Sayles' lonely wilderness ride

By Helen Barlow

After John Sayles makes a film, he travels everywhere to promote it.

Does he like giving interviews? "You know, I don't like it. I've forced myself to be good at it," he says, shirtsleeves rolled up over bulging biceps and clearly ready for work.

"It's part of the job, but if I could hire an actor to go out and do it, I'd be happy."

This pioneer of independent film-making is really only interested in the work: the work of making movies, and making movies his way.

In order to see his vision realised (he insists on control over final casting and the final cut), he often personally finances his films by writing or reworking screenplays for other directors, and over the years he has worked with the likes of Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, James Cameron and John Frankenheimer.

But the big-budget movies of these directors are not for him. Sayles keeps it small, and tells stories about personal and political relationships.

His latest film, Limbo, is set in Alaska and tells of a group of people who take a regular trip up a river and get stranded - after some foul human play.

"As an audience, you're not warned that this will happen. What seems like a community movie all of a sudden takes this sharp turn," Sayles says.

"It's very much like in real life: you're on your way to work and you're thinking about your family and where you're going to have lunch, and then you run into a truck. Your life will possibly never be the same again. There is no warning."

Limbo is a kind of frontier film not unlike Sayles' Lone Star or his Spanish-language movie Men With Guns, where the frontier separating man from the wilderness is easily broken.

"I travelled to Alaska about 11 years ago and I was struck by how there were less than a million people in the state, and yet it's the largest state in the United States," Sayles says.

"I became intrigued by how many people had gone there to be something, or do something, that they never would have been or done in the other 49 states.

"There were philosophy professors who were commercial fishermen, stockbrokers who were bush pilots [Kris Kristofferson plays one in Limbo], people who had literally hitchhiked to the state and ended very high up in the state government within five years.

"There is that feeling of a frontier about it; the people are a little younger, they're very energetic. It's a very hard place to live, and the other thing that struck me was just how close nature is to civilisation.

"If you walk 10 minutes from downtown of Alaska's capital, you can find wild bears, you can fall into a glacier and disappear, you can turn over in a boat and freeze to death and nobody will ever find you."

Two of Limbo's characters in particular were inspired by people Sayles met in Alaska.

Alaskan-born Joe Gastineau (played by David Strathairn), scarred by major setbacks in life, "has been treading water for 25 years." Then he meets a failed singer from the mainland, Donna De Angelo (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, with a remarkable singing voice), who always tries to start afresh, often to the pain of her daughter (Vanessa Martinez).

"The story is about people's reactions when you risk something and you fail. For me, the two principal characters are those two opposite reactions to having failed: one reclusive, one ready to try again.

"The United States is a success-driven country, so if you fail at something, you're reminded of it constantly by advertising and the media - that you should have this car or this job.

"How do people deal with that? And from that point of view I made the unusual choice of not allowing the audience to watch this movie from too much of a distance. I ask them to take a risk; I take them on the same trip with the characters."

Sayles takes risks, too - in the movies he makes. So it was something of a relief to gain studio financing for Limbo, only his second studio film after 1983's Baby It's You (by all accounts a painful experience).

The $US9 million ($17 million) supplied for Limbo was no great shakes in Hollywood but it marked the biggest budget ever for Sayles and his producing partner, Maggie Renzi - also his partner in life.

The pair met at university at the height of the hippie culture and their first success, The Return of The Secaucus Seven in 1980 was an ad-hoc venture about a 60s reunion, with all their friends participating.

It was the first film for David Strathairn, now a veteran of seven Sayles productions, which include Matewan and Lone Star. He is also their neighbour in upstate New York.

Loyalty is a big thing in Sayles' world and Limbo even features Rita Taggart, the wife of the film's cinematographer Haskell Wexler, as a lesbian fisherwoman.

While lesbian subject matter in cinema is now a matter of course, when Sayles made 1983's Lianna, the story of a woman who leaves her husband for a woman, the film was not so well received, or distributed.

Brother From Another Planet in 1984, which dealt with racism, was more of a success, while 1988's Eight Men Out, starring Charlie Sheen and John Cusack as baseball stars who threw the 1919 World Series, was probably as close to a blockbuster as Sayles will ever get - even if his recent films, Lone Star and now Limbo, have been deemed his most commercial.

Who: John Sayles

What: Limbo

Where: Selected cinemas

When: Now