By Cathleen Rountree

John Sayles, writer, director and editor, is considered one of the progenitors of the American independent film movement. After an impressive array of films - Return of the Secaucus Seven, Baby It's You, The Brother From Another Planet, Matewan, Eight Men Out, Lianna, City of Hope, Passion Fish, The Secret of Roan Inish, Lone Star, Men With Guns, Limbo, Sunshine State, Casa de los Babys and Silver City - Honeydripper, his 16th feature film, is now playing in New York and Los Angeles and readying for a run around the country.

The story revolves around Tyrone Purvis, played superbly by Danny Glover, as the struggling proprietor of the Honeydripper Lounge, a music hall and community meeting place for blacks in 1950s Alabama. As Tyrone struggles to maintain his marriage and livelihood, he unwittingly ushers in a social and cultural sea-change in Sayles's mythic and joyous account of the birth of rock-and-roll.

Sayles and I met after Honeydripper's debut in September at the Toronto International Film Festival, where he displayed his impressive encyclopedic knowledge of music, expounded on "comic book movies" and border politics, and shared a liberal's fears about the final days of the Bush administration.

The main thing I'd like to focus on in our interview is the music - the music in this film, naturally, but also how you employ music throughout your body of work, which often assumes the role of a character in your films. I'm wondering what intrigued you about this subject matter - that specific period between acoustic and electric?

Well, I was born in 1950, the year in which this film is set, and the first record I ever owned was "Hound Dog."

Elvis Presley's version?

Yeah, but it originated as a blues version. And that's where I start with music. As I got interested, I sort of moved in both directions...

Between blues and rock-and-roll?

Right, between blues and rock-and-roll. But there weren't a lot of blues on the radio back then; Elvis was about as funky as it got. I kind of discovered blues through Ray Charles. You know, there would be little bluesy kinds of rifts in his music. And then he led me to Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and some of those people, to see where some of the music came from. And then Sam Cooke led me to gospel, as did Aretha Franklin, because he sang those pop songs, but he was also with The Soul Stirrers. And some of the other guys might lead you to Louis Jordan - like Chuck Berry led me to Louis Jordan.

The "King of the Jukeboxes"?

He's the "jump blues" [a swinging, up-tempo, dance-oriented hybrid of jazz, blues and boogie-woogie] guy. That was the transition period between when the swing bands were really big and then got smaller. He did "Five Guys Named Moe" and "Blue Light Boogie" – which we play in this film – and "Saturday Night Fish Fry." His songs had very clever lyrics and that honking saxophone. They were a little more sophisticated than rhythm and blues, but it was a smaller group, so it couldn't really be swing anymore with the big horn sections. So I liked all that music and I liked country and western. So if you listen to the Hank Williams song that's in the movie ("Move It On Over"), it's the exact same song as "Rock Around the Clock." So country was going in that rockabilly direction on its own.

So I was always interested in that transition period and what happens in any art, in any field of endeavor, when there's this sea change, when things change really fast, you know? And who jumps aboard the new thing, and who says, "No, I play jazz" or "I play blues" or "I'm a silent movie director" or "I'm not gonna go there, I don't like it" or "I can't go there; I can't play that stuff." And it happens in all kinds of fields.

So, for me, that was the beginning of it and that suggested a character who could go either way. And he's kinda gotta go with the new thing, but is he gonna like it? Is he gonna be able to do it?

This is Tyrone, the character that Danny Glover plays?

And then I felt like, okay, that's a good beginning of a character. But also, so much of that early rock-and-roll came out of the South, and the racial situation down there. And, yes, it got electrified when it got to Chicago, in the case of the blues. But Chuck Berry was from St. Louis, you know; Ike Turner was a southern guy - he was working for Sun Records, who recorded Elvis and Johnny Cash. He was going out and basically finding blues and rhythm and blues artists for them. At the same time, he was playing in his own group. And, of course, Elvis was from Tennessee.

So I wanted to set the film in the South, and began thinking about a black man in that time and place trying to be his own man. Yes, it's a funky club, and his wife makes more money than him, cleaning the floors and polishing the silver for the mayor's wife. But he's his own man in Alabama in 1950. And that's what he's going to lose if he loses the club. A lot of the projects I do start with a character like that.

Music has been important - almost a character, as I mentioned earlier - in several of your other films as well.

Music, to me, is not only the rhythm of the film, it's some of the soul of the film. So in something like The Secret of Roan Inish, there's that traditional Irish music, including some songs in Gaelic; in Passion Fish, there's zydeco and cajun music; in Matewan, it's that hill music, you know, that gives a real spirit to it. In some of our other movies it's been more eclectic. But Mason Daring has scored all but one of our movies, and the one that he didn't do didn't have any scored music.

