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John Sayles
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By rights, John Sayles's first foray into film-making should have been an utter disaster. For a start, nobody on the cast or crew had made a film before. That included Sayles, who wrote, directed, edited and acted in it. He'd written a novel, he'd done a bit of summer theatre, he'd once, for one day, visited a film set. "But I'd never looked through a camera," he says. If he ever had, he wouldn't have seen any of his cast on the other side: none of them had done more than a bit of theatre either. As for the crew, their experience lay in shooting advertisements round Boston.
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Before John Sayles was an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, he was a National Book Award-nominated writer of fiction. The Anarchists' Convention is his first short story collection, providing a prism of America through fifteen stories. These everyday people?a kid on the road heading west, aging political activists, a lonely woman in Boston?go about their business with humor and resilience, dealing more in possibility than fact. In the widely anthologized and O. Henry Award-winning "I-80 Nebraska," Sayles perfectly renders the image of a pill-popping trucker who has become a legend of the road.
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Looking a little like a sophisticated but rugged movie cowboy, the tall, lean John Sayles sits across from a tall, icy glass. He wears a comfortable looking dress shirt that's caught somewhere between office and weekend attire. His table rests near the window on the top story of San Francisco's Hilton, and beautiful panorama of the city lies below. It's an unusually sunny summer day and the bar is totally empty except for Sayles and his co-producer Maggie Renzi, who has been with him since the beginning of his career. She gives a friendly smile and goes back to her sheaf of papers.
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This complex and rich film by John Sayles stars Chris Cooper as the contemporary sheriff of a Texas border town still under the sway of his late, legendary lawman father (Matthew McConaughey, seen in flashbacks). The discovery of a skeleton and crusted-over badge--buried some 40 years--initiates an investigation into an old crime no one wants to talk about but which will determine for Cooper's character, once and for all, various truths about his father's life. Sayles ingeniously sets this mystery against the backdrop of a developing, multicultural community losing its economic base while haggling over a history of racism. The overall effect is of a complicated American tragedy mitigated by the possibility of personal redemption. A terrific experience. --Tom Keogh
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John Sayles was born on September 28, 1950 in upstate New York. He grew up the son of two schoolteachers in the Schenectady area. As a young man, he liked to read and write stories, and he was active in sports.
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One of the most respected actresses of her generation, Mary McDonnell first worked with John Sayles in 1987, when she played the central role of Elma, the woman who runs the boarding house in Matewan. It was only her second film. Sayles first met her in 1983, when he was in the midst of an aborted first attempt at casting Matewan. "Really good actress, a bit young," he wrote in his notes. But by the time filming actually began three years later, Sayles wrote, "Mary didn't look much older but seemed older in terms of experience -- whatever she had lived was available and apparent in her acting."
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John Sayles