Hey folks, Harry here... You've already experienced Moriarty and Sayles, now experience Quint and Sayles... Oh how the Seaman makes that Napoleon of Crime shiver.... as it should be... Here ya go...
Ahoy, squirts! 'Tis I, everybody's favorite crusty ol' seaman, Quint, here with yet another geekastic interview, this time with John Sayles, one of the only filmmakers out there who has a fan club that includes both the super geek (due to his early writing career with Roger Corman) and the serious filmgoers (due to his incredible independent directing work), not to mention the handful that straddle both worlds, like myself.
I got this interview due to a phone call out of the blue. "Do you want to interview John Sayles." The answer was, of course, "YES!!!" The interview was set during the South By Southwest Film Festival. Needless to say, I was a bit swamped and didn't have much time to prepare. In the little time I had, I read a few interviews Mr. Sayles had done. Each and every one of them focused on his newer efforts. Don't get me wrong, his newer films are amazing. Who couldn't love something like Men With Guns? But I thought his Corman work was much more interesting and would make a more fun interview. Plus no one apparently likes to talk about it during his interviews, so there was less of a chance of getting some boring rehash of the same story.
While I do cover Sayles's entire career, I think you'll find this interview to be a bit heavy on the Corman-era of John Sayles. I think it turned out pretty fun. We're all over the map on this one. We talk about Battle Beyond the Stars, The Howling, his current work on Ron Howard's Alamo, his upcoming films Sunshine State and Casa de Los Babys and the two best Jaws rip-offs ever made: Piranha and Alligator... See you at the bottom!
QUINT: HOW DID YOU COME TO WRITE FOR ROGER CORMAN IN THE FIRST PLACE?
JOHN SAYLES: I think it was because of Francis Dole, who was his kind of right hand person and story editor. When I first came to LA, I had written some short stories and a novel. It was kind of the opposite of the kid sitting in class reading his comic book inside his Geography book... Francis used to read serious fiction and kept comics on the outside of them.
So, when the agents called up and said, "I got this new writer, John Sayles." She went, "Oh, the one who writes the short stories!" The agent went, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you've heard of him?" She went, "Oh, yeah. He's a good writer." The agent said, "Well, do you have anything over there?" And she said, "Well, we need a rewrite on this thing called PIRANHA." I said, "Sounds fine to me. Sounds like a JAWS spin-off." And that's exactly what it was.
So, I did that and in very short order I did PIRANHA, BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS and LADY IN RED for Roger and then with Joe (Dante) and Lewis Teague, who I'd worked with there, I did THE HOWLING and... Which was the one for Lewis? Oh, yeah. ALLIGATOR.
QUINT: YOU KNOW, I WAS JUST IN L.A. WHERE JOE DANTE SCREENED "THE HOWLING" AT THE EGYPTIAN THEATER AND...
JOHN SAYLES: Do you know what he's doing?
QUINT: HE MENTIONED A FEW THINGS, BUT DIDN'T CEMENT ANY OF THEM. THERE'S BEEN RUMOR OF GREMLINS 3 FOR A LONG TIME AND HE DIDN'T DO ANYTHING TO DENY IT, BUT DIDN'T SEEM TO WANT TO MAKE A DEFINITE STATEMENT ABOUT WHAT HE HAS ON HIS PLATE.
JOHN SAYLES: I worked for Joe on THE MUMMY, in the long saga of THE MUMMY getting remade. For a while Joe was going to do it. It was at Universal and Joe was going to do it and his idea was to set it present day, in Los Angeles and have somebody bring the mummy to Los Angeles...
QUINT: WAS IT AS SLAPSTICKY AS SOMMER'S MOVIE ENDED UP BEING OR MORE LEANING TOWARD HORROR?
JOHN SAYLES: It was funny, but wasn't as slapsticky. It wasn't quite as Indiana Jones. Somebody else got a hold of it and did it very differently. The writer's guild does thing when anybody has touched a script... They send them a list of who's done it and do you think you want credit or don't want credit or want somebody else not to have credit... And there were 15 writers on it, including George (A.) Romero, twice. It was like over a 12 year period.