Mason and I get together and we talk about the musical soul and backbone of the movie, and we listen to a lot of stuff together. In the case of Matewan, for instance, we decided, "Okay, here's this whole genre of music, but we're going to pull one thing, we're gonna take the banjo out. The banjo's a little too happy for this particular song; and, because of Flatt and Scruggs and Bonnie and Clyde, it gives you the wrong feel and rhythm. And we want to slow things down, so we'll use dobro and fiddle, and that will give us the rhythm we want from this particular music, without that foot-stomping thing.

Then when we did Eight Men Out, which was one year earlier - but it's Chicago, it's not West Virginia - we decided to go with early jazz, that King Oliver jazz sound, which does have a beat and is a lot livelier. That's a movie with faster cutting and no long dissolves.

So music really is an important kind of foundation for every movie, and the question is: "What's the music going to be?" In Lone Star it was, Okay, we have a contemporary story which we need to link to the back story that happened in 1957. One of the songs we found was Freddy Fender's "Since I Met You, Baby," which became the romantic couple's song. Now that's another good example of a song that started with Ivory Joe Hunter, who had a small hit on a race label and then it got discovered by country and western artists and became a big hit. Well, Hunter decided that he was going to make some money from it, so he wrote, not a cover version, but an almost identical song, which was "Since I Met You, Baby."

What's a "cover version"?

A cover version is when somebody does the same song but in a different style. But what he wrote was a parallel song - "Since I Met You, Baby" - that was almost the same. And then Freddy Fender, "El Bebop Kid," the guy who brought rock-and-roll to Latin America, did a cover version of it in Spanish. And Lone Star being set on the border, I was able to use both the English and Spanish versions and link those two communities as well as those two eras together.

So, music is a huge deal. And the best thing about it is that I get to buy a lot of CDs and take them off on my taxes later on, because they truly are research for the movies.

<!--pagebreak-->In talking about transition periods between acoustic and electric music, Dylan, of course, definitely jumped on board the new movement.

Well, for instance, Phil Ochs, who was having a hard time as a folksinger, came out in a gold lamé suit at one of his concerts. It was kind of an ironic act, you know, Okay, if this is how what I have to do to make money, I'll do a rock-and-roll album. But his heart wasn't in it.

He committed suicide, right?

Eventually. Right after he came out with that album, actually. But Dylan went to rock-and-roll because he wanted to play that stuff. He saw possibilities there. He wasn't going because he was failing. So when Bruce Springsteen made Nebraska, it was because he had a bunch of those songs, and he thought, Well, it's not gonna sell like my danceable music does, but I want to do that.

So, really, one reason why people move on is because they think, There's a possibility for me there. It's not the only thing I can play, but I could do something interesting. You know, as Danny Glover says, "I could do some damage with that." So, you can make either decision, and it may be right for you or it may be wrong for you. For Charlie Parker to stop playing on R&B sessions was the right decision for him, because he didn't think much of it and didn't like himself when he was doing it.

It's been nice - to promote the movie, we put together the Honeydripper All-Star Band, the core of which are people who are in the movie, including Gary Clark, Jr., who is the guitar player. We play the Chicago Blues Festival; we're going to be in Monterey. I'm supposed to do a talk with Clint Eastwood about movies and music. Music is so important to his movies as well.

He writes a lot of his own music. Do you write or play music?

In Honeydripper I have about three credits. What I do is I come up with lyrics and a melody, and then I sit with Mason Daring and he makes it more musical. I can't read music, but he knows what it needs and how to use a bridge and all that. I get maybe a thousand dollars a year from ASCAP [American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers] from royalties to the rights of other songs I've written. [laughs] In this film I wrote, with Mason, the gospel song and the song on the final credits and I wrote "China Doll" that Gary sings.

And there are two reasons for that. One is, sometimes you can find the perfect song that has the perfect lyrics and the perfect feel, but sometimes you can't find it. Also, when you write your own, it's a lot cheaper than buying the rights for someone else's song. The rights have gotten so expensive for songs that were pre-recorded. Partly because many of the small labels have been bought out by bigger publishing companies. But then those publishing companies often don't even know what the songs are. For instance, we couldn't use the great Joe Liggins's "Honeydripper," because they were just asking too much money for it. It might have been nice to put in somewhere or to use for the trailer. It wasn't anything we absolutely needed, but it would have been nice to have it in the film. But we just couldn't afford it. The new Julie Taymor movie uses all these Beatles songs. The music fees alone must have been twenty million dollars.

