by Ray Pride "Limbo" challenges the usual ideas about the meaning of "independent" when applied to contemporary movies. While distributed by Sony's new mid-budget Screen Gems division, John Sayles' tense, talky, and very contrary twelfth feature is filled with the kind of studious writing of character and dialogue we expect in his work. New here are several sudden narrative breaks: "Limbo" begins like a Robert Altman movie but takes an abrupt turn midway into a compressed Jack London tale, which then turns into a metaphor, obvious yet sweet, about the feat of storytelling itself. Sayles anatomizes the fiber of economically depressed Port Henry, Alaska (a stand-in for Juneau), where a developer, consumed with turning the forty-ninth state into a theme part enthuses, "History is our future, not our past." David Straitharn, Sayles' customary alter ego, plays Joe Gastineau, a taciturn fisherman with a sorrowful past; Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio plays Donna DeAngelo, a single mother and vagabond bar chanteuse, whose every gesture trembles with the confidence and hesitation of flesh and blood. Vanessa Martinez is Noelle, Mastrantonio's self-punishing teenage daughter, who has not found her place in life but is finding her voice as a budding writer. While Sayles has expressed his impatience with the interview process in the past, the 48-year-old screenwriter, script doctor, novelist, director and sometimes-actor is a garrulous evangelist for his own work, especially his recurring theme of the effects of history on our culture ("history has 'story' in it" is a choice quote). His own secret history is the work he does on a half-dozen or so film scripts (such as "Apollo 13," an earlier version of "The Mummy," James Cameron's upcoming "Brother Termite") he doctors each year, finding narrative solutions where other writers have gone dry. (Sayles' most recent project as screenwriter, "Fade to Black," is a convoluted, 1940s Raymond Chandler-style thriller with Orson Welles as the lead character. Set in Rome, it's also a pastiche of Welles' work both as director and actor.) As a former student of psychology (animal and human), Sayles is quick to examine the smallest particulars of the motivations and desires of his characters. In the conversation that follows, we talk mostly about "Limbo," "Men with Guns" and "Lone Star" but Sayles is also very good at talking about screenwriting craft. You seem to collect bits and pieces of story, then discover a location that makes sense for the characters and conflict you've collected. Yeah. For "Men With Guns," probably the idea came during the Vietnam War. I wrote a short story in which I tried to get rid of the western concept of free will. I was thinking about the fact that in wars, often there are more casualties who are civilians than combatants. I tried to imagine people whose life made them, basically, rice people. They had their water buffalo, they had their rice paddy, they had their community and it had been that way for centuries. The Chinese came and went, the French came and went, the Japanese came and went, the French came and went again. Then the Americans came. They were just a rumor, and now men with guns are coming again, you have to do what they're saying. I made sure that almost all of the incidents are based on events that have happened somewhere else, almost to the exact detail. A lot of the dialogue in the beginning when the doctor is being defensive, "Oh this doesn't happen in our country," and his son-in-law says, "Our family has lived with these people for centuries," that's pretty much verbatim what I heard as a kid in the American South when I went down there. "They're our Negroes, we've lived with these people and it's only these outside agitators who have blown it out of proportion." There are things in this movie that come from Bosnia, from the former Soviet Union, from Africa, where a larger concept of government, whether it's colonialism or socialism, is blown away and old tribalisms reappear. But the common factor is that there are people who are just stuck in the middle. We're seeing more movies set in a world where everyone drinks Starbucks and talks about their Hush Puppies and shops at the Gap. Someday I may tell a story about that world, but right now it's hard for me to tell a story about people who only have in common the products that they buy, the TV shows that they watch, that's their shared culture. That is true for an awful lot of Americans, and I play with that in my novels. But as far as the movies are concerned, they're physical, they're rooted to place. For me, even the physicality of a room that you're in, that's going to be a big part of the storytelling. I try to pick places where the people are connected in some very distinct way with the culture--Southwest Louisiana Cajun country in "Passion Fish" is a good example. And if you want to make metaphors, even though they're not necessary to movies, they help people understand what's going on. Alaska is a place where people are going from real risk to the illusion of risk. For me, one of the most important themes is how does it change you when you no longer go out and put your ass on the line to catch fish? It's been regulated, so you may catch more fish, but you have [the character who] says, I'm not a goddam farmer. Well, he is. The other side of that is when Joe says, the cannery closed down, the paper mill closed