Elston Gunn Interviews John Sayles About HONEYDRIPPER And More!!

Hello. Elston Gunn here. Since his directorial debut RETURN OF THE SECAUCUS 7 twenty-seven years ago, preeminent indie pilgrim John Sayles has traveled the country - and a few times internationally - exploring regional cultures, sociology, economics, history and human behavior through the stories he writes and the films he makes. His latest feature, HONEYDRIPPER, is no exception. Set in an Alabama crossroads town in 1950, the story centers on Tyrone "Pinetop" Purvis (played by Danny Glover), a boogie woogie piano player and owner of The Honeydripper Lounge, whose traditional bluesy world is shaken when a young guitar player (Texas prodigy Gary Clark Jr.) brings his electrified axe to town. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and Purvis needs a hot guitar player to pack the house so debts can be paid. It's do-or-die. Of Glover's character and the story, Sayles writes he "has to decide whether the new music is a threat or a life-saving opportunity. Tension harmony potential violence - put some rhythm in it and it's drama. It's rock and roll." HONEYDRIPPER, which also stars Charles S. Dutton, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Stacy Keach, Mary Steenburgen, Yaya DaCosta and Sean Patrick Thomas; as well as musicians Keb' Mo' and Dr. Mable John, is set to premiere at this year's Toronto Film Festival on September 10. Early buzz indicates Glover's performance in the film may be his best in two decades. You can see the trailer for the film at the top of this article, and a rough cut clip posted HERE. Sayles took time to answer some questions for AICN.

[Elston Gunn]: There are some filmmakers today who tell personal, regionally-flavored stories from a certain area of the country and world, but your filmography is kind of like the hitchhiker who stops at different places here and there, soaking up the people and stories - which you actually have done. It has become almost a cliche to say that a place is a character in the story, but with your films that certainly rings true. Why is that so important to you? [John Sayles]: Location brings two important things to the telling of a story. First of all, there is the sheer physical impact of the environment on the action and characters. The hills and hollows of West Virginia were perfect in MATEWAN for a story where there is no escape, where the striking miners and the thugs hired to break the union are headed for an inevitable conflict. In the final shoot-out scene the walls of the hills around the town serve to confine and pressurize the action - there is no escape to the side, so the two parties have to head straight toward each other on Main Street at high noon. In LONE STAR the flat, unbroken horizon of the Texas-Mexico border area (which we emphasized by shooting in widescreen) was perfect for a story where time is amorphous, where present turns to past without a cut, where much of the emotional drama is in the head of the Sheriff played by Chris Cooper. It is a movie where circular panning shots often take us from one era to another, and hills (or trees, or even buildings) would get in the way of the flow. In CASA DE LOS BABYS I needed a hillside dotted with poor people's shacks, a funky, crowded city, and some idyllic beachside tourist resorts. Acapulco had all of those within sight of each other, with geography pretty much defining sociology. Nowhere else in America are you so constantly reminded that Nature is big and humans are small than in the Alaska of LIMBO. MEN WITH GUNS is a road movie, and the trip Doctor Fuentes takes has a very specific topography - from a huge glass and plastic city through the flat scrubby desert, to flat but less arid cane country, into the rolling hills of coffee and bananas, then climbing up into jungle-covered mountains where the poorest Indians or refugees try to survive despite the unsuitability of the landscape for cultivation. We had to shoot in three different states of Mexico to put this together, but in a movie where stories are told about the Salt People, the Sugar People, the Banana People and the Cloud-Eaters, it was essential despite our tiny budget. The second consideration is the culture or cultures of the people who live in the place. I've always felt like race is an illusion but culture is real, and an incredibly important factor in how you see the world and react to situations. There is no place remotely like the Cajun country of Louisiana seen in PASSION FISH. EIGHT MEN OUT and MATEWAN, though occuring in 1919-1920, have totally different rhythms because one is set in the remote hills of West Virginia and the other in urban, multi-ethnic Chicago at the dawn of the Jazz Age. I chose Colorado for the political battles of SILVER CITY because of the extremes in world views it contains, from the religious right in Colorado City to the free-thinking enviro-progressives of the People's Republic of Boulder. Though HONEYDRIPPER is not primarily about race relations, it is set in rural Alabama in 1950 and the legacy of slavery and persistence of Jim Crow laws and attitudes permeates every exchange between the races and even affects what dreams the African-American characters allow themselves. I write a biography for each character in our movies and one of the first things covered is where, geographically and culturally, that character is coming from. Danny Glover portrays a piano player in HONEYDRIPPER - it's important musically and culturally to know that he's spent some time in New Orleans.
