John Sayles – Last Man Standing

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by IFQ Critic Todd Konrad

IFQ Magazine recently caught up with independent filmmaker and author John Sayles to discuss his latest film Honeydripper, starring Danny Glover and Stacy Keach. In addition to discussing this newest work, Sayles also candidly discusses his own working methods, lessons learned from legendary producer Roger Corman, and his thoughts on the ever-shifting nature of the independent film business.

IFQ: For our readers, could you discuss first the film’s plot briefly and moreover, what was the impetus for you to take on this project?

JS: Yeah Honeydripper is set in this little crossroads town in Harmony, Alabama in 1950 and Danny Glover plays a guy who runs the Honeydripper Lounge, which is not doing so well. He’s still got live music in his club and he’s featuring a blues singer from the 20’s. But his rival across the street has a brand new jukebox and it’s packing them in so Danny’s character is about to lose his club. And more than that, he’s about to lose his place as probably the only independent, self-made black man in Harmony, Alabama in 1950. So I think my way into the story was basically through the music; I grew up in the 50’s listening to Top 40 Radio and you don’t think about it much when you’re a kid. It just exists and then as you get older you start to hear hints of other things and say “hey, maybe there’s something in that direction” and so rock n’ roll led me to gospel and blues which automatically leads you into the past. In my case, it was the recent past because I was born in 1950 and started thinking about what it must have been like not so much for the audience but for the musicians when they heard that first solidbody, electric guitar and realized “Oh my God, it’s all going to change, and we better get on board this new thing or else we’re going to be left behind. What do I do now?”

IFQ: Especially with blues music where the solidbody, electric guitar really became a dominant sound when it was finally able to compete volume-wise with the other traditional instruments.

JS: Yeah, see in the blues world what it meant was that Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and those people who came up north all of a sudden could electrify the guitar and stick the harmonica right into the microphone. And it was a much harder, louder, more modern sound and that harmonica didn’t sound like a train anymore it sounded like a B-52. If you think of Little Walter’s juke or some of those early swooping kinds of harmonica solos he would do, you knew that we weren’t on a porch in Alabama anymore.

IFQ: Especially with a lot of the music coming out of Chess Records out in Chicago at that time.

JS: Yeah absolutely, and then I think for rhythm and blues what it meant was that there was this brief four or five year war between the piano and the guitar as to what was going to be the dominant instrument. The guitar had always been more of a backup instrument, a sideman instrument, and all of a sudden it could out-volume the piano. It still had all the range that a guitar always did, in fact even more, and it was much more portable. And so you get into the phenomenon of the ‘garage band’ which leads to The Beatles and things like that. You can throw that guitar in a case, jump on a freight train, and go somewhere else and play it. And you know how many poor kids can afford a piano? Whereas they could send their four dollars away to Sears & Roebuck and get that basic guitar that almost all the blues legends talk about being their first instrument.

IFQ: You’ve already touched on this a little bit, but to be more specific, were there any specific ideas or themes that you wanted to express in this particular film?

JS: I think that as I started to do the research what led me to 1950 was when exactly did that solidbody, electric guitar become available to people? Or start becoming available to people in its infancy. Within a year, somewhere around ’51, the electric bass became available and that revolutionized life for the bass players because they didn’t have to carry that huge thing around anymore and get taxi drivers to allow them to tie it to their hood or whatever. But then I started thinking, “What else is going on in 1950?”, and one of the biggest things was the beginning of the Korean War and President Truman, through pressure from Eleanor Roosevelt, saying “Ok, we’re going to integrate the combat forces”. Most of our Army bases were still in the deep South so the Army’s concern was not so much “How is this going to affect us on the base?” it was “
Oh my God what’s going to happen when our black soldiers wander off the base on leave and expect to be treated like United States soldiers?” And those little towns aren’t buying it so there’s going to be a lot of problems, so that kind of fed into the story as well. That idea of change about to happen, it’s before what we recognize as the Civil Rights movement and it’s before what was being called Rock n’ Roll but it was already there. And people were already stretching those envelopes.

IFQ: The film appears to touch on a common thread that runs throughout your work, namely illustrating moments of transition, when one era is fading while another rises and people are left in a state of flux.

