John Sayles

No, I think it's a fairly realistic film. I think that in the United States, people are trying to do a very, very difficult thing, which is to have a society that works, that's made up of people of many, many different races, many, many different ethnicities, and many, many different classes. And sometimes you put them all, cram them all into one city and ask them to coexist and to cooperate, that's a very, very difficult thing.

It's a very, very difficult thing to expect them to rise above the interests of their own class or the interests of their own racial group or even the interests of their own family for the common good. So it's not so much anti-American as about the difficulty of what America is trying to do.

Do you have personal experience with the world of your film, the world what the film shows?

Yeah, I think I lived in small cities all my life, so that when I went to write "City of Hope", I didn't do any research. I've lived in Atlanta, Georgia, in Albany, New York, in Hoboken, New Jersey, in East Boston, Massachusetts. All of these are small cities of the sort that you see in "City of Hope", where there's a very particular kind of American politics that is generally about one ethnic group growing to the size where eventually they gain power of the city, and then as they do well and move out into the suburbs, yet another ethnic group comes and starts to build up underneath them.

And there's usually a conflict between those two groups, as well as some of the other groups around them who never get quite big enough to have true power.

What is for you the attraction of a big and dirty city? Why did you tell about this place?

Well, I think as well as the problems, there's a incredible excitement to culture in the United States and in those cities because of all those things. You have the musics of all those different peoples. You have places where they do come together, usually first in music and athletics, but some other places. There's kind of an energy in confrontation, even. And I think rather than being a static society, it makes for a very kind of dynamic society, one that has to move in order to just deal with all those different people and all their different needs.

So I find that places where life is always the same, where life is very, very cyclical, are less interesting in a way to live in. They may be interesting to visit, they may be peaceful to visit, but they're less interesting to me.

What do you think? Has your film a message for the election contest in this moment?

Well, I do think that in that "City of Hope" is partly about leadership and what are the responsibilities of leadership. The mayor of the city in "City of Hope" is somebody who's very, very willing and very good at driving a wedge between different kinds of people in order to divide and conquer. The character that Joe Morton plays, the Black City Councilman, is somebody who's trying to do good things for his people at the same time that he doesn't want to do it at the expense of race relations. He doesn't want to start a race war just in order to get his community behind him. And that's something that, despite what the official policy or the official publicity for the Bush administration has been, they've done quite a bit to make people afraid of each other, feeling that the middle class, if you can make them afraid of falling down in the working and lower classes where more Black and Hispanic people are, then you can scare them into voting for you. And so I think it has a lot to do with the present election in the United States.

Your film, "City of Hope", is the end of the vision, the end of hope. Where is the future, a kind of happy future for you, for the big cities, not only in America?

Yeah, I think that the hope in "City of Hope" comes through some of the individual characters. And as long as there are those individuals, and now and then they can find some way to group together with other people, the hope never dies within a city. You put the fire of something good out, there are always a few ashes or embers that are still glowing. And I think that that's where it is in the United States, is that even though many of these cities have become bankrupt, people are getting a chance to be the leaders of those cities who never had a chance before.

And they'll probably make many of the mistakes that the people who came before them did, but at least now they get to run their own lives. The history of immigration in America has been such that each immigrant group that came in stepped in front of the black people and the black people always stayed at the bottom. They never got pushed up and up and up and up. And only in the last 10 years have black people started to be the mayors of large cities, the chiefs of police, in the firemen, in the educational system, as teachers and principals.

And that's a very, very hopeful sign. Not that it's going to be easy for them, but at least now they're getting a little bit more control over their own lives.

You are a political filmmaker. Are you a political man, also outside of the cinema?

I'd say that the movies that I make are politically conscious as opposed to being politically unconscious. I'm very aware of what things are about, but I would say that they're not so much ideological, and so outside of moviemaking, I'm very aware of politics and I do what I can, whether it's individually or supporting certain groups, but I wouldn't say that I'm ideological. The people in the Bush administration would disagree, but what I find is that ideologies tend to become like fundamentalist religions and they can exist without doing anything good for people once they get to too pure a state and that the real job is to take whatever ideologies are around and use what's best about them to improve people's lives.

Is there for you and for your work a difference between clearing up and enjoy the audience?