[EG]: How extensive is the research you typically undertake for your writing and original screenplays in terms of the setting, social themes and variety of characters? [JS]: For the period movies I might read forty or fifty books, diaries, personal accounts, etc. and then expect the art department to continue that research for details that will show up on screen. In MATEWAN I discovered that a lot of West Virginia mines weren't as mechanized as in the anthracite fields of Pennsylvania, that miners still had open-flame headlamps, used mules, that the tents in the strikers' camp would have been Spanish-American war surplus (white rather than camoflage green - no planes back then) and that mine owners almost never lived in the state. For HONEYDRIPPER I did a lot of research on cotton picking, sharecropping, and the development of the solid-body electric guitar. For the contemporary stories I now try to go to the location while I'm still outlining/writing the story. You see things, talk with people, learn local customs, and all of that influences the screenplay. We had to learn a lot about commercial salmon fishing for LIMBO. I also sometimes find a place, like the old Civil War fort in SUNSHINE STATE, that I write into the drama knowing somebody else has gone to the trouble and expense of building it for us. We also get quite a bit of good 'local knowledge' in pre-production from area people who help with set construction or audition to be extras and actors. The stories get back to me and find their way onto the screen. There's a montage of people telling their near-death experiences in LIMBO that mostly came from stories related to me while we were scouting locations in Alaska (the Near-Death Experience State).
[EG]: HONEYDRIPPER is based on your short story "Keeping Time," correct? [JS]: I consider HONEYDRIPPER to be an original screenplay, though it is inspired by a character who appears in "Keeping Time," just as MATEWAN was inspired by a character who appears (in about four pages) of my novel UNION DUES. The only time I've adapted a short story I've written into a movie was CASA DE LOS BABYS.
[EG]: What other kinds of research did you do for HONEYDRIPPER? How differently did you prepare for it? [JS]: One of the main inspirations for the plot of HONEYDRIPPER was stories I'd heard about a New Orleans musician named Guitar Slim, famous in the early 50's, and known to party too hard and miss a gig. Many of the premier R & B guitarists who came out of that era claim to have at one time been told by a club owner to pretend to be Slim, since album covers and MTV didn't exist to let folks in the boonies know what he looked like. I've read lots of biographies and personal accounts of early bluesmen and rock and rollers over the years, and my characters are composites of those musical pioneers. I'd say the biggest difference in prep for HONEYDRIPPER was how much of the music we had to plan before getting to the set. Not only picking or writing the songs to be played onscreen but deciding on keys and tempos (once we'd cast the performers) and figuring out how to shoot and record so our musician/actors could keep their spontaniety from take to take. We only had five weeks to shoot a very ambitious, complex movie, so planning everything was very important.
[EG]: And you have the concept of the crossroads, which, of course, is as much a metaphor as it is literal. [JS]: We kind of throw away the mystical idea of meeting the devil at the crossroads. The most important crossroads in HONEYDRIPPER is a musical one, where you hear blues, boogie-woogie, big band, jump, country-Western and gospel all coming together into what would later be called rock and roll.