That was the last I saw Joe... No! Then I worked on... Joe for a while was going to do THE SIXTH DAY and I worked on a few drafts of that. Then Joe decided not to do it and then it went back to somebody else. Then they just went back to the script before the one I worked on. So, I saw him during that.
QUINT: YOU BROUGHT UP "JAWS." MY NAME ON THE SITE IS QUINT, WHICH I TOOK FROM MY FAVORITE MOVIE, "JAWS." TWO OF MY FAVORITE THINGS YOU'VE WRITTEN ARE TAKE-OFFS ON "JAWS." THERE HAVE BEEN MANY DIFFERENT RIFFS ON JAWS, LIKE "TENTACLES" AND "BLOOD BEACH," BUT OF ALL THE ONES I'VE SEEN, THE ONES YOU'VE HAD A HAND IN SEEM TO BE THE BEST. DID YOU LOOK AT "JAWS" BEFORE WRITING "PIRANHA" OR "ALLIGATOR" TO AVOID GETTING TOO CLOSE TO THE ORIGINAL MATERIAL?
JOHN SAYLES: No, I didn't look at it again, really. What I actually looked at were movies like THEM... You know, monster movies, not horror movies. There was a form that they had of revealing the monster, but not seeing 'em, but revealing what they could do, then one person would see it who was the hero, but nobody would believe it was there, then a couple more would see it and try to tell the army about it. Then the army would ignore, then it would show itself to everybody and the army would try to kill it and couldn't and then the hero would figure out the way to kill the monster. Either kill it or drive it back into the sea for the sequel.
That's really what I did, look at those old kinda MOTHRA, THEM... BEGINNING OF THE END, I think was another one, which was giant Locusts of something... Another thing I wrote, that's actually connected with Quint is I wrote a screenplay for Jonathan Demme based on the Indianapolis, which is the story he tells in the film.
QUINT: WHAT HAPPENED WITH THAT?
JOHN SAYLES: There are 3 different companies making movies about not only the Indianapolis, but there's also a secondary story which is kinda like the Hurricane Carter one, where this young boy read the story and has worked to get the captain cleared by the navy...
QUINT: YEAH, I READ UP ON THAT... LAST YEAR I WROTE AN APRIL FOOLS DAY STORY ABOUT SPIELBERG HELMING IT AS A SORTA JAWS PREQUEL. IT'S PERFECT SPIELBERG FODDER WHEN YOU LOOK AT IT. YOU GOT WW2 IN THE PAST, A YOUNG BOY IN THE PRESENT WORKING TO CLEAR THE NAME OF THE INNOCENT CAPTAIN...
JOHN SAYLES: Yeah, yeah. You get to have the flashbacks, you get to go use James Cameron's tanks...
QUINT: YEAH, FOR A BULLSHIT APRIL FOOLS DAY STORY, A LOT OF PEOPLE THOUGHT IT WAS REAL AND IT GOT REPRINTED BY A FEW PEOPLE.
JOHN SAYLES: The best of them (April Fools stories) was years ago at Sports Illustrated they ran a thing by George Plimpton about some guy who was studying to be a monk in Tibet and started throwing rocks and developed this new style of throwing. The Mets had him training and he was throwing 112 mile per hour fastballs, but it was inside of a tend because they didn't want any... It was going to change baseball forever.
Like all the sports guys were talking about it for the next couple of days. Was this good for baseball? What's going to happen? What they didn't see was the first letter of every paragraph spelled out April Fools. They were really mad because it was so well written. They had pictures, but said, "We had to sneak in and get these pictures, so they're not really in focus..." (laughs)
QUINT: YOU GOT TO REMAKE SEVEN SAMURAI AND THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN WITH BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS.
JOHN SAYLES: Yeah, that was fun. Roger had a young woman, Anne Dyer, who was working in his office. He had given all these science fiction books and he had her watch THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN and she had written a little treatment. He asked me to come in and use that legend and expand upon it.
That was fun. I basically was able to give it a kind of theme, which was all these different versions of death because I could go into other species and they could have different kinds of death. A lot of THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN is this Samurai thing about having an honorable death even though you've kinda been thrown away by society already. That's one of my favorite movies, the original SEVEN SAMURAI and then THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN was a great use of it in another context.
