Students at the University of Hawaii are having face-to-face discussions this month with one of the great storytellers in film: John Sayles. Among independent filmmakers and art house aficionados, he’s royalty, the American godfather of the genre.
His films explore the human condition against a landscape of politics, history and culture: a brutal labor conflict in "Matewan"; race, murder and class in "Lone Star," which received an Oscar nomination for screenwriting; and the little-known Philippine-American war in "Amigo," which you can see for free (along with the director) at 3:30 p.m. Sunday at the FilCom Center in Waipahu.
Because of the impact of his work on American culture, Sayles was named the 2014 Dan and Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair in Democratic Ideals. It was a chance to speak to students, which he loves to do, and spend a few weeks here in February instead of his home in New York.
But as he sat at a concrete table outside Hemenway Hall on the UH campus last week, Sayles said the world of indie films has changed dramatically since 1979 and the release of his first film, "Return of the Secaucus Seven." Distributors aren’t financing films, just distributing them, he said. And audiences he counted on for 15 to 20 years to show up are staying home.
"They are not actively going to movie theaters to see these films," he said. "They wait and watch them at home. If there is an audience, it is not one that does us any good financially. So what tends to happen with my movies is the core audience depends on what the movie is about."
In other words, the baseball fans will never tire of his 1988 film "Eight Men Out," which describes professional baseball’s 1919 World Series scandal, but they will probably never watch anything else the director has done, according to Sayles. It’s the same with 2011’s "Amigo," which was popular with Filipino audiences — once they found it, he said.
Despite a changing film industry and audiences, Sayles isn’t ready to stop making movies.
Last year he finished his 18th film, "Go For Sisters," which was shot at 65 locations in the United States and Mexico over the course of four weeks. (His movies, even down to a shooting schedule that can include three locations in one day, are what he calls "ambitious.") Like the three films before it, "Go For Sister" was self-financed — for about $800,000.
Sayles can do this because he’s a screenwriter for hire. He’s written and polished scripts for more than 60 films, including "The Quick and the Dead," "Apollo 13" and "Mimic."
"I’m lucky," he said. "Most of the filmmakers I know, their day job, if they have one, doesn’t pay nearly enough to make a movie."
THE 63-YEAR-OLD Sayles grew up in Schenectady, N.Y. As a boy, he saw movies through the windshield of the family station wagon at a local drive-in. He loved the Westerns. "They were in color and were not boring and about adult problems," he said. "They were about cowboys and Indians. I don’t think I saw a subtitled movie until I was in college."
His first stories, though, were not films. After graduating from Williams College, Sayles wrote books and stories for magazines. He got his first break when he was 24 and writing during his spare time while working at a meat-packing plant in East Boston. And while he sold a novel to The Atlantic Press, the story of his time there — the crazy woman and her boyfriend the copper thief, the flood in his tenement apartment that destroyed the only copy of his story, and his days making pepperoni sausage — is surely worth its own script.
Sayles is still writing. His most recent work, a historical novel titled "A Moment in the Sun," was published in 2011.
Stories are important to Sayles, to explore and to tell. They are the dramatic core of culture and history. But different as they are — as all of his stories are — they all go to the same well.
"I know what grabs me and what I try to put into my own stories: people whose story you get involved in," Sayles said. "Emotionally and intellectually. You want to see what happens next to them."
Sayles will give a free public presentation — "Stories for Survival" — on the importance of storytelling at Orvis Auditorium on the UH campus Friday. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the talk begins at 7 p.m.
AND that’s a wrap …
Mike Gordon is the Star-Advertiser’s film and television writer. Read his Outtakes Online blog at honolulupulse.com. Reach him at 529-4803 or email mgordon@staradvertiser.com.
