In our latest, we talk with legendary filmmaker, screenwriter, actor and novelist John Sayles. We start with a discussion about his new novel “Crucible.” But, also talk about labor, class consciousness, portraying the organizer as a hero, the border and the American empire in his, and other, films and novels.
Bio//
John Sayles is an Oscar nominated American independent film director, screenwriter, editor, actor, and novelist. He is known for writing and directing the films The Brother from Another Planet, Matewan, Eight Men Out, Passion Fish, The Secret of Roan Inish, Lone Star, Men with Guns, Sunshine State, Silver City and Amigo.
He has written eight novels, the most recent being Yellow Earth, To Save the Man, Crucible and the forthcoming Gods of Gotham.
Transcript of interview:
Scott: We’re super excited today to be joined by the legendary filmmaker John Sayles.
John is an independent film director, screenwriter, actor, and novelist, known for writing and directing films like Eight Men Out, Matewan, Passion Fish, Lone Star, Silver City, and many others. He’s twice nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay for Passion Fish and Lone Star. And then he’s also written eight novels, which we’ll be talking about today, it includes 2022’s Yellow Earth, To Save the Man and the most recent one is Crucible. John’s also been nominated for a National Book Award.
John, welcome to the Green & Red podcast.
John Sayles: Yeah, nice to be here.
Scott: And, maybe we can kick off talking about the books a little bit. You’ve written two books within just like the last two years or so: To Save The Man and Crucible.
John Sayles: Actually, I’ve written another one that’ll come out next year, I hope.
Scott: Oh, excellent. Maybe we could start off with why have you been writing more novels than film making?
John Sayles: You don’t need to raise millions of dollars to write a novel. The great thing about fiction writing is whether you get it published or not, you can do the thing itself by just sitting down and doing it.
You don’t even have to buy typewriting paper anymore. It’s been really difficult for us to raise money for movies for the last 20 years. I think it’s been 20 years since we got any other people’s money for anything that we did. So several of those novels are things that were screenplays first: To Save the Man and Jamie McGillivray.
You try to make them, and it gets clear, we’re never gonna raise that much money. And then they sit for a while and you just – I felt like it’s such a good story. I wanna do something with it, and then well, maybe I can make it into a novel. And it always doesn’t work to make it into a novel.
So you try, and they tend to expand because you can, basically you can expand without costing any money. Yeah. So in the case of To Save the Man, in the screenplay these kids are at the Carlisle Boarding School. They’ve been taught to read English. They’re actually putting out a newspaper of their own, and they’re reading in the newspapers.
In the case of the Lakota kids, oh my God. There’s this train wreck about to happen, back on our reservation. Those are my people, those are my relatives, these are my family. What’s gonna happen? And they start to get some letters from a former student all during the Wounded Knee massacre.
In the book I could go to Wounded Knee and I didn’t have to worry about an extra location, and paying for the stuff, and the army and the horses and all that. So there are opportunities. There are things you can do in a movie you can’t do in a book. And there are things you can do in a book that you can’t do in a movie.
Bob: I don’t know if you like to be described as a political filmmaker or political author, but here we are. The last two especially have I think really world historical meaning, right? You deal with the Carlisle boarding school and Wounded Knee and then Henry Ford, one of the biggest figures.
Like, what’s the purpose of studying those? Is it just that you’re interested in these folks, or do you think there’s a bigger purpose? Is there a tale in there?
John Sayles: I’d get interested in how these big events affect just people.
One of the things that I do when I direct movies is when there’s a scene that’s not working often I realize, oh, I know what’s wrong. They’re saying the line’s right and everything like that, but something’s off. And I take the actors aside and I say, guys, you’re playing this scene as if you’ve read the script, and people in real life haven’t read the script.
In the 1920s, 1930s, if you were a young communist, it might be the answer to everything. This, and it’s just can’t, people just listen? I’ve got the key to everything. If you’re an African American guy working at the Ford Auto Plant and somebody says most of the white workers want to form a union, do you want to join or not?
You’ve gotta think, “Henry Ford’s the only guy paying black workers the same as white workers for the same work. I’m on thin ice here.” Unions, you look at the AFL, it was pretty exclusionary. “How do I trust this bunch of people who I don’t have much to do with at the factory?”
They were purposely kept apart. In the River Rouge factory, the service department were basically a lot of thugs. If you went to the bathroom from the assembly line, your foreman had a stopwatch and he clicked at the minute, you stopped doing your job and he clicked it when you came back and wrote down how long you were gone.
Not only that, when you went into the toilet, the stalls had no doors on them, and there was a service department guy looking at you the whole time, making sure you didn’t talk to any other workers. That’s what these guys were under.
So of course, these African-American workers are thinking like, “I don’t think this is gonna work.
Why should I stick my neck out? And even if I do, how can I be sure that these union guys won’t say, oh, it’s all seniority.” And you’ve only been here two years, so sorry, you’re out of a job. So I get in that way, in which people only know what they know. They only get the information they get.
