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| Interview: John Sayles on "Honeydripper" |
by Peter Sobczynski
The acclaimed filmmaker/forerunner of the American independent film movement sits down to talk about his latest work, the musical drama "Honeydripper."
Since the release of his first film, 1980's “Return of the Secaucus Seven,” writer-director John Sayles has carved out a career for himself as one of the leading figures in the American independent film movement–an achievement that is especially impressive when you consider that he was working at it before most people realized that such a thing even existed. Over that period of time, he has written and directed such acclaimed films as “The Brother From Another Planet” (1984), “Matewan” (1987), “City of Hope” (1991), “Passion Fish” (1992), “Lone Star” (1996) and “Limbo” (1999) and while he has never really had a breakthrough commercial success as a filmmaker, he has had enough success over the years to continue to finance (largely through the fees he has generated in Hollywood for his contributions to the screenplays of films as varied as “Piranha,” “The Howling,” “Apollo 13,” “Mimic” and the as-yet-unmade “Jurassic Park IV”) and distribute the films that he wants to make on his own terms and even when he occasionally stumbles, the work is filled with the kind of passion and devotion to creating interesting stories and characters that has become increasingly rare these days.
His latest work is “Honeydripper” a musical drama is the most consistently engaging thing that he has done since “Limbo.” Set in a rural Alabama town in 1950, a time just before the advent of the Korean War, the end of Jim Crow and the birth of a little thing called rock-and-roll, the film stars Danny Glover as Tyrone “Pine-Top” Purvis, the owner of a run-down juke joint who is losing customers left and right to a rival who has installed one of those new-fangled jukeboxes to lure patrons in. Owing money to everyone and in danger of losing his beloved club, he gambles his entire future on hiring popular bluesman Guitar Sam for a one-night-only performance in the hopes of luring enough people into the place to get him out of debt. As in a classic blues song, however, things don’t go that easy and when Guitar Sam never shows up on the day of the big show, the desperate Tyrone hatches a scheme in which a recently arrived guitar player (Gary Clark Jr) will pose as Guitar Sam in a ruse that will hopefully last long enough for him to get his hand on the cash and make a getaway. How it all works out is something I will leave for you to decide but along the way, viewers will be treated to a film with a gallery of wonderful performances, a nice sense of evoking a specific time and place and a soundtrack so thrilling to behold that viewers will want to snag it for themselves the minute that they leave the theater.
While promoting “Honeydripper” last October at the Chicago International Film Festival, Sayles sat down with me to talk about the film, the past history of rock music, the future of independent filmmaking and even offers up a word or two on that “Jurassic Park IV” screenplay you may have heard about online.
One of the things that ties all of your films together is the way that each one is set in a very distinct location and utilized in such a way that it essentially becomes another character in the story that you are telling. Can you talk about your approach as a filmmaker towards location both in general and specifically in the case of “Honeydripper?”
I think in general, it is because where and when you set the movie really affects who the people are–the same story set in Chicago in 1950 would be a very different story. The same story set in Alabama in 2000 would be a very different story because the racial relations would be different and the technology of the guitars would be very different. Much of what I do in writing characters is figuring out how these people think and how they see the world to the point where I write a biography for every one of the actors of their characters telling where they came from and who they are. That affects who you are–if you grew up during the Civil War or in the Deep South or in a tiny little town in Florida or on the ocean or landlocked, all those things affect the culture around you and individuals as well. I try to be fairly specific about that and I get ideas through that. The reason we made “Limbo” is because we had gone to Alaska and I just realized that I didn’t know where else in the United States you are reminded every time you walk out the door, even in the capital city, that nature is big and people are small because there are less than a million people in our biggest state and that nature kills people there–they are always getting caught in snowslides or tidal waves and this and that–and that changes the way that you feel about yourself. It changes society–women in Alaska know how to change tires and fix engines and you never leave someone on the side of the road trying to fix a car there in the way that you might in a more urban area.
With this specific movie, one of the important parts of the story was that it was set during the cotton harvest and right at the beginning of the Korean War, so the two things we needed were a lot of cotton and an old Army base. There were maybe a half-dozen states that had the cotton that we wanted and then we started looking for a decommissioned Army base so that we wouldn’t have to deal with the Army, which is always difficult on a movie, and because a decommissioned based would be more likely to have old barracks that had just been left to fall down. We found in Aniston, Alabama this base that still had World War II-vintage barracks, which is what they would have been using, and outside of cutting some weeds down, we wouldn’t have to do that much work to it and it would work for the story and that brought us to Alabama.
