A bright child, John Sayles began reading novels before age 9. A Williams grad in 1972, he shunned a corporate career to work various blue-collar jobs, moving to east Boston to take a factory job. He wrote stories and submitted them to various magazines, and the Atlantic Monthly gave him the idea of publishing them in a novel--thus "Pride of the ...
MacArthur Fellowship, Satellite Award for Best Original Screenplay, Gotham Independent Film Tribute Award, Writers Guild of America Award for Television: Long Form – Original, Edgar Awards for Best Television Feature/Mini-Series Teleplay, Ian McLellan Hunter Award, Golden Space Needle Award for Be...
Nominations
Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, Palme d'Or, Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay - Motion Picture, Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay, Independent Spirit Award for Best Director, BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay, Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screen...
Movies
Lone Star, Matewan, Eight Men Out, The Brother from Another Planet, Return of the Secaucus 7, City of Hope, Passion Fish, The Secret of Roan Inish, Honeydripper, Sunshine State, Go for Sisters, Baby It's You, Lianna, Silver City, Piranha, Men with Guns, The Howling, Casa de los Babys, Amigo, The Spi...
TV Shows
Shannon's Deal, Square One Television, Mathnet, Sodankylä Forever, Miradas 2
[on "The Brother from Another Planet"] I couldn't afford to hire a production manager, a first assistant director, and a second assistant director. Their minimums would have been high enough to make up a third of my budget.
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[1983 interview] The things I write and direct are things I'm not going to see unless I do them.
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[1983 interview] It's great not to have to go around and raise your money - a thousand here, ten thousand there. But if I can't get the same kind of control doing it through a studio - artistic control, which is always important to a project as far as I'm concerned - then I'd just as soon go back to looking for the money myself and do it independently.
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[1983 interview] Because directing is very political and social, it takes up more of your time than writing does. It's more demanding because you have to make the movie when the money is there. A book can just sit there; it doesn't depend on anyone else. That's what's nice about it. You don't have to rely on anyone else - you either do it or you don't. Fiction writing is a break from movie-making for me.
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There's a basic structure to movies. It's rigid and reductive. In a movie you only deal with core relationships: a protagonist, an antagonist. But in a novel you can do whatever you want. You can introduce characters that disappear for a hundred pages. You can have a dozen plot lines that interweave and overlap. In a novel, you get to be God. That doesn't happen in the movies.
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The scariest movie I ever saw was John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) with special effects by Rob Bottin. The theater was full, and I had to sit in the front row.
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Being a screenwriter is a good job. I can make a good amount of money to put back into my own films.
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I want to direct films that no one else is going to make. I know if I don't make them, I'm never going to see them. Of course, I hope some people will want to see my movies as well, but I won't pander to the public. I won't try to second guess what a Hollywood studio would like to see in a low-budget film, so that they will hire me the next time around. I know I will always do better work if I do projects in which I really believe. And if I never get to direct again, I will have made some movies I can feel proud of.
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I always feel that there are no final victories and no final defeats. But it's true that America is in a hole right now. There are a lot of dead fish in the water.
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Oh, I've always felt like I was on the margins. Once upon a time that's what independent used to mean.
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[on making Baby It's You (1983)] I got the cut I wanted, but I was thrown out of the editing room.
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Fact
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In an AFI poll, he chose Akira Kurosawa's "Redbeard" as his favorite film.
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Sayles is a great admirer of Akira Kurosawa and borrowed the basic plot of "Battle beyond the Stars" from "The Seven Samurai.".
In Greenville, Alabama, with partner Maggie Renzi, filming Honeydripper (starring Danny Glover) [September 2006]
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In the Philippines filming Amigo. [June 2010]
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Speaks Spanish fluently.
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Has English and Irish ancestry.
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In the 2008 Empire Magazine movie poll, Sayles listed his ten favorite films as: Yojimbo (1961), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Two Women (1960), The Organizer (1963), The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Seven Samurai (1954), Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), Raging Bull (1980), The Wages of Fear (1953), Port of Shadows (1938).
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In his hometown of Schenectady, New York, there is the Sayles School of Fine Arts Black Box Theatre at the high school.
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While staying in Greenville, Alabama, during the Honeydripper (2007) shoot, Maggie Renzi and Sayles called in a contribution during the fund drive for the National Public Radio affiliate WUAL-FM in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
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Did uncredited rewrites for Apollo 13 (1995) and Mimic (1997).
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Was classmates at Williams College with actor David Strathairn, whom Sayles regularly casts in his films.
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His films are often more based on character than plot.
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Drafted in 1968, but rejected by the United States Army because of missing vertebra.
$1.3 Million