It’s like today, if you only watch Fox News, you have a certain view of how the world works and how America works. If you go on Pod Save America or something like that, or read a bunch of different things, you have a different view. So that complexity, I’m very interested in that.
And then I’m interested, and the story isn’t over. How are we gonna work all this stuff out? This is complex, difficult stuff. How do you deal with a system where, yes, it makes absolute economic sense to get rid of workers and put robots and machines in there instead?
But at what point is there nobody left who can afford to buy one of your cars?
Bob: You mentioned a minute ago how, at that moment, you don’t know if you have a story and so people have this kind of fervor and anticipation and maybe even hope in the thirties, right? You have this global depression and even in Matewan, people are coming together.
It’s important to give people a sense of how people felt about this. Because we can always look back on it and say, that was the ruling class grinding us down.
John Sayles: Yeah. I think for instance, one of the reasons that I made Matewan was that when Ronald Reagan first got in, pretty much the first thing he did was bust the air controllers, the people who land planes safely.
And a lot of it was that they made pretty good money. But most of their complaints weren’t about money. They were about, we’re over stressed, this is gonna kill people, people are gonna die if we don’t get some better regulations in here. And time away from the computer screen and stuff like that so that we can do a better job.
But it was a symbolic thing. It was like a show trial and he busted this union and most of those guys did not get their jobs back. Within a year almost everything they were asking for, ’cause it was so obviously needed, got put in. And union membership was way, way down. This is the early eighties.
And I was meeting young kids who were saying why would you want to belong to a union? You have to pay dues and they could tell you what to do and this and that and the other thing. And I thought it was important for people to understand. Okay. Remember a time when there wasn’t a union, and this is what happens. We cannot expect these corporations or owners to just outta the goodness of their heart say, oh, I’m gonna, see, I’m gonna meet the workers halfway. So yeah, often I feel like I don’t see anybody else making this story at this time.
Scott: One of the elements in some of your novels, and then also in your films, is this idea of organizing. We don’t see the organizer as a hero in many films, but I often think of Chris Cooper and Matewan. American audiences seem to be more geared toward the action hero or what have you.
But how do you see fitting this process of political organizing into these projects? And then, how do you portray them so that organizing is this noble profession, that sort of thing?
John Sayles: One of the things that I do is try to recognize the complexity of it. It is not a simple thing. If you take the Detroit example, the Reuther brothers, when they started, they were considered radicals. They’d been to the Soviet Union. They worked in factories there. They came back saying we love the political system, but these people can’t make a car to save their lives. They felt like on the shop floor, they needed to do a lot of learning, but they liked the idea of a place that really recognized workers. By the sixties they were middle of the road to center, right?
They had ended up like a lot of other units purging all the left wing members. People had fought side by side with them at the beginning. And there was this kind of unwritten deal that happened between corporations and manufacturing and some of the bigger unions of, you get rid of those lefties and we’ll meet you halfway.
But those people, they’re gonna be going out on strike every two minutes and they’re gonna ask for things that just are not on the table. My new book, called Gods of Gotham, is set in New York City between 1949 and 1951. And some of that takes place within the garment district world.
Those unions had to deal with the mob, ’cause the mob was so deep into that union. And that’s something that happened around the country. And one of the reasons that people got turned off by unions is, until Franklin Roosevelt came in, unions were just like, the state didn’t want ’em, the national government didn’t want ’em. It was just like, this is a foreign evil idea. And they were unprotected.
So it was easy for a criminal group to come in and. Sometimes they would rent out to both sides, and one time they’d be on the company side punching people and then they’d rent out to the union and say, oh, we’re gonna protect you.
And they were making money off both sides. That inclusion of criminal elements is one of the things that made the union story more complex in this country. I’m interested in that. It’s not good guys and bad guys. It’s not one side versus the other.
And to be very clear, even in Matewan, there’s a point where they’re having a union meeting and one guy gets up and says, “I don’t see why I have to listen to a bunch of honkies in Pittsburgh about what I can do with my life.” And he’s resisting the idea, but only because.
the conditions are so bad. But do these hillbilly miners and black miners and immigrant miners have to go around armed men to find each other and form this union? But when you take away that kind of common enemy, if the common enemy starts to be a little more political instead of just muscle your coalition can fall apart.
It’s a union. The word union is a tough word. Why do people give up some of their individuality and some of their time? And it does take time and effort to belong to this thing. And what are the factors that mitigate against that?
Bob: Your newest or most recent book, I guess not the newest, is Crucible and, I’ve seen some reviews of it, and they point out kind of the relevance to what’s going on today, and they make comparisons to people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. And Ford was a huge, larger than life figure when you’re writing. Are you trying to make that connection so people will see that this stuff as historical, but also contemporary as well?