Well, I think that there are so many movies that are just entertainment, that people go to and they're expected to experience them like a good meal, that you eat it but you don't think about it the minute that it's done. What our movies try to do is try to be something that you actually might think about a little bit. They should be entertaining while they're happening. And entertaining doesn't just mean, oh, they make you feel good while they're happening. But as long as the audience gets involved in the lives of the people who are up there on the screen, I feel like that's entertaining.

You care what happens to them next. It may not be nice sometimes. Sometimes they have a sense of humor, so you can identify with them. The situation that they're in is very tough, but I really think that you always go for a mixture of that. I'm not teaching a history class or I would be teaching at a school. I'm making a movie and dramatizing things that are going on around us.

"City of Hope" has an exciting, a very exciting story. Is it important for you to tell a story instead of making, for example, an episodical film? To tell a story, is it important for you?

Yeah, I think whether it's episodic or it's more plot-driven, I do think that one thing that I always try for is what in fiction writing, which I also do, is called the page-turning quality, which is you want to see what happens next. And in the case of some of the movies I've made, it's about the plot, how is the plot going to progress. It may be a mystery or it may be a gunfight that's going to come next, and you want to see how that comes out. In some cases, it's character development, and you just want to see what happens to these people. Do they change? In "City of Hope", there are, maybe seven or eight characters, all of whom have some kind of moral dilemma, and the hope is that you get involved in their lives, and then you say, well, which way are they going to choose?

Each one of them has a chance to do something here, and it's a really hard choice. I'd hate to have to make the choices that the characters in this movie have, but which way are they going to go? So as long as there is that to drive the audience forward, to want to know what happens next, it doesn't really matter whether it's a single plot or a more episodic movie.

You are an independent filmmaker and you refuse the studios of Hollywood. Perhaps you can tell us why you are so hard.

Well, it's not so much that I refuse them. It's a very mutual thing. I mean, they reject what I do in a way. I work as a screenwriter for Hollywood studios. And so now I have lots of friends there and talk to them very often. And pretty much what the attitude is, is I have a lot of executives that say, "I really like your movies, I wish we could make something like that, but I just don't think we're set up to make money on the kind of movies that you make." More than being political, I'd say that what's happening in the mainstream Hollywood industry right now, the film industry, is that characters are getting more and more simple. More and more of the big movies are cartoons.

Some of them are literally based on cartoons, like "Batman". And others are action-adventure movies where the characters are very one-dimensional and very cartoon-like, whereas the movies that we're making are getting more and more complex and more and more like real life. And I'd say more than any political thing or attitude on my part, that is what separates the two. And so Hollywood tends not to be interested in the stories I'm interested to tell, not even the way that I make them, but the stories themselves that I'm interested in telling. And I tend not to be that interested in spending a year of my life making the stories that they're interested in.

This film, it will be a film for the big town, for the audience of the big cities, or also for the small towns?

I think people who have lived in big cities may recognize more. But I think that, once again, there are a lot of characters and there are a lot of characters who are accessible enough for you to get involved in. So I really don't think that it necessarily breaks down that people in a big city will like it and people in a small town won't. I think it's instructive either way, whether you live in the middle of a big city and you can recognize some of the things that happen, or if you live in a small town and you say, well, oh, that's what goes on there.

Is there anything like that? Are there those kind of moral dilemmas in my own life here in the small town?

In this film, you are actor, director and scriptwriter. What is the profit doing all the things together?

Well, I don't act in all of my movies, but every once in a while there's a part that is good for me. I generally play people who don't change. Because the most difficult thing about movie acting is to know where you are, because you don't shoot the scenes in order. And if your character goes through any change, you may shoot the first scene, and then the last scene, and then the middle scene. And you have to remember, where am I now? So when I play a part, I play people who are the same all the way through, so I can just go on the other side of the camera and react to the other actors. As far as writing, directing, and editing, I think I, from being a fiction writer first, I got used to doing that.

When you write fiction, you write the first draft, the second draft, and probably the third draft. And when I'm making a movie, I very much feel like the screenplay is only the first draft. The shooting of the movie is the second draft, and you change some things and alter some things and emphasize some things and learn more things about the story. And then the editing is the third draft. And I'd no sooner give up control over one of those three parts of storytelling in movies than I would to write two drafts of a book and then hand it over to somebody else and say, "Oh, you finish it up."

Thank you very much.