[EG]: Do you think Pinetop named his bar after the Joe Liggins song 'Honeydripper' Oscar Peterson and Cab Calloway made famous? [JS]: 'Honeydripper' in old blues songs is the male equivalent of the female 'jelly roll.' Usually when you hear the word 'honeydripper' in a blues song, the next line is 'and then my love come tumblin' down.' My first contact with the metaphor in a song was from Roosevelt Sykes, who often billed himself as 'The Honeydripper.' The idea to name the club and the movie came when we were making SUNSHINE STATE and shooting at historic American Beach on Amelia Island in Florida. Our trip from base camp took us past a defunct, falling-down club called The Honeydripper and we always remarked on what stories those walls could tell. We heard they just pulled the sign and building down.
[EG]: What I find fascinating about this era of music is that it seemed necessary for musicians to electrify their instruments - steel guitar in the honkytonks, hole-less electric guitar in the blues bars, or the sax playing into a microphone in the bop clubs - in order to cut through the ambient sounds of these places and simply be heard. These places were loud. People fought, hooped and hollered, released their frustrations. Music was forever changed possibly more as a result of practicality rather than for aesthetic reasons or the sake of originality. [JS]: I think it was not only practical but reflected a change in the times and locations and lives of the players. The image we have of the Robert Johnson-style bluesman is usually someone walking down a dirt road or possibly hopping a freight. Take that same musician and throw him on a screeching El train in Chicago, surrounded by millions of people and cars and factories, and you understand why the sound, the rhythm, had to change. It's no accident that so many early rock songs feature souped-up cars - 'Rocket 88,' 'Maybelline,' even Johnny Watson's 'Space Guitar' reflects the change in pace and transportation. The principal musical conflict in HONEYDRIPPER is between the piano and the guitar - once it became truly electrified and amplified (and the bass followed a year later) the guitar didn't have to sit behind the piano's volume any more. When Chuck Berry started playing boogie piano licks on his guitar the course of rock and roll was set (and the sax players soon left to play jazz).
[EG]: That idea of 'old tradition vs. the new thing' is something you've dealt with a lot in your films, whether the 'new thing' was urban sprawl, commercial development or even a labor union. Why do you think you are drawn to that particular kind of conflict? [JS]: As human beings we can only control certain things in our lives. One of these is whether and how much we are willing to change when the world changes around us. 'Assimilation' is one of the main dramatic themes in both BABY ITS YOU and BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET - how much are you willing to change the way you act/dress/think to 'pass,' to fit in with the new order? What do you get and what do you give up? Every immigrant to this country has had to make those decisions. In art or music it is often an economic choice as well as an artistic one. Some people, like Bruce Springsteen or Los Lobos, have been able to follow their eclectic personal muses and do fine, others disappear like the dinosaurs, either because they can't or won't change or try and do it very badly. Some keep plugging at what they love and are rediscovered and forgotten several times over.
[EG]: Do you ever find yourself in the middle of that struggle, trying to hold on to old traditions in filmmaking, writing or your own life? [JS]: As a filmmaker and novelist I've never felt tied to either a 'classic' or 'avant garde' approach - I just take it story by story, scene by scene, asking 'what's the best way to tell this?' One of the advantages of having so constantly been at the margins of the mainstream is that the pressure of topping our last platinum mega-success has never really arisen. Quite honestly, it has been so long since anybody has even bothered to ask us to 'sell out' that our struggles are only the prosaic ones about money and survival that almost all filmmakers face.
[EG]: Your films focus on the internal as much as, if not greater than, the external. How do you balance getting into the minds of these characters and conveying that onscreen with the story you've created around them? [JS]: Even in my fiction writing I prefer to dramatize internal states as much as possible - hoping the reader/audience can figure out what might be going on in the character's mind by what they say and do. One of the most useful things is that I started as an actor, and actors work backwards from the text - 'if I am saying and doing this, what is going through my mind?' A lot of this gets worked out between me and the film actors before we get to the set, through the character bios I send them, phone conversations, and the work they do on their own. The toughest stuff, of course, is when a character has a great deal of subtext, feeling and thinking more than they reveal in their words and deeds. The best example of this in our work is Chris Cooper as Sheriff Sam Deeds in LONE STAR. He is asking witnesses questions about an incident from forty years ago, sometimes in a very straightforward way, but what he really wants to know is 'What kind of human being was my father?'
