OVER the last 15 years, John Sayles has become a role model for many aspiring film-makers in the US and around the world with his low-budget, independently made films set in locations ranging from US inner-city ghettoes to the coastline of Donegal.
His work is most impressive, though, as a sustained exploration of the secret histories and powerful myths of 20th-century America. His new film, Lone Star, is squarely in that tradition, using many of the techniques of the classical western to present a modern vision of the US's frontier society far removed from the familiar archetypes.
In conversation with Michael Dwyer and an appreciative and knowledgeable audience at The Irish Times Readers' Forum after a screening of his new film last week, Sayles explained the long evolution of the idea for Lone Star. "Probably it started, without me even knowing it, when as a kid I was watching The Legend of Davy Crockett on TV. That's the official, heroic legend, and it's almost always very one-dimensional and one-sided. Going to Texas in my early 20s, I was very surprised, because like most Americans I thought the border was a line above which there were only Anglos who spoke English and below which there were only Mexicans who spoke Spanish. What I found was that almost all those towns north of the border were Spanish-speaking as well.
"I got fascinated with the idea of the history of Texas as a very compressed metaphor for US history. They had their revolution, their civil war and their reconstruction in a 25-year rather than a 200-year period. It's a very bloody, very condensed version of American history, so I started thinking about a story which would encompass all those different ethnic communities that lived along the border, but also get into the legacy and weight of the past. Since it was in Texas, I reckoned that the story had to be about a murder. Half the stories that have ever been told about Texas could be called `Blood and Money'."
Sayles is particularly interested in the lines that people draw or allow to be drawn between themselves and other people - the things that they use to define themselves, or the things that are sometimes imposed on them. "For instance in the case of the Mexicans living in the Rio Grande valley, a lot of them woke up one morning to find a line had been drawn which said from this day on you're an American and your cousin who lives a hundred yards away across the river is a Mexican.
A novelist as well as a film-maker, he is fiercely protective of his authorial vision when making his films. "I think of a script, as a first draft, directing as a second draft and editing as a third draft. I've edited a lot of my own movies and always controlled the editing very closely. I would no more hand over the third draft of my novel to somebody else than would let somebody come in and direct or edit a story I wanted to tell. You can change things enormously in the directing or editing of a movie, without changing a word of the screenplay."
Sayles isn't interested in making impenetrable films which people don't want to see, and he is conscious of the dangers of self-absorption in making a movie. "The American style of method acting - is very internalised, and the mistake that actors who come through that kind of training often make is that they think it's not happening unless they're feeling the emotions that their character is supposed to be feeling. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're transmitting that to an audience. So you can have actors who are having incredible emotional flux in front of you, but all you see is someone grunting in a corner."
One of the young actors in Lone Star has since gone on with one giant leap to become a star through his performance in the current John Grisham adaptation, A Time to Kill "I'd seen Matthew McConaughey in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, and been very impressed. The only other things he'd been in, the parts were so small that when we got the videotapes we couldn't find him in the movie!
For years, Sayles has financed his independent film-making by working as a screenwriter for hire for the major studios. "Sometimes they give me a book or an idea to adapt into a screenplay, and sometimes I'm brought in to doctor a script, which can mean anything from `Look, keep the title and the concept and change everything else,' to `let's pad Gene Hackman's speeches a little bit'. In those cases it's very clear that I'm an employee. I'm there to help them tell their story.
"I was in a room with John Frankenheimer once, working on a movie about Chinese martial arts, and he just said `Oh, I can cast Toshiro Mifune, let's make them all Japanese'. That was fine, but if I was at a meeting about Lone Star and somebody had suggested making all the Mexicans Yugoslavian, I would have said see you later."
Of the big-budget scripts he has worked on recently, his favourite was Apollo 13. "My mandate there was to take the script and bring it back a little closer to the original material, make it a little less melodramatic. I think that Tom Hanks and Ron Howard had enough confidence in the real story and in the audience to understand the science if it was presented in the right way. That was the last time I felt that a big movie I'd worked on had achieved what it set out to do, which is pretty rare."
Sayles's next film, Men with Guns is based on events in Guatemala in the 1970s and 1980s, but he intends to universalise it, seeing it as a story which could take place in Africa, Yugoslavia or the former Soviet Union. "It will probably not be the biggest box office movie I've ever made, since it's in Spanish and Mayan! It's about a rich doctor who has always chosen to believe the official version of what's going on around him. The thing he's proudest of, because he has a good heart, is training a bunch of barefoot doctors to go out and work in the small villages which he himself has never visited. When he retires, he goes out to visit these doctors and finds that they have all been taken away or murdered or disappeared. It asks whether innocence is a sin.
