The films John Sayles makes are hard to define: multi-stranded with complex layers, he prefers to smarten scripts up than to follow the Hollywood trend of dumbing down, he tells Simon Hattenstone
John Sayles looks like the odd-job man, the fixer. There's even a loop in his trousers where you'd expect his hammer to sit. He is tall, strong, with an aura of wisdom; the kind of guy who comes round to fix the boiler and leaves having taught you everything you need to know about the history of Chinese fish workers in Alaska.
Sayles is a novelist, script-doctor, actor, editor and, most famously, radical American film-maker. In films such as Lone Star, City of Hope, Lianna, Matewan, and The Secret of Roan Inish, he has tackled such disparate subjects as municipal corruption, lesbianism, trade unionism, and the inner life of a "selkie" (half-seal, half-human). His movies defy the classic Hollywood eight-word plot summary. Lone Star, perhaps his best film, is about murder on the Texas-Mexico border, but it is easier to see the film than to explain the plot.
His new film, Sunshine State, is set in Florida, and is about family, race, real estate, borders and history. In other words, a typical Sayles movie, with multiple plots and overlapping dialogue. It's too theatrical, too wordy, to be one of his great films, but he still draws out wonderfully natural performances from his cast. The characters played by Edie Falco, Angela Bassett and Timothy Hutton seem to be simply living out their lives as Sayles films around them.
Can he tell the story of Sunshine State any better than I can? He whinnies in distress. "It's about what happens when you start inventing history to sell," he says. "You've sold your history and it means nothing to you, and you've changed it enough to make it attractive. What happens when you're two generations into tourism and your history has been created by press people in order to make a week-long celebration of buccaneer days."
But this is only one of the many strands in the film. The word Sayles returns to, time and again, is "complexity".
"What separates our movies from mainstream Hollywood is not the politics per se, but that they are complex," he says. "If there's anything that I'm trying to do with movies that is unusual, it is to bring some of the complexity of life into a movie."
Sayles tends to work with the same team on each film; he says it's easier to retain control that way. His producer is Maggie Renzi, with whom he has lived for many years. He talks about their films affectionately and possessively; they are very much his and Renzi's babies. (He has said that there are enough kids on the planet, and that the couple's life is so dominated by work that they wouldn't have the time to bring up children properly.)
Sayles (51) explains how he and Renzi approach potential backers. "We promise not to go over budget, but the caveat is: 'OK, I get final cut and she gets business control'."
He doesn't hold back when discussing his films. He treats you with respect, and expects to be treated with respect. He will tell you exactly what he gets paid to write a screenplay ("A writer gets $45,000. It takes me about two weeks per draft, and I do three drafts per film. I average three screenplays a year for other people. To direct a film I get $50,000 to $60,000, then I get paid something as editor.")
Sayles was born in New York. His parents were teachers, and their parents were cops back in Florida. He spent much of his childhood reading, and watching films - Kurosawa, the Italian neo-realists, Bergman, John Ford westerns. After graduating from college, he took various blue-collar jobs before writing his first novel. By the late 1970s, he was working as a screenwriter for schlockmeister Roger Corman.
His relationship with the mainstream remains predictably complex. He says his films are about storytelling, while Hollywood is about commerce. So is he at odds with Hollywood as a director? "Not at odds, but to one side," he says. "As a director, there's a mutual understanding that most of what I'm interested in is not what they do, and most of what they do is not what I'm interested in."
He talks, with controlled horror, about the studio bosses he has met, whose twin mantras are "we have to dumb this down" and "there's no such thing as too simple".
As a script doctor, he tends to work on his own terms, smartening scripts up rather than dumbing them down. Ron Howard's Apollo 13 was a case in point.
"A lot of that job was to bring the science back in, to challenge the audience a little bit," he says. "It was actually Tom Hanks who was the rocket jock and knew all that stuff. It was his input to bring it back in, then they ended up leaving almost all of it in the picture."
There's a theme running through Sayles's films, but I can't quite put my finger on it. I ask him to help me out. "Well, inevitably your world view gets into the movie, and it's a complex world, and one that's not heroic," he says. "All the characters have shades of grey. They don't always do what you wish they'd do, but you may still like them."
A typical Sayles answer.
I tell him I think his films are about different kinds of corruption, and that Florida is a classic symbol of corruption. Well, he says, it's not quite so simple as that. For him, Florida evokes childhood and innocence, alligators and sand, flamingos and summer.
There's something as complex, as non- specific, about the man as there is about his films. He answers questions gracefully and as fully as he can, but even so, I don't come away after a couple of hours with Sayles feeling that I know the man.
It is tempting to assume that he is anti-American. He talks about US foreign policy with disdain, particularly post-September 11th. "The United States right now gets to go into the Middle East or the former Yugoslavia and do their military adventures not because it's morally right, but because they can. Period," he says.
"And there's an assumption that if somebody murders some people in our country, then we can go and hunt them down wherever, whereas if somebody murders somebody in Greece, say, and the Greeks say they're hiding in the United States and we're gonna bring 10,000 of our troops in to look for this guy, there's no way the United States would let them come in and do this. I generally haven't agreed with American foreign policy since I've been alive."
But there is so much he admires about the US. He talks about how the American character has been shaped by frontier. "There was always this possibility that if you failed in the old country, there was another frontier to go to," he says.
He talks about the men, invariably men, who cast off their past, and set off for a new life in Texas. "It was full of people who were in debt, wanted by the law, had abandoned their families, and all of a sudden there was an opportunity to get rich," he says.
The US still has a frontier mentality, he argues, the belief that there are no limits. "There's a tradition in this country of risk- taking, of just saying, 'I'm going to take some of my money and I'm going to try and dig an oil well'. I know they usually don't come in - but it might. Or 'I'm going to buy this lottery ticket' or 'I'm going to back this movie'."
He says it's wonderful how the US hasn't allowed itself to calcify, how it forever pushes forward the boundaries.
That's it, I say, that's what all your films are about - frontiers, and the way people are defined by their relationship with the land. He nods.
"There was some famous guy, French, Descartes or someone, who says it's always about land; even if it's a metaphor, it's about land. Currencies come and go, governments come and go, but if you have land you have power," he says.
"And in the United States, you have this melting-pot culture, where these people are trying to live, and you get people fighting over the land with very different ideas about not only who owns it, but what it should be."
He tells me of the Walking Treaty the Delaware Indians made inPennsylvania - they agreed that the Europeans could have as much land as they could walk in a day. The Europeans made maps, hired runners, and trained them to run as far as they could in a day. The disagreement led to thousands of Indians being killed.
Of course, there has always been a flipside to the frontier mentality. "All you had to do was kill Indians and push the Mexicans out," Sayles says.
It is this flipside, he adds, that his films explore as much as anything. "There is the heedlessness of the consequences, of the damage you can do. There is this assumption in the US that if anybody gets hurt in the process, that's their problem."
He pauses. Sometimes, he says, he feels so pessimistic about the world. But pessimists are often idealists, I say. He nods. "They can be, yeah. I actually don't like to use the word, I'm a kind of realist, but reality is generally pessimistic."
Sunshine State opens at the Irish Film Centre on August 30th
- Guardian Service