[EG]: Do you ever actually write what the character is thinking into the screenplay? [JS]: I try to avoid characters doing theatrical, self-referring soliloquies. They do tell stories, though, and the stories often illustrate something happening in the plot or in their own emotional arc. At a crucial point in HONEYDRIPPER Danny Glover's character tells a long story about the first black man on a plantation to play the piano. It's a nice story, but more important is that Tyrone has chosen this moment, at the most desperate point of his crisis, to tell it.
[EG]: Danny Glover and Charles S. Dutton in a John Sayles film seems like a perfect fit, but this was your first time working with both of them. How did they surprise you and what specifically did they bring to the story? [JS]: Danny, besides his obvious acting chops, has a size and 'presence' that make believable he could get away with being his own man in 1950 Alabama despite the institutionalized racism, and that he could control a club full of frustrated, well-lubricated cotton pickers and soldiers without packing a gun or coming on too heavy. And if he needed somebody to back him up, the perfect candidate would be Charles Dutton. I knew Charles mostly through his stage work and always admired the incredible energy and physical grace he gives his characters. They are also both warm and funny actors, and the friendship between the two of them is one of the most important things that is not emphasized in the script, but has been beautifully brought out in the playing of it.
[EG]: The whole ensemble looks amazing. Along with Glover and Dutton the film features newcomers like Gary Clark Jr. and Yaya DaCosta, then you have Lisa Gay Hamilton, Vondie Curtis Hall, Mary Steenburgen, Kel Mitchell, Albert Hall among many others. I know you've talked about your love of working with actors before, but what do you think it is specifically about your projects that make them want to be in a John Sayles film? [JS]: I think we can offer a few things. One is that they are three-dimensional characters. I always tell my actors in these ensemble pieces that when they exit frame we should feel like the camera could follow their character and we'd have an equally interesting movie. I like to hear audience members say, 'Oh, I wish there'd been more scenes with so-and-so.' Because we don't make a movie without controlling the final cut, an actor knows that what they see on the page is pretty close to what will be on screen - focus groups and studio executives don't get to mess with what they've thrown down on the set. And just practically, although we can only pay scale, our shooting schedules are short and efficient, so there isn't much down-time on location. Yes, you may be taking leave from your normal money-making career, but it is a brief and finite vacation.
[EG]: I only recently saw Stacy Keach in John Huston's FAT CITY and he was amazing, just as he was playing much smaller roles in THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JUDGE ROY BEAN and BREWSTER MCCLOUD around the same time. What character does he play in HONEYDRIPPER? And please tell me he knocks it out of the park. [JS]: Stacy plays the very politically savvy High Sheriff of Harmony, Alabama. Though not a sadist or psychopath like Kris Kristofferson's character in LONE STAR, he is very happy to use the racial inequities of the time and place to his personal and professional advantage. Stacy has always struck me as an actor with both dramatic power and ability to do comedy, and he gets to work both things out in HONEYDRIPPER. My main direction to him was that he was a former boxer (like Alabama Governor George Wallace) who likes to keep his opponents off-balance.