What I will often do know is write an outline of the movie and then go scouting for the locations and when we find a place, the stuff that I find there often finds its way into the movie. In the case of “Sunshine State,” there was an old Civil War fort right in this town that I wanted to shoot in and so I worked it into the script because on a low budget, which is usually what we are working with, it makes more sense than writing something and then having to build it or travel two hours to and two hours from to find it.
What came to mind first with “Honeydripper”–the premise, the characters or the location?
I started thinking about it because of this rock-and-roll legend about Guitar Slim, who was an early electric guitar player in New Orleans–he would play an acoustic guitar with an electric pickup–who was kind of famous for missing gigs and so a lot of the guys who became blues and R&B legends would, at some point in their early careers, be told by a club owner “Okay, Guitar Slim didn’t show up and you know how to play his stuff–you’re him tonight!” You would have heard that story from a number of musicians and it planted a seed in my mind. At the same time, I was also interested in a point in time when things change quickly. You could make a similar movie about when talkies came into Hollywood–who was able to get on that train as it was leaving the station and who was saying “That isn’t a movie,” either because they don’t want to go or they can’t because they don’t have the talent, and they get left behind. Rock & roll had such an effect on popular music, especially with the advent of the electric guitar. Before the electric guitar, guitar really was a sideman kind of thing and fairly rare–T-Bone Walker was one of the few people who was a lead guitar back then and it was the saxophone and the piano that made the most noise. After the electric guitar and the amplifier showed up, the piano started to ease its way out of rock in the 1960's until the advent of the electric keyboard and the amplifiers that went with that and the saxophone kind of left until Bruce Springsteen came along–it had a back-up roll in Otis Redding records but you didn’t get those honking solos anymore until those guys wandered over into jazz.
I’m always interested in those big transition periods where people have to make decisions. For Phil Ochs, his last album was a rock album and it was terrible–it was a terrible idea and his heart wasn’t in it. For Bob Dylan, he saw all these possibilities in rock-and-roll and when he electrified, some people didn’t like it but he loved it and to this day, that is what he does.
The transition between the old and new in one form or another–social, economic, personal–has been a recurring theme in virtually all of your films.
Change–yeah, though not necessarily old vs. new. What do people do when their culture changes around them? “Sunshine State” is a good example–it is this community right at the point when mom-and-pop tourism is being replaced by corporate tourism. What happens to your culture when all of a sudden, the tourists come to see the rain dance–does the rain dance mean anything to you anymore? It is something that we all have to deal with because life changes so quickly for people that there is not much in American society that you can consider to be “traditional” anymore. Very few people now do what their grandfathers did or live where their grandfathers lived whereas from 1900 and back, you could be a seventh-generation fisherman in Alaska. Nowadays, if you are a second or third-generation fisherman, it is a big deal because most guys don’t get to fish for a living anymore.
When you do a story like this that is set in a specific time and place in the past but isn’t based on a specific incident in the way that “Matewan” or “Eight Men Out” were, what do you do in the way of research?
With this, there was a lot of technical research on the guitar–how fast that technology spread and what was that technology. In the film, Gary plays a single-coil solid-body guitar which he could have actually built from an article that I had seen in an issue of “Popular Electronics” in 1950. There is that kind of research and research into when they stopped doing the hand-picking of cotton in various parts of the world–in Alabama, there was still hand-picking up until the mid-1960's, so that was part of it. I did research into the Korean War, Army bases and the struggle that went on with Truman and the various heads of the military branches after Truman integrated the combat forces. Most of our Army bases were still in the Deep South and there was a lot of worry in the towns next to those bases about what to do when these colored guys who have been walking around thinking that they are equal and carrying guns come to town and pull that attitude there. There was a lot of tension about that and so I did a lot of reading on that.