JS: And people don’t necessarily recognize that it’s a period of transition but when it comes they just have to deal with it. And who also, to a certain extent, get left behind. A lot of my movies are about assimilation. The Brother From Another Planet and, to a certain extent, Baby It’s You deal with that question of when you assimilate, when you become ‘cool’ in the new world whether it’s literal, i.e. you’re an immigrant and you learn English, or you go from high school to college and you do the hip things in college which weren’t hip when you were in high school, when you come to this planet like the character in The Brother From Another Planet does, what do you lose? What do you have to give up to be accepted in this new world? And it may be something pretty heavy, it may be “I don’t want my children to speak the language I speak” and so you get the phenomenon where people say “Oh I wish my parents would have spoken to me in Czech or Italian or whatever but they wanted us to be Americans and they never really learned proper English so I had a hard time talking to my own parents”. That’s a heavy thing to give up so what are the good things that you lose and what do you get for them? And rock and roll was the same thing for a lot of musicians, there were a lot of rhythm and blues musicians who actually would have preferred playing what they preferred before. They felt that rock and roll was just one tiny aspect of what they were doing before, but it was how you made a living. And the jazz guys, most of them would do it in a session for the money, but they wouldn’t do it on stage. It was just too embarrassing.

IFQ: Another commonality that runs through your body of work is the highly tuned levels of both acting and writing that your films achieve. Being a writer first, how do you work with your actors in regards to their handling of the text? Do you allow much improvisation or do you have them stick closely to your script?

JS: I may change one or two lines per movie and that’s after a lot of discussion (laughs), sometimes it’s just a tongue-twister and I realize that as people try to say it I could just rephrase it slightly. But usually if I do change something it’s because an actor before we start shooting says “I’m not sure about this line, what does it mean?” and as we talk about it they ask “Well, would my character really say that?” And then I realize probably not or they wouldn’t say it that way. But yeah, I basically write things the way they’re written for a reason so I don’t really let the actors paraphrase or expect them to paraphrase or improvise. Within that though, you can say the same exact lines and play a scene twenty different ways.

I worked with Marcia Gay Harden in Casa de Los Babys and she was playing a sociopath and she said to me “You know, there’s just so many ways I can play these scenes with this character” and I said “I want to see them all”. Every take she did something different without ever changing a single line. And they were all appropriate to the character so then in the editing room I got to mix and match and work on the character arc of just how crazy she was in any one moment and how good she was at hiding it. So when I start writing I just have to realize that all the characters can’t talk the same way. The way they express themselves tells us something about who they are. Are they educated? Are they not educated? Are they angry? Are they not angry? Who are they trying to impress? Are they with their friends? Are they trying to get a job? All those kinds of things express a time, place, social caste, etc.

So you start with that and you start with very specific dialogue with people. And then when I work with actors, truly, I send them the script and I send them each a biography of their character and you know with a character the size of Danny’s character it might be seven or eight pages long. And I also sent him a lot of music to listen to and think about; his character’s around fifty years old in 1950 so he’s somebody who grew up with the music and has played everything. He was there when swing started and when it ended. And then for the smaller characters, it’s usually a shorter bio so that they come to the set having a good idea of who their character is.

Then truly what you try to do the first couple of takes is see what they’re going to do with it. They’re actors, they bring something to it. You don’t teach people to act as a director, you direct their talent. So sometimes it’s just “You know, consider this in this scene” or “Try to do this in this scene with the same lines” sometimes it’s just a blocking thing of “Move left, instead of right” but very often it’s “Ok, we’ve got that version, let’s do one where you don’t show him how angry you are. Where you hold it just under the surface”, “Let’s do one where you’re a little more ironic with him”, “Let’s do one where you show your contempt for this person a little bit more”.

For instance, the scenes between Danny’s character and Stacy Keach; I got a chance to work with Stacy Keach who I think is one of our best actors and very underused. And this is a black man who’s his own boss in 1950 and the sheriff of his county, who’s not a psychopath but a guy used to running the show, and he partly does it by, as I said in the bio, keeping people off balance because he was a boxer. So sometimes he’s friendly but there’s a veiled threat in it, sometimes he’s threatening but he says it with a smile. You just don’t know what he’s going to come at you with. And so each time they did their scenes together it was slightly different. And there’s this balance Danny’s character had to walk between holding his ground and being a little too sassy for a black man in 1950 and getting himself into deeper trouble than he can get himself out of. But he doesn’t want to be a pushover. And that’s the ideal acting dynamic for actors because each time they do it they’re really by that point acting with each other, they’re not acting with me. They’ve got their ammunition, their lines and their characters, and now they’re really looking to each other to see how the scene is going to go.

IFQ: I’d like to take a step back from the creative end for a moment, and ask about the process of getting the project together in regards to finance, casting, etc. and how that process has been for you since your last movie, Silver City, was released back on ‘04.

