sneak politics into his Hollywood scripts? "Well, when I am writing my own scripts I often don't really think of them as political. This stuff is just there and you can't ignore it. Often my job when working on Hollywood scripts is to get rid of those issues. You want to create a simple genre film."
Political concerns - union rights, the plight of the immigrant, corporate land grabs - have cropped up throughout the distinguished series of films Sayles has directed over the past 25 years. (One of the few films which wandered away from realism towards fantasy was the fanciful The Secret of Roan Inish, made in Donegal a little over a decade ago.) But none of his previous pictures has engaged with the electoral process as directly as does Silver City. Chris Cooper, so good in Sayles's Lone Star, turns up as the idiot child of a political dynasty. Richard Dreyfuss is a Machiavellian spin-doctor. Tim Roth is an internet radical. In truth, the picture is, by Sayles's high standards, rather baggy and shapeless. But that may be a symptom of the speed with which it was put together. Renzi and Sayles were forced to invest their own savings to get Silver City out in time for the election and, considering how modestly the film performed, they will be lucky to get the money back.
After the interview I suggest to Renzi, an intelligent, warm-hearted woman, that the couple might like to take a break. Maybe they could suck up some Hollywood money and do a genre film. She seems genuinely amazed.
"Why? We are only on this earth a certain number of years. Everybody I know is dying. All of us are. You might as well do something you believe in."
Silver City is on limited release