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The twin tracks of John Sayles’ career combine smaller personal films made independently, and lucrative commissions script ‘polishing’ for Hollywood studios. With the release of his latest, Honeydripper, he tells FOCUS why this arrangement suits him so well.
When a big studio movie encounters script problems it’s not unusual for John Sayles to come in and weave his magic. Many jobs are undertaken discreetly, others such as Apollo 13 or The Fugitive are better known, but he remains the man Hollywood continues turning to when they need a fresh perspective and crisp new draft..
Recently he worked on The Spiderwick Chronicles, and he is rumoured to be preparing Jurassic Park IV for Steven Spielberg.
“I’d say two thirds of the time when I’m one of many writers I end up reading the thing and asking for them not to include my name on it,” he explains. “The Spiderwick Chronicles is one I said yes to and actually did get credit on. I was an early writer on it, I think I was the first person who put all five of the books into one movie. So I had more to do with it structurally than the final polish kind of thing, or the dialogue, but it was fun to work on.”
His ego is clearly untroubled by letting others take credit for the foundation or detail he might have contributed, but then he has a singular body of work at writer-director that he can call his own.
Since his debut with The Return of The Secaucus Seven in 1980 he has brought 15 other distinctive and original films to the screen, including Eight Men Out, Passion Fish, Lone Star and Limbo. All quite different, though sharing a common humanity and an empathy with the outsider.
His latest, Honeydripper, offers the convincingly imagined moment when rock and roll was born, in the Alabama of 1950. Typically Sayles does not shirk the tougher details of a state still riven by its racist past, but there is humour and the same tender emotion that characterises his work. The genesis of the project was also in keeping with past films.
“I woodshed ideas for a long time,” the American auteur explains. “I wrote a contemporary short story in 1993 and I got fascinated with the moment when the solid bodied electric guitar show up. What did that mean for guitar players themselves who must have realised that the train was leaving the station, and they’d better jump on board?
“I started doing research on that, and I think I wrote it in late 2004 and early 2005. But by then the cotton was out of the ground so we had to wait a whole other year for it to grow again. In those two years I wrote a lot more screenplays for other people, and that is what we eventually financed the movie with.”
And there lies the beauty of Sayles’ double life, he writes movies for others that pay for his films, which also proves a useful distraction when he might be inclined to tinker with his screenplay. Not that he is precious about it, just systematic in an approach that has served him well so far.
“I usually do a couple of drafts and get it to the point where it’s ready to show to actors, and ready to try to raise the money on. I always do a final draft after we’ve gotten to the location. It’s practical in two ways. We usually show it to some local people and just get their feedback if there’s anything that’s inaccurate about the location or the life of people there.
“Not, do they like it or not, but is there anything that just wouldn’t happen here. And you get some good stories, and some important details come in. And then in that same draft I do what’s basically practical work, which is we’ve had time to budget the film, we’ve had a production manager on, we’ve looked at locations.
“There are practical things like if we could turn a night scene into a day scene, or if we could combine two locations, or if you give two of these lines to another actor we save a whole week of an actor’s salary. I do as much of that as I can without harming the script.”
ANWAR BRETT
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