Beyond all that, I just did the kind of general reading that I do of authors from the time and newspapers of the time to get a feel for what is going on. That way, by the time you start to really write it, you aren’t guessing about that many things. I got a list of what was playing on jukeboxes in the South at that moment. What was interesting about that is that it was such an eclectic spread. There was big-band stuff and Louis Jourdan jump music and Perry Como and Hank Willams–that street that you see with all the railroad tracks on it is in Georgiana, Alabama, which is where Hank Williams grew up. Gospel wasn’t on the radio that much but it was a huge part of that area. That whole mix of music all went into what became rock-and-roll. I read up on the lives of a bunch of old blues musicians who were still around–they weren’t doing very well in 1950 because that wasn’t the heyday of their success and they weren’t being recorded very much. People like Skip James and Muddy Waters have an early career that was pretty good and then they almost disappear–they were still playing music but they weren’t making any money at it or being recorded–for about 10 or 15 years and then there was the blues revival in the 1960's that started in London and then came over here.
Considering that your last few films have been set in contemporary times–“Silver City” was actually made and released to coincide with the 2004 election season–was the decision to make a film set in a different time period this time around a conscious choice on your part?
I don’t necessarily get to make the films in the order that I write them–“Eight Men Out” took eleven years to get made and “Matewan” took eight. Every once in a while, something like “Silver City” happens where you get to make it right away but very often, I have two or three screenplays that I have written and it becomes a matter of which one can we afford to do or which one can we do because this actor is available. Sometimes we don’t get to do any of them because there is no money around and I have to write another one, which I have done in the past, which is really cheap so that we can at least make a movie because we aren’t getting any action on the others. I kind of make them when we can make them. With this one, we had it for a year before we able to figure out how to get it financed and if it had stalled again, I probably would have gone off and written something cheaper and that usually means contemporary because it is always cheaper to shoot contemporary.
You spoke a little earlier about devising biographies for all of the characters in your films. Could you talk a little more about the development of the characters because one of the interesting things in “Honeydripper” is the that many of them develop and evolve in ways that are much different from what one might expect–I’m thinking of the Stacy Keach character who seems at first glance to be your standard redneck sheriff but later shows that there is more to him than meets the eye.
I think the thing that Stacy did best in nailing from his bio was that I told him that this is his county, he’s the sheriff and he likes to control it but he likes to control it by keeping people off-balance. He was a boxer–George Wallace was a boxer–and one of the things you do as a boxer is keep people on their heels and off-balance so that they can’t tell where you are coming from. His character can be very friendly at times and humorous at times but then he can get right up in your face and say “Don’t get too big for your britches.” Every encounter that he has with Danny Glover’s character has a little humor in it but when it gets too humorous, he gets hard again and when it gets too hard, he gets humorous again. People just don’t know what he is going to do next and that is one of the ways that he keeps control so that he doesn’t have to be such a hard guy because he doesn’t really ever want to have to take his gun out. As he says, he has an “agreement” with all of these people and it kind of bemuses and troubles him that he doesn’t have an agreement with this piano player who own his own club–how does this guy get away with not needing his services because he is the guy who makes everything happen around there? He’s more corrupt than the character that Kris Kristofferson played in “Lone Star,” who was a psychopath who really liked hurting people and used that badge to do it. This is a guy who likes to control things and keep order but he has a sense of humor about it and he keeps order mostly by knowing everything and keeping people off-balance so they never know which Sheriff Pugh is going to show up.
It seems strange that even though you and Danny Glover have each been working for a long time and have each specialized in making films with a social conscience, “Honeydripper” is actually the first time that the two of you have actually worked together on a project. Was he in your mind for the role when you were writing it?
He is somebody whose work I have always admired and whom I’ve always wanted to work with. It is crazy to think of what actors you want to use when you are writing because you never know if you are going to get them–they might want to do it but are busy or they might not want to do it or whatever. You just don’t know and that can even be with actors that you have worked with before. With this one, I finished it and thought about who was a good actor who could also be the kind of guy who could walk into a room and you knew that he was in charge. At the end, when he and Charles Dutton disarm these two guys with weapons in their hands, you have to believe that those two guys wouldn’t have to come in with machine guns and both Danny and Charles have that kind of authority. That is what they bring to the part–some of it is from other roles that they have done but some of it comes from the quality of the guys themselves.
Danny seemed obvious and he was the first guy that we asked when we tried to cast. He said yes and then a year went by when we couldn’t raise the money. We’d check in with him every once in a while and he said that he still wanted to do it and would try to work it into his schedule. The difficult thing with that was once we got the money, Danny already had two or three other projects. We were going to shoot for five weeks and Danny was in three-and-a-half of them and so we shot every single thing that we could without him first and when he showed up, he was basically in every scene that we shot from then on.
