John Sayles - From B-movie protege to indie cinema's A-list

By rights, John Sayles's first foray into film-making should have been an utter disaster. For a start, nobody on the cast or crew had made a film before. That included Sayles, who wrote, directed, edited and acted in it. He'd written a novel, he'd done a bit of summer theatre, he'd once, for one day, visited a film set. "But I'd never looked through a camera," he says. If he ever had, he wouldn't have seen any of his cast on the other side: none of them had done more than a bit of theatre either. As for the crew, their experience lay in shooting advertisements round Boston. They just about knew enough to say they needed contracts, though, Sayles says. "I agreed with that, so they brought along a guy they happened to know who was a lawyer to write up the contract. Then my car broke down on the way to the meeting. This lawyer said, 'I fix cars', so he drove me back. While he was fixing my car, he said 'I'm also a folk singer'. So he ended up writing the soundtrack."

Sounds like it could all have gone horribly awry, doesn't it? But it didn't, for reasons that sum up much about why Sayles is arguably the most influential and successful figure in American independent film-making working today. Though he's often thought of as an old leftie beating the drum of social concern, that idealism coexists with a supreme pragmatism. There are possibly few directors as resourceful or as capable of matching their ambitions to their budget as he is. It couldn't be clearer from the way he discusses Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980) that first effort of his. "I knew all these good actors who were about 30 years old, so I said: 'This is going to be a movie about people who are turning 30'," he says. " I wrote a contemporary movie that takes place over a weekend. There was no make-up department, no costume department, all of the actors brought their own clothes. When we did the summer theatre work we all lived in this falling-down ski lodge in New Hampshire, so I set the movie in New Hampshire and we used the ski lodge - I knew I could turn the interiors into bedrooms and a police station. Basically, nothing that we shot was more than five miles from the place we were staying. And we were able to put everybody up for about one dollar a head." As it happens, the folksinging lawyer was a man called Mason Daring, who has gone on to establish his own very successful career and to write 15 of the soundtracks to Sayles's films. ("And he still builds cars from scratch," Sayles says.)

The manner in which Sayles pulled his first film together from nothing has since become the stuff of legend to anyone familiar with the US indie film scene. It embodies the sort of eminently practical approach that you'd think Hollywood, with its overblown budgets, could use more of. But of course Sayles, with his ferocious dislike of corporate control, has always mistrusted the studios. If a low budget is the price he must pay for keeping control over his own work, he's willing to pay it. The budgets have risen over the years, though, because despite the limitations Sayles imposes on himself he has produced an enormously interesting and thoughtful body of work. His films include 2004's Silver City, a satire about an inept politician not a million miles from George Bush; Lone Star (1996), a magnificent drama starring Kris Kristofferson and Chris Cooper, about old misdeeds haunting the sheriff of a small Texas town; The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), a magical realist drama set in 1946 Ireland about a young girl who may or may not be a "selkie", half-human, half-seal; Passion Fish (1992), a black comedy about the relationship between a paraplegic soap star and her recovering drug addict carer, Sayles's screenplay for which was Oscar-nominated; and Matewan (1987), a drama about coal mining union conflicts in the early 20th century.

Sayles not only writes and directs, but also acts in most of his films, and has been known to edit them as well. As film-makers with a theatre background perhaps tend to, he has worked regularly not only with the same composer but also many of the same actors, including Chris Cooper and David Strathairn, and his long-term partner, Maggie Renzi, also the producer of many of his films. (They have no children: "It's not like there's a shortage of kids in the world," he says). Throughout all of his films, certain themes recur: the problems faced by the working class, the social divide between black people and white, the tensions created by the official story of a traumatic event. Also, he says, he's fascinated by the way in which belief systems can divide people, particularly politically: "Today in America, there are not only red states and blue states, but also red facts and blue facts." But if he sounds straightforwardly liberal, it hasn't stopped him joining forces sometimes with Americans who are emphatically not: he has been known to go on right-wing radio stations to discuss issues, agreeing with Republican politician and broadcaster Pat Buchanan that government outsourcing of jobs to other countries is wrong.