[EG]: This was also your first collaboration with Dick Pope, Mike Leigh's director of photography. How did that collaboration come to be and how was Pope's contribution unique to what you've done before? Especially since you tend to keep the camera still and let the performances do the heavy lifting. [JS]: I actually don't tend to keep the camera still. You may be thinking of Jim Jarmusch, who often uses static distancing to great effect. What I do try to do is move the camera in a way that doesn't call too much attention to itself but helps to tell the story and underline the emotions. What interested me in Dick's resume was that he had shot down-and-dirty Mike Leigh films like VERA DRAKE or NAKED, but also something as lushly-lit as TOPSY TURVY. With production designer Toby Corbett and costume designer Hope Hanafin, we based the look of the film on the earliest Kodachrome color photos taken in the late '30s and early '40s. In working with a cinematographer I tend to know where I want the cameras and how they'll move, but talk about lighting only in terms of emotion to the DP. One of the great things about film stocks in the last ten to fifteen years is that you can see with the naked eye something very close to what the camera is seeing. Dick's biggest challenge was the usual low-budget one of making the picture look as good as it possibly can with very little time to work, no cover sets, and limited ability to 'wait for the light.'
[EG]: You shot SILVER CITY digitally, correct? How did you shoot HONEYDRIPPER? [JS]: We actually shot both CASA DE LOS BABYS and SILVER CITY on super-16mm film, solely for budgetary concerns. With big fields of cotton and lots of low-light scenes in a bar to shoot, we didn't feel like we could live with the grain that 16mm still carries for HONEYDRIPPER. And digital has nowhere near the 'latiitude' we needed to shoot dark-skinned people in white cotton without the detail in one or the other disappearing altogether. Dick chose a Fuji 35mm stock that besides being perfect for the early color-photo look we were going for was also less expensive than Kodak.
[EG]: And what are your thoughts on film vs. digital? Do you approach it as whatever best serves the story, or simply what you can afford? [JS]: Digital has its own characteristics which only serve certain kinds of stories/looks. It is certainly cheaper, but once your budget climbs beyond one million dollars, the percentage of it soaked up by film stock gets smaller and smaller. All the DPs I know beg to shoot 16mm film over digital if that is the only choice. However, with each film we first ask the question if digital is a possibility.
[EG]: Your long-time collaborator Mason Daring returns once again, contributing the majority of the original songwriting for the film with the help of people like Keb' Mo' and a host of other musicians. Music, piano-based and guitar-based blues, is obviously very central to the story. What were your instructions to Daring? [JS]: Mason and I send a lot of music back and forth to listen to and familiarize ourselves with the genre(s) we're dealing with, then start to talk about specific songs/cues. In the case of 'You've Got to Choose' and 'China Doll' in HONEYDRIPPER, I supplied lyrics and a crude melody to Mason and he made them songs, dealing with bars and bridges and all that musical stuff. The gospel 'You've Got to Choose' then benefitted from a further re-interpretation by the New Beginnings Ministry choir who appear in the film. Mason had to write some juke-box cues to be heard in the distance from the Ace of Spades club across the road, and here I only gave him what genre I wanted and where there should be no loud percussion fighting my foreground dialog. For the transition and background cues we talk some about instrumentation, but mostly I give him emotional directions - 'This scene needs tension, this one doesn't resolve, this should be eerie, this should be warm' something along the line of what I do with a cinematographer in talking about light. The thing about being a 'director' is that you direct other people's talents, eliciting from them things you'd never be able to do or create yourself.
[EG]: You edit your own films as well, but usually don't get to discuss that aspect. Woody Allen often shoots a lot of master takes, minimizes coverage and can have a first cut in a couple of weeks. Do you have a specific kind of editing process? Do you use nonlinear editing now? [JS]: As writer, director and editor I am constantly 'editing' - shaping and rewriting the story. During the screenwriting you try to cut scenes to their essence and combine or eliminate unnecessary scenes - anything you shoot you have to pay for, and the cheapest cut is the one that happens before you get to the set. I am cutting in my head as we shoot scenes - knowing the coverage, I often leave a scene without a complete 'master' or even without any take that is perfect. It is fine if actors flub lines as long as they don't break character and don't always flub the same line. I don't make choices at dailies, but wait till I sit down to edit and then choose the takes I want to work with very quickly. An audience is only going to see the thing once, so whatever jumps out at you first as being good, powerful, right for the moment, is what you should go for. Then, the movie kind of evolves as I cut scenes together and look at larger sections. Because I work on screenplays for other people and don't reread the script after I've shot, the story feels pretty new and unfamiliar to me and I don't keep stuff in just because it was written on a page somewhere. SILVER CITY had almost every shot we made appear in the final film, but almost no scene was in its original order. I rarely cut a whole character out of a movie, though two of my own cameo performances have hit the floor. The acting was fine, the scenes weren't needed. Three films ago, I started editing digitally, which is fun and saves time. I think the Coen brothers and I were the last flatbed holdouts on the East Coast. I especially like the 'go-back' button.