down, but now the town smells better. But most movies, and I write them for other people all the time, are there to deliver an illusion of risk. That is what we want. A roller-coaster ride. You go to a Harrison Ford movie, you get the twists and turns, but we know it's Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, but no one's going to die. I was interested in, if I'm setting this in a place where there is this possibility, it still is a frontier. You can go out and really risk your ass a few miles out of town. Mythmaking and storytelling run through all of your films, as each of the characters seek to define themselves. Here's a line from "Lone Star" that stood out for me: "Blood only means what you let it." How you identify yourself, that's important. What do you use to identify yourself? Do you identify yourself as someone from West Virginia? As black? As white? Why do you feel that you have to? If you're running around in a country where eighty percent of the people are white and you're on something called the White Citizen's Council, what does that say about you? I'm interested in that presentation of self in everyday life. Why would you feel so defensive if they question the legend of Davy Crockett? Black Pride is an interesting concept to me, but being white to me is like six-foot-four—it's a fact, not something I achieved or am proud of or ashamed of. But coming from a different point of view, I can see where it would matter." So legends are more than social building—or stumbling—blocks. There are also family legends. Was my grandmother really such a great person, or was she just drunk all the time, feeling pretty good about herself? Did dad really go on vacation that time or did our parents split up, then get back together? There are also the fictions of the moment. One of the fictions of the moment is immigration. On both sides, there's something legendary about the true economic impact of people crossing the border to get jobs. People come up and work in industries that wouldn't exist if labor wouldn't work that cheap, then they go home when the job is over. It's an issue used to polarize people in an almost mythical way, and people choose to receive it that way. For instance, absolutely, the government is screwing you, but I don't think it's screwing us in the same way that guys holed up in a cabin in Montana think it's screwing us—with black helicopters and all that stuff. Instead of doing whatever could be done in Montana to get government off everybody's backs, they get a lot of automatic weapons and cans of beef stew. Your take on the every-man-for-himself siege mentality seems to always return to a concern for community. Sure. In "City of Hope," we showed how it was difficult for people to avoid each other in an Eastern urban city. Their lives intertwined whether they wanted them to or not. In "Lone Star," you have to drive half an hour to get to the guy with the next piece of information. So "City of Hope" is like a snapshot, but this is about history. It's about how they got there. That's why the editing transitions are in the camera; there's no break between the present and the past. One of the great pleasures of "Lone Star" is how even the smallest characters recur in important, colorful ways. Every character has thematic connections as well as plot connections. An episode of "NYPD Blue" is about forty-four minutes long; put three of those together and you have about the length of our feature. You can always cram a lot of story in there, but it can turn to shorthand. Depth is as important as scope. Theme is as important as plot. I think "Lone Star" is more film noir than a Western, where the story turns back on the detective. Or "Oedipus," which is a mystery story, or whatever. But I hope it's most like Raymond Chandler, where the trip is the point, and not "Who Shot The Sheriff?" The title of "Men With Guns" is at once blunt and forcefully distilled. Who are these guys who've come down our street? "They're the guys with guns." Yeah. As I was writing it, I made sure that almost all of the incidents are based on events that have happened somewhere else, almost to the exact detail. A lot of the dialogue in the beginning when Fuentes is being defensive, 'Oh this doesn't happen in our country,' and his son-in -law says, 'Our family has lived with these people for centuries,' that's pretty much verbatim what I heard as a kid in the American South when I went down there. "They're our Negroes, we've lived with these people and it's only these outside agitators who've blown it out of proportion." So why Central or South America, or this made-up country? I'm just more familiar with Latin American language and culture than those others, so when it came time to set it somewhere, and very specifically thinking about what had gone on in Argentina and Peru and El Salvador and Guatemala and Chiapas, this seemed to be the most comfortable setting for a contemporary story. And I wanted there to be the fable side of it, but I also wanted the investigative side at the same time. So it's an unnamed country, but everything that happens... has happened. I could give you dates. That's the way I worked with the actors. I said you may be representing these people, but I'll give you details. You're playing a person who's absolutely an individual who's been in that situation. Do you think "Men With Guns" requires of a viewer the same amount of knowledge as