John Sayles
John Sayles
John Thomas Saylesis an American independent film director, screenwriter, editor, actor and novelist. He has twice been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Passion Fishand Lone Star. His film Men with Gunshas been nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. His directorial debut, Return of the Secaucus 7, has been added to the National Film Registry...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth28 September 1950
CountryUnited States of America
We just said, 'Okay, you're in the movie. Bring what you would bring for a three-day weekend and I hope you like the way you look in it because once you're on camera, that's your wardrobe.' But it worked; it worked and we were very surprised.
You get to say, 'Here's my philosophical idea about what the costume should like,' and the costume designer comes and gives you choices and sometimes they're all good, and I say, 'What do you think?' and they pick the right thing.
With Roger, it would be: 'On Page 67, we think this is a little quick to have another attack of Piranhas, so could you put it off until Page 69?'
Fahrenheit 9/11 took public domain information that should have been on the news every night and put it in a film that a lot of people went to see. But still Bush has never had to answer those charges.
But once I discovered that there was such a thing as a screenwriter and a director and all that, it stayed in my head as a possibility.
What I often find is it has to do with, is we need somebody who's in one scene to intimidate somebody who's over 5'10' and there I am on the set.
Those are fun, especially if they're going to shoot them in four weeks, because you know they're not going to mess with anything you do, so it can be very imaginative.
So when I came to making movies, that's the way I wanted to do it. I didn't kind of wanting to just do one part of the process and leave it at that.
I always felt like, okay, I'm going to try to tell stories whatever way I can and it would be cool to make a movie, and tell a story that way.
The media in America has become so cowed and compromised.
I always feel that there are no final victories and no final defeats. But it's true that America is in a hole right now. There are a lot of dead fish in the water.
And it was out in the theaters in two weeks. This is not, 'We're going to develop twenty-five and maybe one's going to get made,' so the first three things I wrote got up on the screen and, good, bad or indifferent, I got to see them on their feet.
And is there a movie, whatever the genre here, that I would like to go see? If I can see the germ of that there, I'll usually take the job.
I was trying to think of a title for it, which is a hard thing. Limbo is basically a metaphor, anyway ... it's this place where you're neither here nor there ... and so many people live that kind of life.