[EG]: Speaking of practical, what kinds of lessons are you learning from self-financing and distribution? [JS]: The main lesson I've learned from self-financing over the years is that it was a huge mistake not to be born rich (or invent the computer). But when Spike Lee says 'by any means necessary' independent filmmakers know where he's coming from. We aren't doing what you'd strictly call 'self-distribution' but are certainly more involved in the marketing of HONEYDRIPPER than is usual. I've always said that the workers can't just seize the means of production, but have to get a hold of distribution and exhibition as well.
[EG]: Last year, David Lynch self-distributed his own film, INLAND EMPIRE. Do you think this will be a new trend for independent filmmakers? [JS]: I think filmmakers will be no less inventive in getting their work seen than musicians are now in getting theirs heard. Unfortunately, the capital outlay to make a film is generally a lot higher than laying down a bunch of music tracks, so the problem comes in how to get your next film financed, if the last one didn't hit it big.
[EG]: So, you get to generate your own marketing ideas, one of which is the HONEYDRIPPER band tour. Tell me a little more about that. [JS]: The Honeydripper All-Star Band is comprised of several performers in the film and other players, and has already played the Chicago Blues Festival and the River to River Festival in New York. They will perform at the upcoming Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle, at the Long Beach Blues Festival, the Monterey Jazz Festival, in conjunction with our North American premiere of HONEYDRIPPER at the Toronto Film Festival and possibly in some of the European markets we are selling to. Check for dates and more detailed information on emergingpictures.com. The band is really terrific. We've got five different band members doing vocals and Gary Clark Jr. is truly a guitar wizard.
[EG]: When will the film be released? [JS]: The film will have an award-qualifying release in LA and New York at the end of December, but we expect the general roll-out to start in late February, 2008.
[EG]: What else are you working on? [JS]: At the moment, I'm mostly working on a very big novel set between 1897-1901 that deals with, among many other things, the Philippine-American War.
[EG]: And were the reports of your involvement in JURASSIC PARK IV greatly exaggerated? [JS]: I did several drafts of J4, but have no idea at what stage or if the project is still in development at the moment. Screenwriters tend to read these things in the trades like everybody else. I believe certain sneaky motherfuckers intercepted one of my drafts and published a review of it on some obscure fan blog.
[EG]: Several months ago I interviewed Jason Brown, who's producing a doc on the making of MATEWAN in West Virginia and is getting some interesting stuff. This year mark's the film's 20th anniversary and I think it's due for a special edition DVD. Is that a possibility? [JS]: Unfortunately, we don't own the rights to MATEWAN and are in dispute with the party who claims to. I have no idea when this will be resolved.
[EG]: Do you look back on MATEWAN or any of your films and see how differently you work now, or how your films might have influenced other filmmakers? [JS]: What I do on movies is pretty moment-to-moment, so I don't see any huge changes. Certainly, after making sixteen movies we get more out of a five-week shoot than we did at the beginning, but that is why I chose contemporary, relatively simple stories for my first two movies. When we started it was 'What can we do well with the little bit of money we've already got?' Now, it tends to be 'shit, how are we going to come up with enough money to do a good job on the epic this idiot has written?'

Visit the official HONEYDRIPPER website HERE Elston Gunn elstongunn@hotmail.com http://www.myspace.com/elstongunnaicn