you have?. After all, a lot of American viewers are like Fuentes, removed from the cruel realities of world conflicts. Which is one of the reasons Fuentes is the main character. You try not to assume too much knowledge. I always try to write things on several levels. So that they work as just a story—this is a story about a guy, strip all the politics away, he thinks he had done something very good. But because he didn't check it out enough, because he didn't know enough, it turns out to very bad for the students he sent out into the world. What I wanted also was that possibility, "I don't know what's going on, I don't know my country." So in effect, Dr. Fuentes is like a detective in a thriller. Yeah—let's just follow this guy with the possibility that at the beginning they are only rumors and the evidence mounts up. He doesn't find any of his students. So on the most human level, it's just a page-turner, but then drawing a lot of other things into them. If you can make that leap and bring it back to your own experience, that's great, that's the most complete view of this movie, if you can then say, "This is not just Latin America—how does this apply to me?" Audiences are going to have to ask how the shifts in "Limbo" apply to them as well. If we're talking about risks, I'm gonna ask the audience to take a couple of risks. The first one is I'm going to give them almost no warning about the structure. I don't show you their world just for fifteen minutes like your average disaster movie, over half the movie is like a Robert Altman movie. I don't tell you it's going to turn into [an Ingmar] Bergman movie! Then you're as surprised and disoriented as the characters, down to not showing the [actions] which set them adrift. We've seen the scene between the two brothers, so we believe him, just follow me, bad stuff is coming down. The two women don't. Until that body comes out, he could just be some wacko. Now they're stranded. Then at the end, I'm saying to people, you've got to step up. You're on the beach, you hear that prop plane and you don't know what the hell happens next.
Haskell Wexler and John Sayles with David Straithern And Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. This is a movie about risk and the other way out of those situations that people get into, treading water but not drowning, but you're not going anywhere, is to take some kind of risk. It could be going on strike, it could be getting divorced, quitting your job, putting the mask on and joining Subcomandante Marcos. But it's a risk. And you don't know how it's going to turn out. And very few people take them, even in their personal relationships. Especially people who get burned. I'm always interested in movies when I've seen this behavior, what must be going on in this person's head? The one that's hardest to understand is Mary Elizabeth's character, who keeps coming back. Is she reckless? Courageous? The first time, when she was in her 20s, she probably lived with guys for years. Then she realized, Jesus, this guy treats me like shit. Then in her 30s, it was probably months and months. This last guy lasted three weeks! So the turnaround is getting quicker, but also her period of mourning is not very long, three days before she's interested in this new guy. I think she's genuinely optimistic, if only for her daughter, whether she sees the cutting [the daughter does to herself] or other problems, she's so troubled that she just wants things to be good, and take whatever path she wants to take, and her daughter's not just following. That kind of relationship with single mothers, especially with daughters, is a little too close. They've been best buddies too long. They know too much about each other's personal business. When did you find the abrupt ending? Before I sat down to write it. I'd heard the story of the guys who caught so many fish their ship sank. It's funny enough you hear somebody drowned. I started thinking about a Joseph Conrad style character. Someone hoping for redemption, but he won't take any risks. If it falls in his lap, great. Then you start thinking, where's it set, who are the characters, what is the movie about, what do I want to say at the end of this movie? If I'm talking about risks I don't want to reward or punish the characters at the end. We all get in these situations, and the only way out is risks, even if it's emotional vulnerability opening yourself up to someone else. None of the other ideas I had was remotely satisfactory. The end of this movie is when they become a family. The only shot in the movie where the three of them are together is right at the end, when they're waiting to see what happens. There's something you've said, "Remember the word 'history' contains 'story.'" Yeah. Early on in the movie, you see the scene where you have all the Alaskans telling stories about plane crashes and shipwrecks and bear attacks. They're stories about people surviving physical disasters. Those are the stories you hear there: people defining themselves, closer to the oral tradition than what we have left in most of the United States. But now some of the stories are a little more like tall tales. It's ceasing to be a place where people go to take risks, but where they sell T-shirts about the risks they took. The stories become commodities, part of the tour. Donna even chooses the lyrics of the songs she sings to say, here's what's happening to me. She even chooses