John Sayles: Yeah, it’s unavoidable. So I think I wrote Crucible two and a half years ago at least. And Musk was just making cars. So there were no direct parallels. I think it’s unavoidable that if you write anything that is about complexity and American life the present is gonna catch up with you and there are gonna be things that are analogous, but I don’t usually start out with that kind of thesis. I usually start out, there’s a story here.
I see an arc in this history. A lot of stuff is gonna happen, and I usually discover the connections to the present while I’m in it. One thing that’s happening now Henry Ford was the last of the robber barons. He wasn’t into money so much as the power, and he felt like my job is to move the world forward in various ways, social ways and political ways as well as technology.
He didn’t live a lavish lifestyle or anything. So he’s one of those guys that Teddy Roosevelt tried to get rid of.
And then there were rules in place about corporations and how much they could merge and how much they could own. Teddy Roosevelt started trust busting and tapped into this feeling that you can’t have one company that has a lock on things.
Unfortunately, what’s happened is that it’s not so much a one man, a Ford. It was not a corporation. He had no stockholders. He and his son had all the stock in the company. So he could just close the factory down if he wanted to. What we’ve got today is something analogous to what things were before Teddy Roosevelt got busy.
We have ignored or erased so many laws about mergers that these super companies are more powerful than many countries. They have an inordinate amount of power. And they’re financing politicians, they’re financing political parties. They’re moving without any restrictions ’cause they’ve consolidated so many companies together that they pretty much own a market.
And when computers started, it was the Wild West for a while, and then very quickly it seemed every year it started getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And it was tough to break into that. And so people had not only an incredible amount of cultural power, but an incredible amount of money.
The money is so concentrated. It is just ridiculous. And really nobody has tried very hard to counter that. So we have situations now where if a couple of these kind of companies that own media want to just say something is true, half the world thinks, oh, this is true.
Scott: I thinking with the U.S.’ adventures in Venezuela and attempted adventurism in Greenland, it had me thinking a lot about Smedley Butler, about how he was muscle for Wall Street, Ford or whoever. He was a gangster for capitalism.
John Sayles: He’s a character in the book I’m working on now.
Bob: Oh, fantastic.
John Sayles: That’s about our intervention in Veracruz in 1914 in Mexico. And Smedley was there.
Bob: I taught history for over 30 years and I used film quite a bit. I showed Matewan every semester, some scenes from The Grapes of Wrath, movies like that. And you did an interview, I think it may have been about your movie Amigo, which is set in the Philippines, which is something I taught about and it’s the first time students ever heard about it. And you made a point that, we’re raised on this kind of Davy Crockett or John Wayne version of The Alamo, that kind of thing.
And you said, When I went in and read what actually happened, it was very different.
So why don’t we Americans know that different version? That’s a choice. And some of it is who’s controlling the history, right? And we’re seeing this now more than ever. Books being banned. One of the reasons I retired in Texas and got out of there was because just increasingly the state was taking control over everything you do in the classroom, when you, Matewan is fairly obvious. There’s a real clear message there, but do you think it’s important in your films or in anybody’s films to take on these issues? Because we’re in this situation now where you can’t count on the established institutions to tell you what really happened. And so you’re filling a void in that regard,
John Sayles: Yeah, I think you always have to be suspicious of the official story.
Bob: Yeah.
John Sayles: And you’ll always have to ask. Okay. Who put this information out? During Vietnam, there were generals would have these press conferences and you’d think we were winning the war, and that’s –
Bob: What my first book’s about actually.
John Sayles: Yeah. And finally what would happen is, even the mainstream media, eventually their reporters started saying, it’s not going that well over here. There’s this famous incident where Morley Safer went out with a squad of guys and they hit this village that had some Viet Kong activity, and they torch it.
They burned it to the ground. Morley Safer is shaking. And they aired it. And then the head of the network at three in the morning gets a call on his private phone from Lyndon Johnson. And who’s calling me at three in the morning? “This is your President. You trying to fuck me? Boy, right then there was this crisis of who are we gonna believe”
And truly, when Walter Cronkite started questioning that war, and it took ’em a long time, the government had to reconsider, “oh God, I don’t think we’re gonna get away from this.” We controlled the narrative. We don’t control it anymore. So what you see now, of course, is the government and the people who are in bed with the government, who’ve spent their time at Mar-a-Lago and gotten good deals. They’re controlling the narrative as much as they can.
And not just the narrative of what’s happening now, the narrative of what happened, in the Civil Rights Movement or the Civil War, whatever. Let’s de-emphasize this thing. It’s the anti-Howard Zinn movement going on. Maybe we don’t want a people’s history of America.
Maybe we want our history of America to not only get our core feeling good about the flag again but get other people to stop asking questions and asking for so much.
Scott: Yeah, I’ve been seeing where Ellison’s own Paramount+ really wants to put in programming that really lifts up America, especially around this 250th anniversary that’s coming up, and it had to split with some notable creators, like Taylor Sheridan. He parted ways with them and it’s pretty interesting how they’re trying to take out this history. They’re trying to take out class consciousness and things like that.