That was one of James Cameron's first big movie jobs. He ended up being the art director or something.
QUINT: YEAH, YOU CAN KIND OF SEE HIS STYLE...
JOHN SAYLES: Well, he certainly did a good job with very little. Roger had just bought this former lumber outlet and that was the studio. If you panned one way or the other, you saw the lumber still stacked up.
QUINT: WELL, IT WORKED WELL ENOUGH THAT ROGER USED THE EFFECTS IN A FEW OTHER CORMAN PICTURES.
JOHN SAYLES: Oh, yeah. And James Horner's score. That was one of his first big scores. That score was in, like, a half dozen Corman movies.
QUINT: WHAT MADE YOU WANT TO MOVE ON FROM THE MORE FUN, B GRADE PICTURES TO YOUR MORE SERIOUSLY TONED PICTURES YOU DIRECTED?
JOHN SAYLES: You know, I think... If it's a year of your life, you want to have it be something that means a little bit more to you and that you care a little bit more about. So, I was always interested in doing movies that were in between genres that might refer to them, but weren't square on. It's still fun to write genre pictures, but I've never really directed one that's just a genre picture.
A lot of the movies I've made as a director have been because there's stuff I've seen in the world around me that I just have never seen on the screen or seen portrayed accurately on the screen. Certainly some of these early ones that are in the retrospective... Nowadays, there're lots of gay people making movies, so LIANNA wouldn't be such a surprise today or there're a lot more black filmmakers so BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET wouldn't be (a big deal today).
But literally with BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET, Ernest Dickerson had just shot Spike Lee's short film Joe's Bed-Stuy, so Spike wasn't on the scene yet. There were a couple black directors, but they didn't work that much. So, there were all these good actors who were unemployed or were working in theater.
So, that's what I've continued to do. Find stories or have stories find me that who else is going to make it if I don't? Whereas with the genre stuff, there're lots of good people making those, so I feel like that's taken care of.
QUINT: IT'S BEEN QUITE A WHILE SINCE YOU'VE WORKED WITH CORMAN. DO YOU EVER CONSIDER GOING BACK?
JOHN SAYLES: Roger's stuff mostly now goes straight to video. I've worked on pictures like that. A couple years ago I did some drafts on Guillermo del Toro's MIMIC and I've written a science fiction movie called BROTHER TERMITE... I still don't know what they're... I think they're still working on how to do it, 'cause it's a hard thing to work out technologically. I've seen a little test that looked great, but who knows about that one?
So, I still can write in those genres, it's just what's happened in those many years is those B Pictures have become the A Pictures. The budgets have gone from $800,000 which is what Joe had to do PIRANHA on and maybe a million and a half, which is what he had on THE HOWLING... That movie now would be, like, an 80 million dollar movie or a 60 million dollar movie or whatever. The stakes are so much higher. You know, now I get paid as much to write one of those as much as they used to have to make one of those. And I'm not that high paid of a writer!
QUINT: I READ UP ON YOU LAST NIGHT AND SAW THAT YOU PRETTY MUCH DECIDED TO QUIT PUTTING UP WITH THE STUDIO BULLSHIT AND GO YOUR OWN WAY ON MOST OF YOUR FILMS.
JOHN SAYLES: I've never had to put up with it that much. I've made 3 movies with big studio backing. Really only BABY, IT'S YOU did I have a huge fight with them. Eventually the movie came out and it was my cut of it and everything like that, but really were so down on the movie and me at that moment that they didn't kill themselves distributing it. They kinda did the opposite.
I didn't exactly have final cut on EIGHT MEN OUT, but what I did have was this kinda "good neighbor" agreement with them that if it came in at 2 hours or under, they weren't gonna mess with it. So, it's 1 hour 59 minutes and 52 seconds or something like that.
The casting... We agreed on the casting. There were all these young guy actors they were interested in and I said, "Well, let's write lists of the guys you'd like to work with and the guys we'd like to work with and see if there's anybody on both lists." They said, "Yeah. If there are 3 guys on the list and you could get them, great!" There were actually 6 or 7 people that we both thought would be cool to work with. We got 3 of them.