the right song to break up with her boyfriend, the perfect song to entertain the audience and then cut out when she's done. Then Noelle's story she reads in school about the baby with gills, tells us a little more about her feelings of being an outsider. It goes in a lot of directions, nascent sexuality, her anger at her mother, the gloomy adolescence. Somebody said, "So she's gonna be a writer." I said, "Yeah, but she's gonna become Sylvia Plath." Was this written for the actors? David works with few words, Mary Elizabeth is so vibrant. And you have the faith that Vanessa's performance, reading the dead girl's diary in the tumble-down fox farm, will work the way stories worked around campfires hundreds of years ago. Focusing on her face is like Bergman's line, there's nothing more cinematic than a close-up of a human face. I have actors in mind, not necessarily the qualities of the characters, but what I feel they're capable of. For instance, Vanessa is a still a teenager. How many teenagers have the depth to take over the last third of the movie, instead of just being a mall brat? The same thing with Mary Elizabeth. She always committed to everything, whether Maid Marian in "Prince of Thieves" doing what was appropriate for that or some incredibly heavy stuff that she and Ed Harris did in "The Abyss" that could have been a perfectly good drama without the action-adventure. What I've always liked about David is that he can play text and subtext. He can keep it simple but a lot's going on. There are lines that have the suggestive poetry of plain speech, yet look awful on the page: "Jesus, it's relentless, iddn't it," of fish flopping on the shore; Joe muttering, "I've slept on fish"; and the explanation of what's happening to those fish, "They're drowning in air." Well, isn't everyone here? It's the tricky thing with casting. I'm not giving this to someone else to direct. The better the actor, the less you have to cut, the less you have to shape their performance later [in editing], the more you can ask the actors to do. In one August Wilson play, there's a five minute scene with two children telling a ghost story. You may get the perfect two kids, 10-year-olds in that first production, but from then on, that part of the play won't work with bad actors. I thought, what nerve to do that. Whereas in a movie, I feel like because we control our casting, I can write things that are hard to pull off. One of the things I try to do when I'm writing dialogue is make sure that all the characters speak differently. Characters should all have a different relationship to language. It's something I became aware of more as an actor than as a writer. If you write every character the same, it's really hard on the actors to find a rhythm and a form for the character, the way they speak. David's character gives you the simplest answer. It may be enigmatic, but it's a simple one. Mary Elizabeth is constantly putting things in parentheses, judging herself, almost in an aside, even the first time she kisses him, "my track record..." She editorializes out loud. Then the little girl has her own thing, which is mostly defensive but with a real cutting, nasty wit. How do you know what's the right amount of information to offer an audience, that a point has been made? Straitharn makes points in "Limbo" just with his physical performance. Dave is a very good physical actor, and his moments of grace come on a gill net. He moves so well, I knew we could shoot documentary footage of this guy fishing, gill netting, where you yank 'em out of the net, and still there would be some feeling. You're always blocking when you write: this is writing, too. And my movies often have many, many characters in them. They're not always familiar faces to an audience. I think, how many times do I have to introduce characters before you can separate them. "Eight Men Out," that was a whole lot of white guys with short haircuts in baseball uniforms with no numbers on them. I introduced each character three times in a very characteristic way. In a simpler movie, or if you know it's Tom Hanks, you can be faster. But you're always fighting that thing of, when am I being too obvious and when am I being too subtle, because, guess what? An audience is a broad thing. I remember another film John Cusack was in ["Fat Man and Little Boy"], a scene they shot later because 20 percent of the people said, we didn't know it was set in World War II. So they shot a scene where Paul Newman's character said "Nazi" three times. It stuck out that much from the movie. For me, [I would] just cut those twenty percent loose. They either come to the movie and like it fine, not knowing it was set in World War II, but don't make it so obvious you stop the show for everyone. But obviously, audiences are different. Some won't get the same thing one guy says, "Aw, c'mon." Are you still writing as quickly as you used to for other directors? It's a lot like reporters, they write something, y'know, the best you can do under the circumstances. With me, it's kind of like Brownian movement, a gas will fill the thing that encloses it? So if I have five weeks, it takes me five weeks, if I have three days, it takes me three days.
Also check out the invaluable book-length interview, "Sayles on Sayles," (Faber & Faber, $16.95) edited by Gavin Smith, which covers Sayles' career up to "Men With Guns." |
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