The visual style of the film is very impressive, especially so when you consider that this was obviously done on a low budget. This was your first collaboration with Dick Pope, who is probably best known for the films he has done over the years with Mike Leigh.
The last two movies that we did were shot on Super 16. Dick is someone that I had not known before but we actually offered it to him the year before when we weren’t able to raise the money. I thought of him partly because of the films that he has done with Mike Leigh which are kind of fast and furious but at the same time, he also did “Topsy-Turvy,” which was a lush period movie with non-electric lights, and he did “The Illusionist,” which also had a lush movie look to it. This film had a high degree of difficulty to it and so we decided to bite the bullet and shoot in 35MM. 16 is so much better than it used to be but we still would have gotten a lot of grain in the cotton fields that we didn’t want. This was a really tough job for him–you have actors with very dark skin, nightclubs that aren’t brightly lit and white cotton fields and the density of the dark and the light was very difficult. We had a long talk with him and Toby Corbett, the production designer, and Hope Hanafin, the costumer, about a kind of transition color–everything in the fields would be dry and dusty and not very saturated in color so that the only relief you would get would be on Saturday night in the juke joint or the revival tent. Those were the entertainment options and that is where people would wear their colors and party clothes.
There is a book called “Bound for Glory” which is a photo book where they discovered that when the early WPA photographs that we are all familiar with were being taken, they actually shot some early color photos as well and there are color pictures of the area from 1939 through the early 1950's. We looked at those and there was a certain quality that the color had. One of the things that you notice from those photos is that there was less stuff–phone lines were simpler, there was less advertising and fewer cars and people. There was a spareness to the look of those photographs and that was something that we used as a bible for this movie.
Music has always played an important part in your past films and it is obviously a key element here. Can you talk about how you and Mason Daring approached the musical element, including the writing of a couple of new songs?
We wrote a couple of songs. I don’t write music–I just basically come up with a melody and lyrics and that is usually when I can’t find a song that I can afford that fits the moment perfectly. I did that with one of the gospel songs and one of the rock-and-roll songs and the song at the end. A lot of it was to reflect all these musical influences. In picking songs, there is big-band stuff coming from the jukebox across the way, Gary does a Louis Jourdan jump song and you hear some gospel. The one Hank Williams song you hear is “Move It On Over” and if you listen to it carefully, it is exactly the same as “Rock Around the Clock”–that was rockabilly even before they called it rockabilly.
As for the score itself, what we usually do is talk about what the menu of instruments will be. We narrowed it down to guitars, harmonicas–there are only about four or five instruments in the actual score. There are no big violin-John Williams things, which wouldn’t be appropriate for this kind of movie. Then for the last ten minutes of the movie, the players of the music take over for themselves with this new kind of rock-and-roll and that adds a certain character to it. It is very ragged and we did quite a bit of work to record it live–all those sax solos and guitar solos and harmonica solos are live. The only thing that they had that was steady was the drum, which had been pre-recorded and which they were listening to through earpieces so they can all stay on the same beat. We did the same thing with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio on “Limbo” so that she could sing live on every take. It is really hard to get that improvisational quality from guys who have never played together before when they are playing something that has been pre-recorded. We had maybe one rehearsal where they went through the song twice and then they were really playing together for the first time. We only did about three takes and by keeping it on beat, I was able to use the best parts of different takes for the visuals.
We were talking earlier about people experiencing times of rapid change and we seem to be in one now in terms of independent film. Thanks to cheaper cameras and the Internet, a do-it-yourself aspect has begun to take hold as more filmmakers are producing and distributing their own work–even well-known directors like David Lynch and Francis Ford Coppola have gone this route with their latest works. As someone who was a leader in the American independent film movement even before most people knew such a thing existed, what are your thoughts on its current state?
We started before there was a Sundance film festival and during the first couple of years of Sundance, they might have gotten 30 films. Now they are getting 5000-6000 films a year and they have to look at all of them, or at least part of them. One thing that you have now is that the bottleneck is not in getting the money or wherewithal to make a film–most of them are very low-budget and every film student has the wherewithal to make a film now–but in getting it distributed. That is something that we have had to do and we are doing it again. We got lucky because when we started because that was right about when the so-called calendar houses–the places that would show “The 400 Blows” every September–realized that there was video now and that people could buy that or rent it and that they needed something else to show. Well, there were foreign movies and these new American independent movies that they could show and if they did well, they could hold them for a long time.