Then, I think GARDENS OF STONE didn't very well and they tried to renege on D.B. Sweeney. I went, "No, no, no, no. You said! We got him! He's one of the three!" They said, "OK, we'll make it." It didn't make a lot of money, but it ended up being the movie that I wanted it to be. Then on LIMBO we got final cut, even though it was with Sony. There was some beaurocracy to wade through, there.
But I recognize that most of my ideas are not appropriate for big studios. It's not what they do well in their advertising. We always have this problem of how to do a trailer for our movies because they're so complex. There's just not that many brilliant trailer people around. Whereas most studio movies, it's pretty simple. It's Mel Gibson does this or Brad Pitt does this or it's a comedy and you put all the big jokes in the trailer, so you've seen the movie if you've seen the trailer.
QUINT: HAVE YOU EVER FOUND YOURSELF THIRSTING FOR THE KIND OF BUDGET YOU'D GET WITH A STUDIO PICTURE?
JOHN SAYLES: Bigger budgets, yeah. I have a couple things that are historical epics and if we're going to make them, we're going to need more than $5 million. We won't need $80 million or $50 million, but bigger budgets, yeah. There are certain things that just won't be good if you don't have a certain amount of money in them. I wrote one about the Philippine Insurrection, which is right after the Spanish-American war. It's basically America's first Vietnam that we haven't been able to raise money for.
I'm writing one now that starts at the Battle of Kaluden (QUINT NOTE: APOLOGIES, BUT I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO SPELL THAT BATTLE) and goes to the Battle of Quebec. So, you've got 2 major battles and a lot of stuff in between in different locations. That's not gonna be easy to raise money for on a low level. So, yeah.
But what you don't want is necessarily all the things that come with that big budget. I've been lucky, I've been able to get on the last couple of movies a really incredible cast together... But without it you kinda do this favorite nations thing and you can keep the budget down under $10 million and sometimes under $5 million.
I know Hollywood directors and they're directing what's announced as a $20 million film, but they only really have $4 million to make it because the above the line is so big and that's a lot pressure because you really didn't have that much time and money to make the movie, but they want to make back whatever... They've gotta make $75 million to make a profit on that. That's a lot of pressure.
QUINT: IS THERE A DIFFERENCE IN THE WAY YOU WRITE YOUR STUFF AS OPPOSED TO THE BILL-PAYING STUDIO PICTURES?
JOHN SAYLES: I work harder for them. I do more drafts. But basically the big difference is you're trying to help them tell their story. So, if they want certain changes, you talk to them about the changes and you say, "This is what you're losing, this is what you're gaining," or "This is how you're changing things. Are you sure you want to do that?" Then if they say, "Yeah, yeah. This is what we want to do," then you go ahead and do your best job.
Then occasionally you say, "I'm not the person to do these changes because I think it's either just getting different and not getting better or it's just getting worse. I think you should get somebody who thinks that going in this direction will actually make it better." So, that occasionally happens. I just say, "I can't do anything for you anymore."
You hope that that happens late in the game and not early, that it's not at the beginning of the thing because you'll just have to slip the money back to them, but if you do a bunch of drafts... I'm always willing to do more drafts, whether I've been paid in full or not, if they really think they're going to make the movie and I feel like it's getting better.
When I write for myself, I basically only write a couple drafts, so it's less work just in the time that I spend at the typewriter, but also, I'm telling my story and that's usually a more amorphous story. The characters are more ambiguous, there are less good guys and bad guys. So, there's that difference.
Also, I write a barer script with less description of what's going on in people's heads and what the audience is feeling when I write for myself whereas when I'm writing for the studios... They're always trying to sell it to somebody, somebody higher up, so I write a little bit more of a selling script. A few more exclamation points.
QUINT: TELL ME A LITTLE ABOUT YOUR NEWEST FLICK, "SUNSHINE STATE."
JOHN SAYLES: It's set in contemporary Northern Florida. It's about a community that's going from old fashioned entrepreneurial... You know, one guy owns a little motel and another guy owns a little restaurant kinda tourism to an industrial tourism where you have gated communities and all the restaurants in town are chains run from a corporate headquarters that's maybe not even in the state. That really effects people's lives, even in a place like Florida where everybody came there from somewhere else.