We have this new generation of filmmakers who are very much in the tradition of you, who are still creating independent films, creating things that really question the status quo. And I’m wondering how you feel about the independent creator element out there still making films. How do you see the current generation?
John Sayles: There was that saying in the sixties, you’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem. If you look at American movies, feature films, they were a part of the problem for a very long time. The censorship boards not only were worried about sexual content, but political content.
The heads of the studios didn’t want to ruffle feathers with the government because they were worried about the government coming in and taking control of their business. But also about backlash from the America First people. You have to remember there was a big isolationist move in this country and a big anti-immigrant move in this country for years and years and years.
It’s not a new thing. So I think that idea of, let’s go back to, telling all American stories. How many Jewish people were in movies? Until the sixties, with mostly Jewish people running these studios, America didn’t wanna see that. That’s too ethnic for them, and let’s not cause trouble and cause trouble for ourselves and cause trouble for the studio.
There is this economic part of it, which is maybe that will be good business, and we’ll get some of the people who have turned off to turn back on. Because they’re not afraid that they’re gonna turn something on and feel like, “Oh, they’re calling me a racist.” And there is also just the kind of let’s curry favor with the people who are in power right now.
And that’s always there. And so I think these phenomena often have two edges to the sword. The reason that we don’t have a fairness doctrine anymore is partly because cable came along and that’s not licensed by the government. They couldn’t say, oh, you’re going into people’s houses whether they like it or not. We are gonna hold you to a certain standard of fairness.
The minute cable came in, all bets were off. So all of a sudden, all kinds of stuff, good stuff and bad stuff is possible. You can have a network like Fox that does stuff that’s absolutely political opinion, and they’re calling it news. And then when they’re sued or something, they say, oh, that was an opinion piece, not a news piece. And you can have people like Comedy Central who have stuff that’s actually always kind of taking the piss out of whoever’s in power. And they really don’t have to worry about censorship too much.
If they belong to a network that wants to merge with some big company, they may lose their job, but they can find another job doing something else in the media. So there is this kind of free for all. It’s just that the mainstream stuff, the stuff that most people see, is getting more and more controlled in a certain direction right now.
But it’s a long struggle. Is there still a country where you just can’t do certain things and say certain things? And it’s not just sexual behavior, it’s political stuff. It was not until about 12 years ago in Mexico that you could actually make fun of somebody who was in the PRI. The Partido Nacional Revolucionario.
Yeah. And then finally a movie came out and they were like, oh God, is anything gonna happen? And the PRI wasn’t in control of the government at that moment, so they got away with it. And now it’s open season, but there are still things that you can’t do in many countries that you just can’t say.
Bob: To follow on that, ’cause you mentioned how difficult it’s to get funding. I’m assuming the studios will say it’s an economic decision, right? This movie’s not gonna make us a hundred million dollars. How much of it might be that? Or how much of it is actually they don’t want that political content out there?
John Sayles: I’d say if they’re trying to make an expensive mainstream picture, they get very nervous about it. ‘Cause they think it’s gonna turn off some of their audience. So they’ll come in at the script stage and say, eh, I don’t know.
My friend David Strathairn, the actor, was in a Godzilla movie. And there was a Japanese actor, very well known in Japan, who plays a guy trying to stop Godzilla from crushing the world. He has a speech in the original script about how his family was from Hiroshima. Did a great job acting it. And then the studio edited it out before it was released. They just didn’t want people to have to think about too much. So there’s that kind of censorship.
But basically we’re not getting money because none of our movies have gone platinum lately. If we were making a lot of money, somebody would give us money to make a movie. If we had a couple big hits, and they could be as transgressive as you want politically or sexually or anything, people would be chasing us saying, can we invest in your movie?
Bob: So is that why, for instance, something like Reds, which was a long time ago, it’s Warren Beatty.
John Sayles: And also, in that case, I think he was very hot at the moment. Studios wanted him to make a movie with them that he was in. And I’m sure he went well over budget. He was doing editing in the same place in New York that I was. The movie had an opening date and he just didn’t like the score. So he redid the score and recut the movie a little bit, and it came out, I don’t know, six months to a year after it should have, which cost them a lot of money. But they got lucky and the movie did well. It could have been a good movie and not done well. It happened to be one of those ones that struck a chord even though it was very political.
Scott: Thinking about Reds and then, a few years later you made Matewan. Did you find it difficult to make Matewan in that political era? We talked a little bit about the air traffic controllers and the Reagan anti-union period, but –
John Sayles: We thought we had the financing when we were gonna make it for a little under $2 million. The people who were gonna finance it said, “We’re gonna get a bank loan and then you can go ahead.” And the day before we got on the plane to go to West Virginia, they called up and said, “That loan, they didn’t give it to us.” So we had two years, and I did other things and made Brother from Another Planet, and we did some springing videos and stuff like that.
