John Sayles

• Born: September 28, 1950
• Place of Birth: Schenectady, New York

AMERICAN SCREENWRITER, DIRECTOR, AND SHORT-STORY WRITER

Biography

John Thomas Sayles is one of the United States’ best-known independent filmmakers and a prolific screenwriter. He also writes novels, plays, teleplays, and short stories. He likes to describe himself as a storyteller. Sayles is the son of Donald John Sayles, a teacher and school administrator, and Mary Rausch Sayles, a schoolteacher. Both of his grandfathers were police officers. Sayles attended Mount Pleasant High School in Schenectady, New York, earning letters in basketball, baseball, track, and football.

In 1968, Sayles was rejected by the US Army because of a missing vertebra and entered Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He graduated in 1972 with a Bachelor of Science degree in psychology. While in college, he acted at school and in summer stock. In the several years following his graduation, Sayles worked as an orderly in a nursing home, as a day laborer, and as a meat packer. In addition, he hitchhiked hundreds of miles around the United States, talking to people as he went.

His writing career began in earnest in 1975 with the publication of his first novel, Pride of the Bimbos, and a short story titled “I-80 Nebraska, M.490-M.205,” which won Sayles an O. Henry short-story award. Sayles began writing for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, a factory-like production house known for its horror and exploitation films. There, he learned to pace stories for the screen. The film Piranha, for which he wrote the screenplay, was released in 1978. While working in the Hollywood film industry, he continued to write fiction successfully. Union Dues, his second novel, was published in 1977 and nominated for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, the only novel that year to be so honored. Additionally, he won a second O. Henry Award for the short story “Breed.”

The year 1979 was a breakthrough in Sayles’s career. He wrote, directed, and edited his own first feature film, Return of the Secaucus Seven, a story about a reunion of college friends from the 1960s. Shot in twenty-two days for sixty thousand dollars, the film earned two million dollars and a Los Angeles Film Critics Award for best screenplay for Sayles. Shot in a realistic style with little camera movement (for economy’s sake), the film struck a chord with young people because of its intelligent dialogue. Sayles’s collection of fifteen short stories, The Anarchists’ Convention, was published that same year.

Throughout the 1980s, Sayles continued to be productive as a writer, director, and actor. Even though his films continued to be guided by his vision for telling a story, his budgets increased over the years, as did the list of actors willing to work for relatively lower pay when it was tied to a significant and challenging role. Sayles’s films often reveal a social conscience and political awareness; however, he has said that he is most interested in developing rich characters and telling stories:

I think some of the depth in my writing comes from having been an actor. When I finish a screenplay, I look at every part as if I had to act it and ask, is there enough here to be a three-dimensional character? Or could it use maybe one more line or one more relationship or one more indication? No matter what your part is, you have to believe that you have a life outside of the movie. When a supporting character walks off screen, we should feel like it would be neat if the camera could follow him, and see what he’s up to next.

Sayles’s films from the 1980s show a growing sophistication with the same kind of complex story that always attracted him. In 1983, he directed the films Lianna and Baby, It’s You and received a MacArthur Foundation award.

In 1987, Sayles wrote and directed a film he had been planning for some time. Matewan was based on the brutal suppression of union organizing in a West Virginia coal town in the 1920s and the massacre of miners by hired security. The book Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie “Matewan” (2003) explains how the film was conceived and created. Another socially controversial film followed in Eight Men Out (1988); it concerned the bribery scandal behind the 1919 World Series.

Of his many films, the ones receiving the best critical acclaim have been Lone Star (1996), Passion Fish (1992; Sayles’s screenplay received an Academy Award nomination), and The Secret of Roan Inish (1994). The Secret of Roan Inish, set in Ireland in 1949, was filmed on the west coast of Ireland. It revolves around a young girl’s encounter with “selkies” (seal people). The most commercially successful was Lone Star, with total gross box office sales of almost twelve million dollars. Sayles’s screenplay for Lone Star was nominated for an Academy Award. SunshineState, about development in a small Florida coastal town, was released in June 2002.

Some have criticized Sayles for sometimes verging on sentimentality or pushing an agenda too forcefully. Critics devalued his early work because they felt they saw a lack of visual style and sophistication. Low budgets sometimes affect his visual style. Because he often does not have studio backing for his films, he must constantly be concerned with fund-raising for his projects. He has been assisted in financing by his partner of twenty years, Maggie Renzi, producer and actress.