What are you working on next?

You know, actually, film-wise, I don't know. I still write scripts for other people, so I'm writing screenplays to make a living. And I'm writing a novel that's set during the Philippine-American War, which takes place between 1898 and 1901. I had written a screenplay on the topic, but, realistically, we're just never going to get the money to make it. We haven't been able to raise money for a film for several years, so we've been making them on the money I make as a screenwriter.

Also, while I was writing the screenplay, I felt like I was squeezing it to fit the form; while making it into a novel, I can expand it. So it's going to be a very long novel and it's been fun to work on.

Do you think someone else might buy the rights and you can right the screenplay for it?

That usually doesn't happen. My movies have a lot of characters in them and they have a lot of points of view. My novels have even more, so they'd really be better for a 20 to 50-part mini-series than a single movie. It really would be reductive, so none of them have ever been made.

How does the process work for you to go from the solitary act of writing a novel or screenplay and then the collaborative effort of producing a film?

Each one has its plusses and minuses. Certainly, when I'm writing for someone else, I like it. You use all the muscles you use when you write for yourself, but you're helping them tell their story, so you're not as emotionally involved - you just can't be. You hand in a draft and they say what they like or don't like and where they want it to go. And it may be something as simple as, "Oh, look, we just got a 20-year-old to play this part. So the 40-year-old woman? She's 20 now." You know, if it was your own thing, you'd say, "No way," but it's theirs, so you say, "Okay, well, I'll rethink it."

When I'm working on a book, the great thing is I can do anything I want. My last novel, I did the Bay of Pigs invasion in eight pages. And I didn't have to say, "Oh, we have to have tanks and planes." And the costumers say, "We need boots for all those thousands of people." If it's a sunny day, it's a sunny day. On the other hand, when you're making a movie, you're going to get all these people who have talents you don't have. You can have a composer like Mason Daring, you get actors who can do things I can't do, the production designer, the costumer, you know, all those talents I don't have.

Although, I liked your cameo as the liquor delivery guy.

Oh, thanks, yeah. But that's one part. So they can do things I can't do, but I get to choose. And I get to direct those talents. So, in a book, you don't have to raise money to do anything of any scale, it can only be as good as you can make it; whereas a movie can become even better than the script. And that's what we always hope for. And for most scripts, unfortunately - even the good ones - the film gets about 80 percent of what's in the script, maybe 50, if it's not done very well, or the casting was wrong. With our movies, I really feel like they are 110, 120 percent of what the script was.

I wonder if part of that has to do with the fact that you work with a "family," a crew you've assembled and worked with repeatedly.

You know, that's interesting. I think on every movie, or almost every movie, we're working with some people we've worked with before. Certainly Mason Daring. I've almost always worked with the same technical people in New York who do the sound mix and the sound editing. I've had some assistant editors who have stayed with me for a long time. But as far as the cast goes - our casts are so big - usually a third of them are people I've worked with before, but the other two-thirds are new. I'd never worked with Danny or Charles Dutton before. I'd never gotten to work with Lisa Gay Hamilton or Stacy Keach before. But it's great when you're working on something to say, "Oh, I wonder if we can get Mary Steenburgen for a day? She'd be perfect for this."

She was perfect for the role of the mayor's repressed wife.

Yeah, she's great. And she works all the time, so for her to come for one day and put her head in that place. It's really like a little play - that six-minute scene. It's just the two of them, and you have to have awfully good actors to sustain a scene that long. Especially when the character doesn't show up again. So it's nice to have people to call on who you've worked with before. One of the reasons is it's kind of like being in one of those juggling acts where you're trying to keep eight balls in the air? Every time you can take an unknown variable and put it on the table, that's one less thing you've got to juggle. So having worked with actors before - they know how I work, I know how they work - you can just say, "Here's the part. Go to it." And you don't have to worry about it.

I imagine that you are thrilled to see how well Chris Cooper and David Strathairn - actors who have previously worked with you - are doing.

It's great, because they're both really, really good actors. The nice thing is that they're on "the list," so now they can pick and choose a little bit more and actually get paid a little bit more - certainly more than I ever paid them.

<!--pagebreak-->Would you say something about the political awareness that runs through your films?