And then we got, I think it was $4 million, between $3 and $4 million from independent investors, an independent distribution company, that really had nothing to do with politics. They just thought, okay, this guy’s last movie, Brother from Another Planet did pretty well. Let’s take a gamble on this.
It seems like a good story. So there really was not a political struggle with that one. It was just, How can I make a movie on a fairly big scale for a fairly low budget? And, let’s go to West Virginia and really make it there. That’s a little more expensive than shooting it in Toronto or wherever people were going.
Bob: You’ve worked with well known actors. I believe they nominated Mary McDonnell for an Academy Award. Chris Cooper. Do they come onto these because they’re not just nice roles, but because they’re also committed to these ideas?
John Sayles: I’m sure. I don’t ask actually, I really don’t go down a list on what these people’s politics are. It’s just, “Is this a good actor who would be good for the part,” and B, “What is their reputation as far as working with the other people?” You don’t want somebody who’s too self-centered, an actor who really doesn’t care about the other actors and crew and stuff like that.
Because we’re shooting fast. We’re trying to put out a really good movie in four weeks sometimes and you really can’t be waiting around for somebody who’s having temper tantrums or is just on their own track. I think mostly people see a role they like, they read the movie, they think, oh, I’d like to see this. And the role is interesting enough for them to do it.
We’ve had actors come in for a day or so, almost as a favor, it’s, Oh yeah, I’m free, I can come to wherever you’re shooting for a day and do these scenes. And so sometimes I think it’s just that they like the story. They think it’s the one that should be told.
And if you’re very successful as an actor, you may not be the most famous actor, but you can get to a position where you say, I only want to be in movies that I want to go see, which is not the way to make the most money, obviously. Many actors see only a fraction of the movies that they’re in.
They say “I did my job and good luck. Make some money on it and I’ll be hot for another year.”
Scott: One of your best known films is Lone Star, but then also Silver City. Both deal with the issue of immigration. And in Lone Star, particularly the politics of the border, which in many ways is the root of a political crisis in the U.S. right now.
And I’m wondering, how with those films did you anticipate what’s happening now, and what your thoughts are on the current state of things.
John Sayles: Yeah. It is a crisis everywhere around the world, it’s not just us, and always has been. Once we got to the industrial age and they needed not just farm workers seasonally but they needed people to do these jobs that nobody else really wants to do, and we want them to take as little money as possible.
Migrant workers for years came into America, just for the cane cutting season, or just for the grape picking season or whatever. And then they might go to pick apples somewhere else, or they might go back home where they live. For me, the sad thing is people come up to me and say, oh, I watched Lone Star last night, and that scene where all the parents and the teachers get together couldn’t happen today.
They’re arguing about how Texas history is being taught. And some of the things on the border that could happen today. And I have to say, that movie is 30 years old. We have not moved on. That border is more complex to cross. When we shot at Eagle Pass, you could take a dime, put it in a slot, there was a turnstile, walk into Mexico and do the same on the way back.
And yes, there were border agents there, they would question people who looked like they were in the wrong place. If you lived on the other side in Piedras Negras, and you had a car, it had a border license plate. So if you drove across, the cops would leave you alone in that car.
So people didn’t keep getting stopped when they were going to Walmart. So now there’s a wall and there’s barbed wire, and the border guys have to wear body armor, because it might be somebody working for one of the cartels bringing drugs across, and they might have weapons, which did not used to be the case when we shot the movie there.
But the problem remains, and nobody has done a very good job with it. Everybody can’t live in this country. But our history is of bringing people in and then very often saying, okay, job done, get out. Certainly the Asian people, Chinese and Japanese people, people who made the railroads and stuff like that.
In 1920 or so, there was this act where we got rid of all those people. We had just acquired the Philippines as a territory. And if you go to Alaska – when we shot up there – there’s a big Filipino community. They came to take over the jobs that Chinese people had, in the slime lines where they processed the fish.
This is a long, complicated history and I don’t have any easy answers, but there were times when people came to work on contracts and when the contract was up they had to go home, and those were the border areas where they’re not too deep into the interior. What do we do about that?
What do we do about making sure that if somebody comes from another country and they’re here on a work visa or came in illegally they’re getting paid minimum wage? Because if they’re getting paid minimum wage, maybe the person who’s running the business will say, Why don’t they just hire somebody who’s from here?
I’m not getting any economic break on this. One thing for certain is that a lot of places closed down during COVID. But a lot of places since then have closed down because their existence depended on people who weren’t getting American middle class wages and benefits. And we have to ask, okay, should those businesses exist?
It’s this kind of American dream that you could have your own business and run it your own way and all that kinda stuff. Can we really do that? Or does everything have to be a chain, and have no local businesses? So the people I know who work in restaurants say one of their problems is if they rely on American workers, American workers don’t wanna work that hard for that little money, even if they’re getting minimum wage.
