Nominated for both an Academy Award for scriptwriting and a National
Book Award, John Sayles has written screenplays, teleplays, short
stories, and novels and has worked as a script doctor for a virtual
who's who of Hollywood film and television talent. He has acted in
films and on stage and even directed a music video for Bruce
Springsteen.
In
making movies, Sayles has handled subjects as diverse as seventies
activists in The Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980); a 1920s
Appalachian miners' strike in Matewan (1987); the 1919 Black
Sox scandal in Eight Men Out (1988); the Selkies of Ireland in
The Secret of Roan Inish (1994); and Latin American guerilla
warfare in Men with Guns (1997).
Conducted
over a period of twenty years, these interviews span Sayles's career
as a writer, director, and sometimes actor. Whether he is interviewed
in The Progressive, Film Comment, Sight and Sound, or Rod
Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, Sayles is always direct
and candid. In each conversation, he cuts to the core of the film
business and to the meat of what he is trying to accomplish as an
artist.
Known
for his fiercely independent vision, his authentic characters, and
his provocative observations on the human condition, Sayles
demonstrates in these interviews what an endurably original director
and artist he is. As he tells Sight and Sound, "First of all,
I'm not afraid of failure. I don't get upset if people don't like it.
I'm doing it because I'm interested. . . [Return of the Secaucus
Seven] was the start, because even if I hadn't got it released,
at least I've made a movie I wanted to make."
