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169 If John Cassavetes is the father, then John Sayles is the godfather of American independent cinema, and has for more than twenty-five years been making intelligent, individualistic films outside the system. While Truffaut declared, “I make films that I would like to have seen when I was a young man,” Sayles is a determined nonconformist who wants only to make movies that are unlike anything that has been made before; as he said in Sayles on Sayles, “Whether it is in the complexity that they’re dealt with, or that I just feel like this is something that needs to be made.” In order to fund his distinctive visions, he has also worked as a Hollywood screenwriter and script doctor: in the 1980s he penned many more scripts for other people than he did for himself, and more recently it is through his uncredited work on major studio films that he has made much of his living. Sayles was born in 1950 in Schenectady, New York, where he spent a childhood often cocooned off from the world. A quiet child, he read voraciously and, because of his insomnia, would listen to rock-and-roll radio stations and watch sports on TV through the night, often falling asleep in class the next day. He was a keen sportsman, but was overshadowed both in athletic and academic matters by his brother, who was a year older. Sayles’s father’s doctoral thesis on “the underachiever” was predominantly based on him, and despite going to college at Williams in 1968, he did not initially distinguish himself there. Having written and drawn since his early childhood, at college Sayles began to find his voice in writing classes, which he initially took to bump up his grades, getting involved in campus theater and discovering art-house films for the first time. As was inevitable for a late-1960s college student, Sayles became politicized and went on antiwar marches, but avoided involvement in student INTERVIEW BY NICK DAWSON JOHN SAYLES THE NONCONFORMIST McGilligan_Ch10 8/7/09 11:43 AM Page 169 political organizations, instead spending his spare time hitchhiking across the country, introducing himself to motorists as a different person each time. Through hitchhiking experiences, which included riding with Ku Klux Klan members and having drivers confess murders to him, he not only honed his storytelling skills but gained a greater understanding of America as a whole. After his graduation from Williams, Sayles chose not to do a job that required further years of college, and so fell into doing blue-collar work and moving around the country. He worked as a hospital worker, did day labor, and sold his blood for money in Atlanta, then moved back east to work as a meat packer, writing all the time. After numerous rejections of his short stories, an overlong short story sent to the Atlantic Press became his first novel, Pride of the Bimbos (1975). As writing did not pay the bills, while writing his second novel, Union Dues, published in 1977, Sayles worked as a carpenter’s assistant and did summer stock theater with old friends from Williams. The cinematic style of his writing attracted Hollywood attention, and a move to the West Coast coincided with interest from Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, which hired him to write the low-budget creature feature Piranha (1978). Sayles’s love of genre movies made him an ideal Corman scribe, and he used the money he earned on Piranha and two other New World projects, The Lady in Red (1979) and Battle beyond the Stars (1980), to make his first feature. The Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980) was written in just a few weeks, shot in twenty-five days with his summer stock friends (including partner and producer Maggie Renzi), and released to great acclaim. Other screenplays Sayles had written around the same time—Lianna (1983), Matewan (1987), and Eight Men Out (1988)—would all make it to the screen over the course of the next decade, establishing Sayles as one of the most distinctive voices in American cinema. In the 1990s, beginning with City of Hope (1991), he began to receive even greater and more mainstream recognition, with two of his films from this period, Passion Fish (1992) and Lone Star (1996), being nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.The latter film, a portrait of life in a Texan border town, represents the zenith of Sayles’s career thus far; it...

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