What’s that about?
Scott: They also haven’t raised the minimum wage in almost two decades.
John Sayles: Exactly. They never made it, but I think it was Showtime that bought an option on Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed. Which is, she takes four or five jobs, all pay minimum wage, non-union. And she says, can you make a living? Can you survive doing this? And the answer is no. You’re gonna be eating cotton, you know, she actually goes to a food bank.
They give her a box, which includes Hamburger Helper without the hamburger. Yeah. If you’ve ever tried to eat Hamburger Helper without the hamburger, it’s not very good. So that’s one of the things is, yes, there are businesses that if you raise the minimum wage will not exist. But you know what, maybe that’s the price of entry.
If you can’t pay that, don’t start that business. You’re not making enough of a profit.
Bob: Yeah. Well this is more philosophical, but I think a lot of movies valorize the kind of people who I would call resistance figures, like Star Wars, which Lucas has said is about the Vietcong, and like Hunger Games, and I’ve seen The Godfather like a thousand times, and when when Michael Corleone comes out and shoots the dirty cop, people cheer.
John Sayles: Yeah.
Bob: So on the screen I think people can identify with that. But in real life, we have this propaganda, right? Where movies valorize the police and the military and they’re full of people blowing things up. Is that the studios directing that? Like why do we on screen, understand and get it, but then in real life, not?
John Sayles: I think there’s a human desire to see things solved quickly and easily. With a firm hand. So many of the cop movies that have been successful or westerns that have been successful are abour saying “Forget the judges. They’re just gonna let the guy go.” There’s all this legalese stuff that nobody really understands. We know this is a bad guy, let’s go get ’em.
Within any military or police organization there is that faction. These are the real bad guys.
Let’s go get ’em. Which is unfortunately kinda dangerous. It’s not that easy, first of all. But then it’s why do we take shit from anybody? Why don’t we just enforce the law the way we want to instead of looking at the statutes?
Both of my grandfathers were cops, so we have a lot of cops in the family, and a lot of other relatives were cops. It’s not an easy job. And police don’t always get a clear mandate from their superiors. It’s often, “Go out there and do your job, but be careful.” And the “Be careful” is just this nebulous thing, which is, Don’t step on the wrong toes, Be careful in white neighborhoods, but you can get away with whatever you want in black neighborhoods. The rules are often hazy and so you have individual cops who interpret the rules the way they want to, and then that becomes a police culture.
I think some of the stuff made about cops really deal with that complexity and others, it’s just, Isn’t it satisfying that the bad guy is so bad? We wanna see him killed with extreme prejudice at some point we’ve seen how bad he is. And so when the rogue cop just shoots him, maybe not even in a fair fight, everybody cheers.
It’s easy. I saw the movie Independence Day twice. When the aliens blew up the White House, huge cheer. So this is something that we have to deal with, which is that people are disappointed with their government and with their law enforcement.
And partly ’cause it doesn’t solve things overnight. Which is not a reasonable thing to expect, but they’re disappointed. And they would like it to be less complex than it is. And very often the people who win are the people who can make it seem simple, take one or two issues and make it, whether they pay off on those issues or not, they make it seem like this is simple.
Why are we talking about all these little details? It’s simple. If we just tell these people to behave and kick out the ones who won’t behave, it’ll all be solved. It’s just that we’re disappointed in our political leaders. A lot of our political leaders, the good ones, are pretty disappointed in us.
Scott: We’ve touched on a number of your films. One topic we haven’t really talked about as much is empire. So you have films like Men with Guns, and Amigo. I guess we talked about Smedley Butler for a minute. But especially in those films, when you take on something like the American Empire, I’m wondering what your process is and how you portray that?
John Sayles: Yeah. I’m interested in this idea of any country thinking they can come into a country with a very different culture and imprint their own culture on it immediately. And by force, basically.
So Amigo is about the Philippine–American War. We went there ostensibly to help the Filipino revolutionaries get rid of the Spanish. But because there was no rule that we had made against it like there was a thing, that was called the Platt Amendment that said, “okay guys, we’re not kicking the Spanish outta Cuba ’cause we want to take Cuba.” But they left out Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.
So there we were. And the day after we helped the Filipinos take the city of Manila, American troops moved in, they turned the cannons around, their own guns around, and said to the Filipinos, you can’t enter here. And they put up the American flag.
We didn’t know how the Philippines worked. All of a sudden there were all these Christian missionaries coming over there and they got there and they discovered, oh, these people are already Catholic. Wait a minute. We don’t have to convert them from paganism to Christianity.
We have to lure them away from Catholicism to Protestantism.
The book I’m working on now, about us coming to Mexico, we took over the port city of Vera Cruz for quite a few months during the Mexican Revolution on a whim of Woodrow Wilson’s. And then as people reported that to him, it was like, actually, who knows who’s gonna end up ruling Mexico? We can influence it a bit, but we can’t really control it.
