That's a lot of economic pressure on a story," he concluded. "You gotta open it nationally, that's another 3 million.
#SIX DAYS SEVEN NIGHTS SCREENIT MOVIE#
"A low-budget movie to them is 7 million," he figured. A few years ago, he made "Baby, It's You" for Paramount and had to go hand-to-hand with the studio to retain control of it. So he made movies about a faculty wife leaving her marriage for a lesbian affair, and about an alien landing in Harlem, and he and his producers scrounged for cash.īy now, he probably could get Disney or Columbia to ante up, but the prospect makes him twitch. "I sort of always knew the stuff I was interested in was not necessarily what they're interested in," Sayles recalled. We don't.' "Īt the beginning, making his $60,000 debut with "Return of the Secaucus Seven," getting backing from Hollywood studios wasn't an option. If we had more money we could come back tomorrow and try it again. I know you could make it look better, but you'll have to make it look as good as you can in the next half hour.' I tell the actors, 'We have until this minute. "I almost always have to tell the technicians, 'Sorry, it's not your night. But it may not be worth what it would take. "Almost every shot I make in a movie, I know there's a better way to make it. "Money does affect how good a movie is," Sayles acknowledged, around the sandwich. Sayles would have liked a less exhausting pace, but weekends are one of the luxuries one forgoes when trying to create an epic for a paltry $3.6 million. It had been only a few weeks since Red Dog Films (what the Sayles production company is calling itself for purposes of "Matewan") had returned from 44 intense days of shooting in West Virginia, where the cast and crew worked six days, and sometimes nights, a week. He's tall and broad-shouldered - the word "strapping" comes to mind - and he was tired that day. A drawling voice on the sound track said "Awright, boys," over and over, while outside in a hallway the writer-director-etc. "Matewan" was still hanging in strips around a darkened editing room near Times Square last winter when Sayles offered that estimate. Ninety-eight percent of your work is raising the money to make the movie." It's still true, Sayles points out philosophically, that "two percent of your work is making the movie. Even a track record that includes "Return of the Secaucus Seven," "Baby, It's You" and "The Brother From Another Planet" doesn't mean that an indie's next project will fall smoothly into place. Yet as the making of "Matewan" demonstrates, even a guy who trails hyphens, as in novelist-screen writer-director-actor-"genius" award recipient, has to hustle hard for money. This is supposed to be the era of the nonstudio filmmaker, with everyone from Spike Lee ("She's Gotta Have It") to Oliver Stone ("Salvador," "Platoon") demonstrating that independent movies can win audiences and Oscars. Nothing in his demeanor or language signaled triumph.īut perhaps that's because Sayles, more than the crowd, knew what an ordeal it had been to film "Matewan." It has taken him the better part of a decade to bring this story of bloody union struggles in the West Virginia coal fields to the screen (it opens Friday in Washington). In the movie about to unreel, Sayles had given himself a flamboyant scene as a Baptist preacher in person, he was underplaying.
Asked to say a few words before the film rolled, he ignored the applause, hunched over the microphone stand and mumbled two sentences of barely audible thanks.
Without groveling to a studio owned by Coca-Cola, shaking hands at parties in Bel Air, casting a teen dreamboat or acceding to an upbeat ending - without, in short, any of the humiliations creative people supposedly have to endure to get movies made - Sayles was still doing what he wanted to do. What Sayles' producer Maggie Renzi calls "the usual John Sayles crowd" was out in force. NEW YORK - It was hard to find an empty seat at the premiere of "Matewan." A new written-and-directed-by John Sayles movie creates its own kind of buzz.
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