JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Photo: Maggie Renzi and John Sayles

John Sayles is one of America’s most illustrious independent film directors. His movies include Passion Fish, The Secret of Roan Inish, Lone Star, and the forthcoming Amigo, a film set in the Philippine-American War and shot entirely in Bohol with a Filipino cast and crew. Sayles is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, a National Book Award-nominated novelist, and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. His work has been described as politically astute, dramatically gripping, and profoundly humanist.

Recently we talked to John and his producer and partner Maggie Renzi about working in the Philippines and about his status as the ultimate Hollywood outsider.

What have you got against Hollywood?

John Sayles: It’s almost a waste of time having anything against Hollywood because there’s kind of no “there” there. Occasionally there are moments, the Academy Awards being one of them, where there is an entity you can resent, but since the big studios disappeared it’s really a bunch of corporations. They do things besides movies, and they have a few people they hire to play with this movie thing because sometimes there’s some money in it. For me, what they do well is not what we do.

To make a living I make movies for them, when I can get a job, so I don’t have anything against them in that way. Most of the people I work with out there, I actually like quite a bit. It’s just that what the corporate world is trying to do more and more is to find the least common denominator and spend the least amount of money they possibly can. So the quality of movies has gone down, and like a lot of industries the concern is, “Can we cut costs and still have people buy it?”

If they can, they’re gonna do that. There’s acceptance of that, and basically people get to work if they make a lot of money. So there are some people making really good movies, and they’ll get to do that as long as their movies make enough money.

When the writers’ strike was on two years ago, I talked to the guys on the central committee. They went to the first meeting with the producers, and on the other side of the table there was not a single person from the movie industry. They were all lawyers from the big corporations. It wasn’t even up to the studio moguls, such as they are, to make decisions anymore.

So it’s kind of useless to be resentful of them—it’s their business and they’ve painted themselves into a corner.

The full text in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Philippine Star.