INDEPENDENT SPIRIT: An interview with Casa de los Babys director John Sayles. By Warren Curry 9/19/03

Director John Sayles

(Read the review of Casa de los Babys)

Casa de los Babys is John Sayles' 14th feature film as a writer/director. In his 25 years of filmmaking, Sayles has emerged as a leading figure in American independent cinema -- a maverick spirit whose films have always eschewed cinematic trends. While the 90s saw an unprecedented rise in the popularity of American indies, thanks largely to the cult of personality that was such masters of self-promotion as Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith, Sayles stuck to his guns, making quiet films that resonated with a literacy seldom seen in the indie film world, especially as hyper-stylized violence and overstated hipster dialogue became the rule of the day.

A prolific and hard working auteur, Sayles' films embrace an intellectual aesthetic nestled in a blue-collar disposition. Speaking at a roundtable interview, with his shirt unbuttoned enough to proudly display a wealth of chest hair, the muscled filmmaker (whose biceps have more of a construction worker's shape than a bodybuilder's) can almost appear to be the embodiment of a contradiction when he speaks. His carefully chosen words are spoken with a soothing eloquence, which belies the simple fact that for Sayles promoting his films at press junkets is obviously all in a day's work.

Perhaps (or perhaps not) furthering the filmmaker's contradictions is his "other Hollywood job" -- that of a high priced studio script writer. For a writing assignment, Sayles can command as much as a seven-figure payday (like the one he recently received to write The Alamo, which Ron Howard was once attached to direct), a sum that's in the neighborhood of the average budget he has to work with for his own directorial projects. "The biggest budget I've ever had was $9 million, and we spent $8. The studio said, 'We'll take that million back,'" comments Sayles. He continues, "You have a little more time with a bigger budget, but finally, really, we've had control over our movies. We've gotten to cast who we want to cast, and the final cut is the final cut that I want it to be." Casa, which was made on a budget of around $1 million, was shot in just four weeks. "It's hard to talk about budget. I know filmmakers who work here in Hollywood and they have a $15 million film, but what they really have to make the film is $3 million because there's $12 million above-the-line," says Sayles.

Casa de los Babys, which focuses on the lives of six American women who set up temporary living quarters in a nameless Latin American country while waiting to adopt children, wasn't originally conceived to be a film. "I had written a very long short story, about 75 pages, that was too long to get into a magazine and too short to be a novella," he reveals. "I always thought that his might be a movie and after I looked at it again, one of the things that attracted me the most is that there are so many movies about groups of men, but so little about groups of women."

And why does the filmmaker think that is? "I think there are two reasons," answers Sayles. "It's harder to sell something that's not an action-adventure movie overseas…they translate better, the dialogue is less important. When dialogue is important to understand character, that doesn't translate very easily. So the mass audience effect favors action movies which tend to be more male stories." His second reason is the more familiar but disheartening observation. "Most of the people who hand out money at the studios are men, and, honestly, I don't think they're that interested in women; certainly not in women over 30, possibly over 25, and certainly not in the dynamics of women in non-sexual situations."

The paucity of films that are largely female oriented definitely aided Sayles in assembling his impressive cast, which includes Darryl Hannah (whose career has received a sudden rebirth), Mary Steenburgen, Rita Moreno, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Marcia Gay Harden and Lili Taylor. "The only people I had in mind were Rita Morena and Vanessa (Martinez)," mentions Sayles of the very preliminary stages of the casting process. "With the North American actresses, I just started asking the best actresses I could think of who fit the age. The only of the North American actresses I auditioned for was the part that Maggie Gyllenhaal played, because I didn't know that crop of 25-and-under actresses." He did notice one similarity in all of the young actresses who came in to read for the part of Jennifer, which eventually went to Gyllenhaal. "All of the actresses came in, I saw everybody's navel, and I wanted to tell them all to sit down and eat some potato salad," Sayles reflects with a laugh.

Working on a female ensemble piece was a rare opportunity for the actresses, who made the most of the unique occasion and took the bonding process to a deeper level. "After a couple of days, a few of the actors said, 'Could we live in the same place?' instead of in separate hotel rooms," mentions Sayles. "They found this place that they could all hang out in up in the hills of Acapulco that was very nice. They really got to spend a lot of time together -- it's very rare for American actresses to even be on a movie with one other actress at the same time, much less 5 others."

The research the director did about adoption procedures in Latin America encompassed every country in that part of the world. Although the film was shot in Acapulco, Sayles purposely did not specify the country the film was set in, although for practical reasons it made sense for the film to take place in Latin America. "I'm a little more familiar with the culture there," notes the director, who made the Mexican-set, Spanish-language film Men With Guns in 1997. "I speak Spanish, so I felt like I could have about half of this movie be in the other language and communicate directly to the actors."

Continuing his indefatigable work ethic, Sayles is currently readying his next film entitled Silver City, which will see him re-team with Darryl Hannah. "It's a murder mystery set during a gubernatorial campaign in Colorado. Darryl plays kind of the black sheep sister in an old political family, " informs Sayles. The film also stars Chris Cooper, Danny Huston, Richard Dreyfus, Kris Kristofferson, Richard (Cheech) Marin, Miguel Ferrer and Thora Birch. Silver City is slated to begin production only a few days after the release of Casa de los Babys. "We're going to shoot in Denver right when this opens. We have to beat the snow, which comes early in the Rockies."

Casa de los Babys, to be released in New York and Los Angeles on September 19 via IFC Films, marks another fine addition to the resume of John Sayles. It's a typically understated, intelligent and sensitive film from a director who was making independent movies long before "indie" became a marketing buzzword. Sayles collective body of work compares favorably to any of his contemporaries who may have, at certain times, overshadowed him -- an intriguing artistic career that shows no signs of decelerating.

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