And the Mexicans have never even gotten the whole country under their thumb. How could we possibly now (in 1914), take over that whole country? It’s huge. So let’s just keep doing influence where we can.
So there’s that kind of buyer’s remorse that happens very often with imperialism. In Henry Ford’s case in Crucible he decides I’m gonna buy a chunk of the Amazon in Brazil, the size of the state of Connecticut. I’m gonna send my guys down and they’re going to start a rubber plantation. So I have the raw material to make my own tires.
None of the people he sends down speak Portuguese. None of them know anything about growing trees. They’re people who were cutting down trees up in Michigan. And he expects ’em to make this model an American community. But most of the people there aren’t Americans. Many of ’em have never had a watch. Most of ’em, they work for a while and then they go home and they have enough money to buy whatever they wanna buy, and then they come back and see if the job is still there.
So there is that kind of hubris of imperialism where you send guys, some of them are warriors. What we have now is an all volunteer army. Occasionally guys who joined the National Guard get thrown into it, kicking and screaming.
But, those guys are there because they wanna be there. They’re the Marines, they’re the gung ho guys. And they say this is who we’re supposed to shoot at now, and this is what we’re told to do. And they don’t ask a whole lot of questions. When you have to start drafting people, they start saying, wait a minute, I could get killed here. What’s this about? Nobody sold me this Vietnam war.
Now, even the Korean War was very controversial. I’m interested in that part of imperialism, which is, Is it truly a popular will thing? Or is it businessmen who have a lot of interests in that area who say, oh, Let’s go take over Guatemala, ’cause we don’t like the guy who’s nationalizing land that we’re actually not using, but we might someday. Sam Zemurray (ed note: CEO of the United Fruit Company) created a country – he cut off a chunk of Columbia and made it into Panama.
I’m fascinated by all that stuff. And then right down to the foot soldier level – what does that guy think? When I wrote A Moment in the Sun and did research about the Philippine–American War. There were congressional committees like the church committee after Vietnam. This is where we learned how to waterboard. That came up in those hearings.
I got to read a lot of testimony and also a lot of letters home from soldiers, and it was very mixed. About a third of the people said, this is better than shooting rabbits, using the N word. “These guys, they don’t have much firepower, but they’re everywhere. And we’re mowing ’em down as quick as they pop up and it’s great.” And then there were other guys who say “This is a nastier, dirtier thing than I signed up for, but here I am, and I guess, I signed up for it, so I’ve gotta do my duty.” And then a third were writing home saying, “I’m embarrassed.
This is horrendous. What we’re doing here. This is absolutely against everything I believed the United States was for. What am I doing here?”
And then there was the national organization that was organizing against that war. The two best known leaders of it were Mark Twain and Mrs. Jefferson Davis. Mark Twain, because he thought This is against everything that America is supposed to be for, putting the Eagle’s talons into another country, and Mrs. Jefferson Davis, because she was afraid of miscegenation. And then a bunch of white boys would come back with Filipino wives, but they were both against the war.
Bob: When I taught this, I would talk about Twain and no one was aware of that role in his life, right? Everybody knew about Huck Finn. This is like arguably the most influential writer in American history. And I don’t think I ever had a student who was aware.
‘Cause I would say, who’s the most famous person to oppose the Filipino war? Yeah. Mark Twain. They were just shocked by it. And so I think that’s not coincidental, obviously.
John Sayles: Also his personal experience was he was a soldier for the Confederacy for about three days and then wandered away before they remembered who he was. ‘Cause it was like. yeah, I’m not sure I’m ready to get killed for this, I don’t even have relatives that have slaves. What’s this stuff about? And I’m not sure I’m so into it, the whole slavery idea, even though I’m from a state where a lot of people own slaves.
He had to work those things out. He had his, he admitted, some of this prejudice. He didn’t like Indians. He said, that’s my one big prejudice. But it’s a long story, and people, at the time, throw their weight behind something. And certainly he was not listened to very much.
Scott: The whitewashing of these figures in history actually makes me think of Helen Keller, who’s known because she overcame her deafness and blindness and what have you. But she was a socialist and an organizer and actually did very important things in her adult life. And American history white washes all of that political stuff away.
John Sayles: Yeah. I think sometimes it’s just left out ’cause it’s an easier story to tell. A much more black and white story to tell if you leave that kind of complexity out. And sometimes it really is a serious campaign on the people in power. We don’t want people to know. That’s not the narrative that is gonna get us where we want with these people.
If they’re gonna go and fight in Vietnam we’re gonna have to paint this as a much less complex picture than it is. We’re gonna have to forget the fact that we’re once again aping failed French international policy, and we’re going right down the same stupid road that they went down.
There is a militaristic part of America and an America that was very anti-interventionist. Up until Woodrow Wilson said, we’re going into World War I, and then people on the street were insulted if they weren’t in uniform. It turned that quickly.