It's got a great cast. Edie Falco and Angela Bassett and Tim Hutton and James McDaniel and Gordon Clapp who are both on NYPD Blue and Jane Alexander is in it and Ralph Waite and Miguel Ferrer. A good, solid cast.
QUINT: I LOVE MIGUEL FERRER!
JOHN SAYLES: Yeah. Miguel's been in a bunch of things I've written, but this is the first time I've got to work with him as a director. And it's got these parallel black and white stories that keep crossing. So, Edie and Angela are on-screen together for 12 seconds, but everybody who's in their character's lives keep crossing paths.
It was fun to make. It comes out in June with Sony Classics. And I got to listen to a lot of Lynard Skynard who are kinda the patron saints of Northern Florida music.
QUINT: SKYNARD'S NOT BAD. SKYNARD'S COOL.
JOHN SAYLES: Yeah, I really remembered how much I liked them when I started listening to all their albums to see what was there.
QUINT: SO WHAT DO YOU HAVE GOING NOW?
JOHN SAYLES: Well, I'm doing this rewrite for Ron Howard on THE ALAMO. I'm writing this historical thing, JAMIE MCGILLABRAY (QUINT NOTE: THIS IS VERY POSSIBLY A MISSPELLING. MY APOLOGIES GO OUT TO YOU SCOTS WHO TOOK OFFENSE!) which is the one that starts in Scotland and comes to the New World. I'm going to direct a movie this summer in Mexico called CASA DE LOS BABYS that's about a bunch of American woman who are down there waiting to adopt children.
And then I'm doing publicity for the rest of my life because I've got both the retrospective and SUNSHINE STATE, so I'm basically doing publicity all the way up until July, then I go to Mexico and do 3 weeks of pre production and shoot that very low budget movie and then I'll be editing that. So, I'm pretty busy right now. In between interviews I'm writing THE ALAMO or doing research for it or doing research for the French and Indian War one.
QUINT: WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE DIRTY JOKE?
JOHN SAYLES: OK. Let's see... There's a fat guy who goes to a doctor. He says, "So, Doc. I'm not feelin' very good." He says, "Just look at yourself. Look at yourself. Look down. When's the last time you saw your own penis?" The guy says, "I can't even remember." He says, "Well, you're going to have to diet." He says, "What color is it now?"
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There you have it, squirts. It was great fun sitting down and bullshitting with John Sayles and I hope you guys got a taste of being there with the above. Something else that was cool was having John come over to me as I was leaving to tell me a Robert Shaw (yeah, the real Quint) story. Apparently, and I'm paraphrasing here, when Shaw was filming FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, specifically the scene where Number 3 (Lotte Lenya) examines him, he had to be placed on an apple box (a common fixture on a movie set, a sort of stool) to appear to be towering over Ms. Lenya, as Shaw wasn't a very tall man in real life.
Well, standing atop this apple box kinda put him off balance and in the scene he's supposed to take a punch to the stomach from Number 3 and shrug it off. First take, she socked him in the stomach and he flew backwards. Well, being the Robert Shaw whore I am, I liked the story anyway.
Sayles also brought up THE ALAMO. He said some things in confidence, so I can't spill much, but I can say that Ron Howard is shooting for a scope you're probably not expecting. Sayles said, "Ron wants to make the Alamo movie that has never been done before." At this point it's about the whole story of Texas and the events that lead up to the Alamo. I don't know if it's going to stay that way, but it looks like Ron Howard has a massive undertaking on his hands here.
Be sure to keep an eye on your local listings for any signs of Sayles's retrospectives, which I hear are going to moving around the country very, very soon.
Well, I hope you enjoyed it, squirts. I'm off to hang out with the spirits Frank, Dino and Sammy. Vegas and Paul McCartney call. If I lose the Orca... I'll be fucked, but I'll wander back here somehow and keep the cool interviews comin'. 'Til then, ya' mangy landlubbers, this is Quint bidding you all a fond farewell and adieu.
-Quint
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