Hero Worship: John Sayles

I was first aware of John Sayles as a screenwriter. Back in the late seventies Star Wars had blown my eight-year-old mind and I was slowly sucked into watching genre films, as many as I could see. It was at that time John Sayles was working for Roger Corman, the so called King of the Bs, and the first Sayles film I saw was Piranha, closely followed by Alligator. Both are tongue in cheek riffs on Jaws but both transcend their low budget origins thanks to Sayles' satirical swipes at the media, the military and medical experiments, which help raise them above and beyond the intelligence levels that you might expect for low budget Jaws ripoffs. And, although I was unaware at the time, this is where Sayles' career got interesting. He used the money from the Corman scripts to fund his own directorial debut, Return of the Secaucus 7. The film charts the reunion of seven friends who get together over a weekend in New Hampshire. One of the couples is breaking up and this causes tensions and desires to emerge amongst the group. It inspired the better known The Big Chill and started the template for the career that followed.

Even though I had seen The Howling, another Sayles genre script, it wasn't until the eighties, when I saw Matewan, that I really started to take notice of Sayles and his emerging body of literate and intelligent films. From there he had an incredible run: Eight Men Out, City of Hope, Passion Fish, The Secret of Roan Inish and Lone Star. These films are diverse in subject, sometimes small in scale but always big on theme. He introduced actors such as Chris Cooper and David Strathairn to the mainstream, giving them their best roles in the process and along the way he's kept working as a screenwriter and script doctor to fund his own work. Two such scripts he wrote were Night Skies, which went on to become E.T., and Jurassic Park IV, which is as yet unmade, but he has always balanced this high profile, high paying script work with his own smaller, but no less important films. So if you haven't seen a Sayles film whether he wrote it or directed, go do it, now, you won't be disappointed.