Well, I don't feel that I set out to make a political film necessarily. I'd say that Silver City is the only one specifically about politics because there's an election happening. But what I don't do is: I don't avoid what's there. Most Hollywood films say, Oh, we don't need all that stuff, that's just going to get in the way of the story we want to tell. And so they seem to be taking place in this vacuum of reality, which is perfect for most of those movies because they don't really want to deal with it. I always think of it in the sense that you're walking down the street and say, Oooh, I'm afraid of what's down this street, so I'm going five blocks out of my way to avoid that neighborhood. When I start telling a story I think, Hey, what's in that neighborhood? I'm going straight through; I'm not going to ignore it.

So, Honeydripper is not about race, but it's 1950 in Alabama. You can't forget that it's there, you know? It's part of people's lives. But the black people don't sit around saying "What are the white people going to think of us?" They're a fact of life and you have to deal with them when you have to deal with them. For me, the most powerful line in the film is when the sheriff says to Sonny, "Take your hat off." You know, that's Alabama, 1950. And it's not just because he's the sheriff, it's because he's a white man and Sonny is a black man. And in a scene, I threw it away, but they walk past a "Colored" entrance. The blacks went in through a different entrance. And they learned to stop and let the white people pass and then you go. That stuff adds up, but it's still 1950, it's not 1964. But I'm not going to ignore that.

So, in all of my films, when I ask, "Who is the character?," one of the things you ask is, "Well, how did they get there? Why do they think what they think? Why do they know what they know - or think they know?" Nobody starts from scratch. So, if you're in a border town in Texas, there's a huge amount of history that's gone into how you feel about the world around you. And if you're Mexican or you're Anglo or a mix, or whatever, and if you're on one side of the border... We talked to people down there - and it's almost all Mexican Americans in those border towns - they'll say, "Those Mexicans are crazy. My cousin's down there. Those Mexicans do crazy things." And, you know, they're a half-mile away from each other! But the cultures have drifted in the time they've been separated and it really is different. So I feel that it's much richer to not ignore that stuff and to deal with it.

Do you think there is a particular theme that links your films together?

I do think that there is something all our movies share - and maybe that's why it's hard to get funding - more than being political is that they're complex and the characters are complex. One of the things that movies do very, very well is absolutes. That's one of the reasons that cartoon movies, comic book movies are so popular. And the 80s was the era of Stallone and Schwarzenegger, you know, they were bigger-than-life heroes; and bigger-than-life bad guys. Those black-hat and white-hat kind of movies are something that Hollywood does very well, and visual language does very well.

The minute you get into complexity, it's harder for the audience to know how to feel about a character. And it's harder to see, just visually, who's the good guy and who's the bad guy. I always feel like I want my characters to be like your friends: you still love them but they don't always act well. And what happens when your friends break up and you like them both, but they're really being shitty to each other? You know, who do you choose? I mean, that's life. And that's always been the kind of drama that interests me. So, I think if there is a through-line, it's that complexity, rather than one main theme or anything else. And that's why we often have a lot of characters in our movies. Because I don't want there to be only one black man - or one this or one that - in the movie, who has to represent all black men. Within a community there's just such a range of people.

I definitely see that. And one of the elements that draws me to your films is the stories of the underprivileged and ethnic diversity, as in Men With Guns, Casa de los Babys, Lone Star. Why is that important to you?

Well, some of that is just the way I grew up. I come from a very ethnically mixed city, went to an ethnically mixed high school, so that was my experience. And what I realized is that most of those groups in America, which is supposed to be this big melting pot, live parallel lives that cross. And some of what is interesting to me is, where do they cross and how do they cross? But recognize that what they actually don't realize is that in their parallel lives they are doing all of the same things and they actually care about all the same things. Most of their values are pretty close to each other, but they may think of each other as this exotic "other." City of Hope was all about this failing city and all these ethnic groups are wondering who's going to get the crumbs when this thing finally falls apart? And to emphasize that they didn't understand how much their lives were intertwined, we shot it almost all in master shots. So there's not even a cut between these people, but they're all talking about "Those guys do this, and those guys do that..." But what you realize is that they're all in the same bag.

So that's a lot of it. And it's also about the promise of what America was going to be, as a nation of immigrants. We haven't lived up to the promise always, or rarely, but that is the promise and that's the idea: Okay, to be an American, you get to do what you do and then tolerate what the other person does, and then you try to work it out.

It will be interesting because I think the Republicans are going to make immigration a big deal. But not real immigration and not in a real way, but just in a bogeyman way.

And, speaking of politics, what are you thinking about the next election?

I don't know how it's going to shake out. I think we'll probably see the Bush Administration have a three-day air war against Iran just before the elections - and declare a victory - basically just to get votes.