And then the people who still were resisting it a lot of them went to jail. As a matter of fact, a bunch of the big guys in the Wobblies were sent to jail by Kennesaw Mountain Landis, who became the commissioner of baseball who kicked out eight guys from the White Sox. And he led the league in being overturned by higher courts. But he was the perfect guy for the job at that moment.
Bob: I just have a couple of shortish questions. One is the issue of class in cinema. We do have, I think a decent number of movies that deal with issues of race, but I think fewer that deal with issues like you do in Matewan. Is class conflict that much harder to do, to write about?
John Sayles: A lot of my movies actually are very aware of that. Baby It’s You, Right? There’s a romance between a Jewish girl, whose dad’s a dentist, she’s upper middle class, and she has this romance with this really working-to-poor class guy.
And high school is one of the last places where you’re gonna be in the same gym class, at least, with guys who are gonna be picking up your garbage in five years.
It’s not like British class, which is, the minute you open your mouth, they know where you went to school and where you probably landed on the economic scale, until very recently. But we definitely have class, and what’s going on today is a very concerted effort to find class resentments. And a lot of it is between educated and uneducated people. People who have gone on to beyond high school education, and people who haven’t. And say, What are those people? What really pisses people off about the elite, and let’s use that to make them feel like they’re an endangered species and that these people wanna give their birth right away to some, not white skinned immigrants, or whatever.
It’s a big factor in America and always has been. Certainly in romantic fiction, there’s always the cross class romances. Usually, the rich guy either turns out to be a cad and the girl marries somebody from her own class, or he turns out to be pretty good, and she gets to live in a nice house and wear nicer clothes in the last reel.
But as just something that people are aware of? Barbara Ehrenreich talked in one of her books called The Worst Years of Our Life about the Reagan years, that pretty much everybody in America wanted to say that they were middle class, even people that she would’ve said were working-class people, and these are upper-middle class. They wanna say, I’m middle class. There was a comfort in that and a feeling of belonging in that.
So it’s something that we really try to avoid. And I’m very aware of it. It’s just something that we always live with and that is, can be very destructive. And on both sides. People can really diss people on the other side fairly easily if they’re not really thinking.
Bob: Finally, and this is probably a question you got hundreds of times. We cover a lot about films and culture and politics on this podcast. So we’ve done the best political movies. In fact, you’ve won the kind of prestigious Green & Red award for best films. It’s like the FIFA Peace Prize.
I’ve heard you do interviews where you talked about The Organizer, and you paid homage to Salt of the Earth in Return of the Secaucus Seven. What kind of movies stand out to you in that regard? Like when you think of movies that really talk about these social issues, but are also really great cinema?
John Sayles: Boy, in America it’s complicated. ‘Cause, people were kept from doing it, by the various censorship boards. And then just economically kept from it. Certainly things like Norma Rae, which talks a little about the complexity of organizing people in the South when factories were even fairly new to them. There have been a couple interesting movies about Hoffa, that deal with the corruption of unions and the selling out of their own workers, by certain unions.
So it’s something that, every once in a while, somebody will come up and really do something that’s interesting, but it’s not a genre that we have. Whereas in France and Italy, there were really movies about events. And even in Britain, Ken Loach has made a lot of things that are about working people and what that does to them and how it either drives them apart or puts them together. So it’s an interesting thing also now that so few workers work in a union kind of workplace that it’s a more service economy.
So what is in some good movies that are paying some attention, there’s a lot of movies where the protagonists have these minimum wage jobs, which they hope are temporary, but may not be. Okay, he’s a barista, or they work at Walmart, they’re putting things up on the wall.
They may just be a prelude to another job like that. And, Is this what my life is gonna be like? I was just in a movie called an Ode to Mary Jo. That’s about a single mother. Her husband divorced her and is not paying his alimony payments. She’s got two kids. One of ’em is on the spectrum, she’s working at a Home Depot and doesn’t like it and is going for a job interview where she used to be a school counselor. She wants to get back into that. It pays a little better but it’s on the day of her daughter’s birthday, and her car doesn’t work and the rent is due, and can she even get to the job interview on time.
Those movies do exist, usually not mainstream movies, but I thought that Chloé Zhao movie Nomadland, about the people who work at Amazon. Who moved from place to place. That was interesting, just that phenomenon. People who are basically migrant workers. But they have cars, and their children aren’t working in the fields with them, but they’re, like, Okay, I hear there’s a warehouse that needs people, I can do that kind of work for three months at least. And they put together a living that way.
Bob: We’ll thank you so much for this.This is really fantastic and we really appreciate it. I look forward to reading Crucible.
Scott: And the Gods of Gotham.
John Sayles: I’m hoping that won’t come out in the winter. Because doing a book tour in the winter is really hard, especially when you get to Detroit and places like that.
Thanks a lot guys.
— special thanks to DTS for the editing
Sign up to get updates on scrappy politics, scrappy history and our scrappy podcast.