Sometimes, Sayles works with Hollywood studios, but only on his own terms, crafting relatively low-budget films with a personal vision. His films are known for crisp dialogue, passion, and realistic characters. He supports his independent filmmaking with his work as a screenwriter on big-budget Hollywood projects. He is also in demand as a “script doctor” and has been called to refine films such as Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 (1995).

Even in films with major studios, Sayles insists on controlling the casting and the film's final editing. Of his work, he has said, “I don’t regard anything I do as art. That’s a foreign world to me. I regard it as a conversation. Very often in a conversation, you tell a story to illustrate something you think or feel.” The importance of character and the themes of community and identity resonate throughout the work of this writer and independent filmmaker. Many of Sayles’s notes and manuscripts are in the Williams College Library collection. In 2014, Salyes donated his non-film catalog to the University of Michigan. In the twenty-first century, Sayles continued his work as a screenwriter and actor for film and television, and, in the 2020s, Sayles published two novels.

Author Works

Screenplays:

Piranha, 1978

The Lady in Red, 1979

Battle Beyond the Stars, 1980

Alligator, 1980 (adaptation of a short story by Sayles and Frank Ray Perilli)

Return of the Secaucus Seven, 1980

The Howling, 1981 (with Terence H. Winkless; adaptation of Gary Brandner’s novel)

The Challenge, 1982 (with Richard Maxwell)

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, 1983 (with Susan Rice; adaptation of Grace Paley’s short stories)

Lianna, 1983

Baby, It’s You, 1983 (adaptation of Amy Robinson’s short story)

The Brother from Another Planet, 1984

The Clan of the Cave Bear, 1986 (adaptation of Jean Auel’s novel)

Wild Thing, 1987 (adaptation of a short story by Sayles and Larry Stamper)

Matewan, 1987

Eight Men Out, 1988 (adaptation of Eliot Asinof’s book)

Breaking In, 1989

City of Hope, 1991

Passion Fish, 1992

Men of War, 1994 (with Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris)

The Secret of Roan Inish, 1994

Lone Star, 1996

Men with Guns, 1997

Limbo, 1999

Sunshine State, 2002

Casa de los babys, 2003

Silver City, 2004

Honeydripper, 2007

The Spiderwick Chronicles, 2008

Amigo, 2010

Go for Sisters, 2013

The Devil's Highway, 2018

Long Fiction:

Pride of the Bimbos, 1975

Union Dues, 1977

Los Gusanos, 1991

A Moment in the Sun, 2011

Yellow Earth, 2020

Jamie McGillivray, 2023

Short Fiction:

The Anarchists’ Convention, 1979

“Dillinger in Hollywood,” 1980

“The Halfway Diner,” 1987

“Treasure,” 1988

“Peeling,” 1993

“Keeping Time,” 1993

“Above the Line,” 1994

Drama:

New Hope for the Dead, pr. 1981

Turnbuckle, pr. 1981

Teleplays:

A Perfect Match, 1980

Unnatural Causes, 1986

Shannon’s Deal, 1989 (pilot and two episodes)

The Alienist, 2018

Nonfiction:

Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie “Matewan,” 1987

Sayles on Sayles, 1998 (with Gavin Smith)

Bibliography

Bourjaily, Vance. “A Revivalism of Realism.” The New York Times Book Review, 1 Apr. 1979, pp. 15, 33.

Butscher, Edward. “Books in Brief: The Anarchists’ Convention.” Saturday Review, vol. 6, 28 Apr. 1979, p. 46.

Carson, Diane, editor. John Sayles: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.

Chaw, Walter. “We’re So Short on Time: John Sayles on Lone Star.” Roger Ebert, 15 Jan. 2024, www.rogerebert.com/interviews/were-so-short-on-time-john-sayles-on-lone-star. Accessed 22 July 2024.

Epps, Garrett. “Tales of the Working Class.” Book World—The Washington Post, 29 Apr. 1979, p. M5.

“John Sayles Papers.” University of Michigan Library, www.lib.umich.edu/collections/collecting-areas/special-collections/screen-arts-mavericks-and-makers/john-sayles. Accessed 22 July 2024.

Romney, Jonathan. “Out on a Limbo.” The Guardian, 14 Jan. 2000.

Ryan, Jack. John Sayles, Filmmaker: A Critical Study of the Independent Writer-Director. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland, 1998.

Smith, Gavin, editor. Sayles on Sayles. London: Faber and Faber, 1998.

Smith, Gavin. “John Sayles: ‘I Don’t Want to Blow Anything by People.’” Film Comment, May/June 1996, pp. 57-68.