JS: Well basically, what happened was we went into Silver City thinking that we were going to be able to raise money for it and we call it the “If you build it, he will come” method of filmmaking where you just decide we’re going to miss our date and our actor’s availability so let’s start making it on our own nickel. And then Maggie [Renzi], who’s the producer, will start calling around and trying to get someone to finance it. It never happened on Silver City so we ended up making it with all our own money. Then, I had this idea (for Honeydripper) and I wrote it and I kept writing screenplays for hire for other people and wrote lots and lots and lots of screenplays plus we made a little bit of money not on Silver City but on some of our other movies, backlisted movies. And we spent a year trying to raise the money for this script and even after we had offered it to Danny Glover and he had said yes, so it was a script with a major star attached, we could not raise any money for a five million dollar movie.

So after that year, Maggie said to me “I think we’re going to have to see how much money we have in the bank” and we had just enough we felt like to get it in the can and that bought us five weeks of shooting so we had to plan things very carefully. We only got Danny Glover, who’s the lead in the movie, for three and a half weeks because he had a movie before and a movie afterwards so his window of availability was very short and all the other actors had their own windows of availability. So getting everybody onscreen together was the big problem. We didn’t get to shoot it anywhere near in continuity even within a scene. Sometimes we’d have to shoot the first part of a scene and then drop it and then pick up the second part a week later just ‘cause of actor availability. But we’ve made fifteen other movies so I’ve done stuff like that before and I felt pretty good about it after I finished it. But now we’re basically distributing it ourselves, we put together our own team to distribute it. And to do that, we’ve presold the home video/DVD rights for a million dollars and that’s what we’re using to sell the movie. So it’s a very hands-on, self-financed process, and the great thing about that is we got to make the movie we wanted to make with the actors we wanted to make it with.

IFQ: Well I doubt you could ask for anything more than that when working on a project like this…

JS: Oh no, not at all, not at all. You know, I could have asked for another week (laughs) of shooting and that would have made life easier, not so much for me but for the technical crew who did a wonderful job. Like Dick Pope who shot it did a great job; it’s a really great looking movie but he was under the gun the whole time. You know everyday you have to shoot a certain number of pages and if the weather doesn’t cooperate you’re scrambling to make it look good anyway.

IFQ: I’d like to touch on a person who’s not spoken too often of in conjunction with yourself but whom you started with and surely must have had an influence on your method and that person is Roger Corman. Corman’s obviously well-known for producing dozens of films on very small, tightly-controlled budgets while getting the most out of such limited resources. I want to ask about what practical lessons you learned from him and how they shaped your own work.

JS: I wrote three movies for Roger starting in 1978 and learned from him and also the directors whom he hired to eventually direct those things that I wrote for him. The main thing that I really learned was what in moviemaking is capital-intensive and what’s labor-intensive. What can you do with hard work and imagination and what just costs money. And so when I wrote the movie I got to make first, The Return of the Seacaucus Seven, I had written some scripts for myself that obviously I was not going to be able to afford to do yet. I started with the fact that I had forty thousand dollars in the bank so I asked myself “What can I do well for forty-thousand dollars? I know a bunch of really good actors who are almost thirty years old who aren’t in the Screen Actors Guild yet. Well, I think this movie’s going to be about a bunch of people turning thirty; I know of a rundown, ski lodge in New Hampshire where I used to act. We can put people up there for one and a half dollars a night. Well, why don’t we have that be the center of the story and we’ll get most of our interior sets from that building and everything else will be within a five-mile radius from there. And there’s a theater in town so we’ll have a scene in a theater.” So you kind of start with those elements and then you write the best movie you can do. Now that’s the only time I’ve started with a budget but when I write movies I always have to be aware of the budget.

And sometimes I write them and say “There’s just no way we’ll be able to finance this ourselves” and I’ve written historical epics like that. One of the movies I’ve written starts at the battle of Culloden and ends at the battle of Quebec; there’s no way I’m ever going to make as much money to finance that as a screenwriter so somebody’s going to have to decide to finance it. And we tried to make it a couple time and never really came up with the money. But other times I write and I say “Ok, what can I do that is affordable?”. For example, with The Brother From Another Planet; I had written Matewan, we thought we had the finances for it and the day before we were about to get on a plane and go to West Virginia, the people financing it called up and said “Our bank loan was refused, we’re not financing your movie”. So I was sitting with Maggie and the other producer and they were commiserating saying we had all this momentum, it’s too bad to have the rug pulled out from under you and then I said “Look I have this idea about a black extraterrestrial who ends up in Harlem and we want to shoot before the snow hits the ground so I’ll start writing, you start producing”. Six weeks later we were shooting The Brother From Another Planet and we shot it in four weeks. Partly because I knew I only had three hundred to four hundred thousand dollars in the bank so whatever I write, it can’t be too high-tech. It’s got to fit within a certain kind of scope. So yeah, it’s something that’s too bad but sometimes I really have to kind of drive with the brakes on when I’m writing a screenplay.