Born on 28 September 1950, Sayles, a big, craggy man, looks every inch the product of the working-class Catholic family he comes from. He was raised in Schenectady, a small city outside New York centred around the General Electric factory that was then there. Both of Sayles's parents were half-Irish. He says that, by his generation, the awareness of an Irish heritage had dissipated, though most of his relatives on his mother's side were policemen and firemen, two jobs the Irish traditionally filled: "I'm still fascinated why some people choose to be cops and why some choose to be firemen. The pay is almost the same, the social life is the same, but everyone likes to see the fireman and no one likes to see the cop." He was raised Catholic, but rejected it at an early stage. "I wasn't so much questioning the faith, but the church, because you see how human it is - the priests just seemed like people with their own problems and shortcomings. But it was very influential on the way I tell a story. In Catholicism there's the concept of free will, that it's up to you and that you have to earn what you get. And that's not negligible as an idea to be given early on, that you can't be heroic unless there's something to overcome."

Sayles wrote and read avidly when he was a child, but didn't become interested in drama until he started to do theatre, both acting and directing, at college. "I always had in the back of my mind that film would be a cool thing to do, but the college I went to didn't even have a drama major, let alone a film major, so I graduated in 1972 as a psychology major. In those days you had to go out to Hollywood and knock on doors to get into a film career, though, and I wasn't really ready to do that. After college I started working in hospitals and factories and sending short stories away." Through publishing his stories he found an agent who had contacts with Hollywood, and he ended up writing a clutch of screenplays for Roger Corman, famous for his low-budget B-movies. For all Corman's absurdly low production values (in 1955 he made a film called The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes in which the alien was represented by a sock puppet) several major film-makers began their careers with him, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron and Ron Howard. Corman once boasted that he could make a film about the fall of the Roman Empire with two extras and a bush, a quote I repeat to Sayles, who laughs. "Our joke was always that Roger would make Lawrence of Arabia for half-a-million dollars but Lawrence would never leave the tent - you'd just hear the wind blowing outside, and a camel, but he'd never go out. But I learned a lot from those movies about what worked and what didn't, what was labour-intensive and what was costly."

Sayles got the funding for his first film from the scripts he wrote for Corman, and he continues to make money re-writing scripts for Hollywood today. But his disillusion with it set in early on, rather like his disillusion with the Catholic church. "After doing Baby It's You with a studio it became clear that I'd been spoiled as a novelist where you get to control what you do. That's not the norm in Hollywood. Life is short: if I'm going to spend a year of my life doing something I want it to be something I feel good about. And I'm certainly not interested in being a director for hire. A lot of my friends who are directors out there, they feel good about their film at the end of it maybe one time out of every three." Even as a screenwriter, the effect of studio interference can be annoying, Sayles says, citing his work on the screen play for the film Mimic, which Guillermo del Toro, its director, also swore would be the last film he'd ever do with a studio. "I was one of maybe five or six writers on it and the script looked like confetti because every time there was a new draft the pages were a different colour. On one draft the producers would say 'We want the best friend to be a nerdy Jewish guy' and on the next draft they would say, 'Why don't you change him to a streetwise black guy?'. I did this two or three times, and when the movie came out the part was played by a black actor but he still had some of the nerdy Jewish guy lines. Which he did a good job with, but they just weren't written for that character."

Sayles disagrees that his films are always political. They are, however, always complex, at least compared to Hollywood's standard output. "The characters are not necessarily heroic," he says. "They may do heroic things but in the same film they may do something cowardly. One thing that movies historically do best is have good guys and bad guys, black hats and white hats. In Sixties and Seventies moviemaking there was a lot of ambiguity and flawed heroes. Then you get into the Eighties and the era of Stallone and Schwarzennegger. Now Spider-man may have a few hang-ups, but he's still Spider-man. So these heroes are more than human now, not just heroic. But the idea of having a complex world, a world where there is an ensemble of actors who the viewer has to keep track of, that's something I've been doing for years and years. In the last couple of years it's been interesting to see movies like Crash and Babel - maybe moviegoers are a little more open again to not just having one hero."

Either way, it doesn't get any easier, he says. "I truly never know if I'm going to be able to make another movie. If we have some kind of fluke success the next picture will probably be easier to finance." The key to getting his films out there, as always, is being canny with the cash. Sayles, mistrustful of standard distribution outlets, is thinking inventively for his forthcoming film Honeydripper, a drama set in 1950s Alabama about the arrival of rock 'n' roll. "We're going to be doing a lot of grassroots stuff - playing the film at the traditionally black colleges, in towns that don't have an art theatre. The drama departments will be given a percentage of the game for helping us produce the advertising. And we'll get the musicians in the movie, we'll get them to do a little tour. Almost every outing, you have to reinvent how you finance the film and how you distribute it. But we've survived so far. We're at least that good."

'The John Sayles Collection' is available on DVD; see review on page 31