What has happened in the last five years in the independent distribution world is that independent movies now have to live and die in their first weekend just like studio movies. Studio movies can spend $20 million on advertising and if they do a good first week, they can make a profit because they are in 3000 theaters. With an independent movie, even if you do one week in every single art house, you aren’t going to make enough to make another movie. What the difficulty with independent movies is now is that if you aren’t the one anointed movie that gets great reviews and that people go to see right away, how do you build up that word-of-mouth so that the people who would like to see the movie get a chance to see it, either in a theater or on video, so that some of the money does come back to you?
You see David Lynch basically buying back his movie from the distributors that he had and starting to distribute it though his website. You see more and more people who don’t get a theatrical distribution getting their work out somehow and then you see combinations of that, which is kind of what we are trying to do with this one. We aren’t going with a traditional distributor. Quite honestly, they have gotten pretty lazy and them just putting it in their usual circuit was just not going to work for this particular film. We’ve got people who have worked in distribution before and we have put together a little team and we’ll see how it goes. I’d say that is the biggest difference right now–independent filmmakers can’t just make a movie and wait for a distributor to show up and take it. You have to think about distribution for yourself.
Another thing that seems to be changing is the world of film criticism–it seems that every few weeks now, someone is insisting that it is a dying practice and that critics are no longer relevant. As someone whose work, more so than others, has lived and died on the strength of the response it has generated from critics, what do you think of this particular development?
Even when we started, film critics were starting to be regarded more as consumer advocates than academic people who were taking a big overview–more and more of them were writing with less space and were really being asked to establish a taste and personality that went along with their name. I think the main thing that has happened is that critics aren’t any less valuable or important but that there are more of them and many of them aren’t getting paid. They are out there on blogs and the blogs may be as popular and get as many readers as something in a newspaper. There are a lot more voices out there and so the opinion of any one critic is more diluted than it used to be. There are some weird situations. The Village Voice used to have very opinionated and very specific voices but now half of their reviews come through a service and the writers don’t even live in New York. That critic, who might live in Milwaukee and work for the chain that bought the paper, may have more clout than the New York reviewer does because their review shows up in 25 papers. I think it is in flux but by when I am talking to young people who are into film, they usually hit three or four blogs and they are actually more tuned in–they may read three or four articles to get a sense of what is out there. Thanks to things like Rotten Tomatoes, there is a little more table-hopping than there used to be.
I wanted to finish by asking you about two films, one past and one future, that you penned the screenplays for. A few weeks ago, I was delighted to see that “Alligator” finally made it to DVD and that you even did an interview for the disc. What was it like revisiting that film after all this time?
It was fun. That was one of the films that I felt like, even though it was turned out on a very low budget, came out very well. When you write for other people, you hope that it gets made, because most of them don’t, and you hope that it lives up to whatever potential it may have. I thought Lewis Teague did a great job and it had a colorful cast and despite the fact that the alligator didn’t really move–it wasn’t really animatronic and was basically a model–they did a good mix-in with real alligators so that it was credible. It wasn’t as scary as other things and most of the filmmaking is to make the movie move because the alligator wasn’t but I was pleased to see it again.
The future script is the wild one that you apparently wrote a few years ago for “Jurassic Park IV,” which caused a lot of hubbub when it leaked out on the Internet.
Yeah, it got pirated off of somebody’s computer. I have no idea if they are making it or if they are going in that direction. When I was working on it, it was very speculative–what can we do to this franchise to change things enough to make it worth doing another one? I haven’t heard from them for a long time so I don’t know if they are still pursuing that or if they put it on the shelf or if they are rethinking it. They had other concepts they were talking about.
Based on what I saw of it, it sounded like the craziest and maybe the greatest thing in the world.
Yeah, it could have been cool. I think that when you are working for companies like that, they don’t need the money. It is a funny thing because it is both way down low on the feeding chain and way up high–they are only going to make it if they think it is going to be a cool movie and fun to make because they don’t need to just make another one in the series.
link directly to this feature at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=2354
originally posted: 01/16/08 21:34:15
last updated: 01/16/08 22:04:52
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