IFQ: You’ve been in the business now for thirty years now, and as such are regarded as one of the few, truly independent filmmakers who’s managed to survive and create films on your own terms. From the way the actual business-end has changed from when you first got in to how things are now, where do you see yourself fitting into that continuum and moreover what are your thoughts on just how things have changed in the intervening decades?

JS: Well you know, everything is always changing. If you look back into history you realize that and it’s something that’s in this film regarding the aspect of music. The music keeps rolling on so really I think we’ve been very lucky and sometimes our timing has been really perfect like showing up just when video was invented so that the theaters that showed The 400 Blows and The Seven Samurai every year realized these audiences can now rent these movies, they don’t have to come to us every year. What else can we show? They weren’t going to be rep houses anymore, they had to have open runs. What else can we show that the studios don’t own because we’re not in that system. And that was the beginning of what is now considered the American independent film movement, although there were certainly a lot of independent filmmakers before us their just wasn’t a movement of them.

So basically what’s happened is we’ve had to reinvent ourselves every couple of years; the movie business is volatile but the independent movie business is even more volatile. Of our first eight movies, I don’t think any of those companies are still in business except for Paramount Pictures and that was not an independent movie, Baby It’s You. Some of the same people are in business but not at the same companies, so a lot of what you have to do is just say “Look I like to make these movies, where’s the money coming from now? We’re going to have to learn about that.” Certainly a really nice thing that’s happened to us that make movies outside of Hollywood is that very well-known actors now consider those movies and their agents allow them to do those movies (laughs). We used to run into people we offered parts to and they said “Oh I didn’t know that” and it turns out their agent had said they turned it down and they never even showed it to them. That doesn’t really happen anymore, especially with us now that we’ve done sixteen films. So that’s a new opportunity for us to get really experience, well-known actors in a movie where they’re basically making scale.

The other side is that as making movies has democratized because more people come through film schools, more people gaining skills at younger ages, and equipment getting cheaper especially with Hi-Def Video, there is still only a small percentage of theaters that aren’t chain theaters that aren’t tied to the studios. So there is a limited number of screens, a limited number of weeks in the year, and there are now five thousand filmmakers making films every year that are outside the Hollywood system rather than when we started when there were twelve or fifteen. And you’ve got foreign movies coming in and some of them are very good; so the competition to hold a screen for more than a week is really tough. The toughest thing for us theatrically now is we used to get two or three weeks to build up critical mass, you don’t get that anymore. You’re being judged on the first weekend like a major studio release and so what we’re trying to do with our own self-distribution is find a way around that paradigm which if independent filmmakers are going to survive they’re going to have to do. Some of that is going to have to do with building up your DVD sales afterwards, the long tail as they call it, and some of it’s going to have to do with getting to those audiences that have stopped going to the theater and getting them in to see your movie. It means we’re doing a lot more leg work, we’re doing the same kind of leg work we did with our first two or three movies and this is our sixteenth. You can’t just cop an attitude and say “I’m beyond that”, if you want people to see the movie you have to work to get them in the theater.

IFQ: Well that’s what it all boils down to in the end.

JS: Yeah and the studios are trying to do it in a more corporate way so they’re guessing what do people want to see, how to advertise this because we’re going to spend our twenty to fifty million dollars on TV time and ads, billboards, etc. for one weekend. And maybe two if it’s a big runaway hit, but we’ve got to make our money back in that one weekend so we’re going to blitz everybody. So what you see is the studios becoming much more conservative and I don’t mean politically conservative…

IFQ: No, just fiscally…

JS: Fiscally yes, if we’re going to spend a hundred million dollars getting a film out there or more, it better be something that we think everybody in America wants to see or all the kids want to see. I heard from my agent that one studio said to all the agencies “We don’t want you to send us anymore period movies or dramas”. That’s a big genre, drama, and what they meant was “We’re making Knocked Up and Spider-Man and nothing in between”. And that’s because they know how to do that and that’s paying off right now either a twenty million dollar movie that’s a youth comedy or a Marvel comics book thing that costs over a hundred million dollars that everybody in the world wants to see. But the in-between is just too iffy for them and they just can’t take a chance on it.