Sayles was born on September 28, 1950, in Schenectady, New York, the son of Mary (née Rausch), a teacher, and Donald John Sayles, a school administrator.[1] Both of Sayles's parents were Catholic and of half-Irish descent. Sayles has referred to himself as a "Catholic atheist".[2] He attended Williams College with frequent collaborators Gordon Clapp and David Strathairn, as well as his longtime partner, Maggie Renzi. Sayles earned a B.A. in psychology in 1972.[3]
Career
After college, Sayles moved to Boston where he held a series of blue-collar jobs.[3][4] In summer of 1974 he acted and directed at the Eastern Slope Playhouse in North Conway, New Hampshire.[5] In 1975 he worked with The Atlantic Monthly on expanding a 50-page story he had submitted.[4] This effort culminated in his first novel, The Pride of the Bimbos, published in 1975.
In 1979, Sayles used $30,000 he earned writing scripts for Corman to fund his first film, Return of the Secaucus 7.[8] To make the film on a limited budget, he shot it in 16 mm;[9] he set the story over a three-day weekend to limit costume changes, and wrote about people his age so that he could cast his actor friends from the Eastern Slope Playhouse;[10][11] he chose as the primary setting a large nearby house to avoid travel expenses or the need for permits for different locations.[12] The film received near-unanimous critical acclaim at the time and has maintained its reputation. In 1997, the National Film Preservation Board announced that Return of the Secaucus 7 would be one of 25 films selected that year for preservation in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.[13]
Filmmaker and screenwriter
In 1983, after making the films Baby It's You (starring Rosanna Arquette) and Lianna (a story in which a woman grows discontented with her marriage and falls in love with another woman), Sayles received a MacArthur Fellowship. He put the money into the science fiction feature The Brother from Another Planet,[14] a film about a three-toed humanoid who escapes bondage on another world and crash-lands in New York harbor; because he is Africanoid in appearance, he finds himself at home among the people of Harlem, being pursued by European-looking alien enslaver men in black.[15]
The list of Sayles's own films also includes Lone Star, Passion Fish, Eight Men Out, The Secret of Roan Inish,Matewan, and Sunshine State. He works with a regular repertory of actors, most notably Chris Cooper, David Strathairn, and Gordon Clapp, each of whom appeared in at least four of his films. Sayles often acts in small roles in films he directs, and he has occasionally been employed as a supporting actor in other people's films and TV programs, for instance, after collaborating with Joe Dante on Piranha and The Howling, Sayles acted in Dante's movie, Matinee.
Sayles serves on the advisory board for the Austin Film Society.[24]Maggie Renzi has been Sayles's long-time companion (and collaborator), but they have not married. She has produced most of his films since Lianna. They met as students at Williams College.[25]
In 2009, Sayles was hired to write a proposed HBO series based on the early life of Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.[27] In May 2010, Sayles submitted a pilot episode, but the following year it was announced that HBO was no longer interested in the series and that FX picked up the rights. By that point, Sayles had dropped out of the project.[28]
In February 2010, he began shooting his 17th feature film, the historical war drama Amigo, in the Philippines. The film is a fictional account of events during the Philippine–American War, with a cast that includes Joel Torre, Chris Cooper, and Garret Dillahunt.[29]
Sayles's last directorial effort was Go for Sisters (2013). In subsequent years, he struggled to raise enough money to make a film with professional actors and crew.[30]
Parallel with his film career, Sayles has produced a steady stream of novels. He enjoyed early success with Union Dues (1977), which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.[31] With the publication of Los Gusanos (1991)—a sprawling tale of Miami's Cuban exile community and 50 years of Cuban-American relations—Sayles began writing novels on a broad canvas with a penchant for lengthy works of historical fiction.[32] He once called Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon "the best 'big' book I know",[33] and as Tom LeClair said of Sayles's 1,000-page A Moment in the Sun (2011), "In its scale, multiple plots, rigorous attention to setting and technology, colloquial exactitude, race consciousness and suspicion of political power, A Moment in the Sun is admirably Pynchonian."[34] Another reviewer noted that for a budget-constrained independent filmmaker like Sayles, it "must have seemed a luxury to expand the story far beyond what would fit in 90 minutes, and to include places from the past that would be prohibitive to reproduce".[35]
In a review of the 700-page Jamie MacGillivray (2022), Alex Preston wrote: "As with his previous books Yellow Earth (2020) and A Moment in the Sun (2011), this is a vast, epic and multidimensional tale, a larger and more various narrative than any film could hope to contain."[36] Critics praised Sayles for skillfully managing the demands of the lengthy novel form, with "his rare ability to inhabit the intersecting perspectives, motivations, and desires of a diverse dramatis personae",[37] and for being able "to balance his cinematic crowds with novelistic inwardness".[34]
In interviews, Sayles has spoken about the process in which his story ideas and historical research are sometimes turned into fiction, and sometimes into film: "Both Jamie MacGillivray and To Save the Man started as screenplays we couldn't raise the money to make. Casa de los Babys was a movie I made based on a short story I'd written."[38] The Honeydripper screenplay originated with his short story "Keeping Time", published in the Dillinger in Hollywood (2004) collection.[39] His film Amigo grew out of the research he did for A Moment in the Sun, both works taking place at the turn of the 20th century in the U.S., Cuba, and the Philippines.[40] Late in his career, when Sayles was unable to raise funds for new films, he continued to publish new fiction.[30]
Silver City and Other Screenplays (2004). Nation Books. ISBN978-1560256311
Non-fiction
Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie "Matewan" (1987). Houghton Mifflin. ISBN978-0395453889
Sayles on Sayles (1998). Faber & Faber. Edited by Gavin Smith. ISBN978-0571192809
John Sayles: Interviews (1999). University Press of Mississippi. Edited by Diane Carson. ISBN978-1578061389
Sayles Talk: New Perspectives on Independent Filmmaker John Sayles (2006). Wayne State University Press. Edited by Diane Carson and Heidi Kenaga. ISBN978-0814331552
Backstory 5: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1990s (2010). University of California Press. Edited by Patrick McGilligan. ISBN978-0520251052
Sayles, John (2003) [1987]. Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie Matewan (Reviseded.). Cambridge: Da Capo Press. ISBN978-0306812668.
Carson, Diane; Kenaga, Heidi, eds. (2006). Sayles Talk: New Perspectives on Independent Filmmaker John Sayles. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. ISBN978-0814331552.
Shumway, David R. (2012). John Sayles. Contemporary Film Directors. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN978-0252036989.
↑"The 65th Academy Awards | 1993". Oscars.org | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Archived from the original on May 9, 2019. Retrieved November 27, 2018.
↑"The 69th Academy Awards | 1997". Oscars.org | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Archived from the original on October 9, 2020. Retrieved November 27, 2018.
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