Beverly Gage There is a perception among labor historians that labor issues and particularly labor history don't often make it into mainstream culture. Your work is certainly an exception to that, but as someone inside the film industry would you say that that's an accurate perception? What's your sense of why that might be?

John Sayles I think it's very accurate. I think some of it is that labor has always been associated with class in America, and Americans are very uneasy with class. The British, they deal with it and they write about it and they're obsessed with it. The first thing they say to you, even if they've gone to Oxford is, “I'm working-class.” Nobody in America says that in the first paragraph when you meet them.

So I think it's tied to that very strongly. I also think that if you look at this country, there has always been a real fear of worker takeover. In Europe they have national strikes. In America I think it's just part of the culture that there's a worry about that. I think in the country in general, they've been trained into an unease with labor having power.

BG So if we're talking about film and television in particular, your sense is that it really is an audience issue—that there just isn't as much of an audience for straightforward labor history, and that it's less an issue of who's making the films, who's making the television shows, and structural constraints within these industries themselves?

JS I think it's a combination of things. Some of it is that the audience just doesn't have a thirst for it the way that they might in another country—to say, “My story must be told.” One thing that Barbara Ehrenreich talks about [in her 1990 book, Fear of Falling] is how few people will even describe themselves as working-class—that people who in other countries would be described as working-class say, “Oh, I'm middle class.” There's this idea in America that you've made it when you're middle class.

On the other hand, American society has been more mobile in two ways: in that it is more possible than in many cultures to move up economically and in the class you call yourself, but also people move from place to place more. You don't have a static condition where people live on the same land for a hundred years and they've always answered to the same owners or the same guy who starts a factory or whatever.

So I just don't think there's the cultural basis to have the huge hunger for identifying yourself as a worker and [saying] “this is my history.” On the other hand, Hollywood is happy to use something if it's going to make money. They love underdog situations, so the movies that you tend to get are usually very, very polarized underdog situations.

BG That's one of the strange things about the whole situation. In some ways labor struggles are ready-made for the Hollywood treatment. You see films like Norma Rae, or others in which you have your heroic, underdog union organizer, and there's a very clear narrative and there's a clear good guy and a bad guy and a winner at the end. So it's somewhat surprising that you don't see more of these movies. I think one of the things that's so terrific about your films, and Matewan in particular, is that you're telling a much more subtle story and a much more morally complex story. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what drew you to the Matewan story and what it was you were trying to convey in the film.

JS You know I grew up in Schenectady, New York, which is a big factory town. It's where General Electric was based for years and years and years, and every time the IUE (which was the electric workers' union there) would threaten a strike, the GE—it was called “the GE” —would basically say, “OK, that's it, we have [had] it with you people, we're gonna move to the South. This town's gonna be a ghost town.” Now, they never did that. What they did instead was building-by-building close it down and move not so much to the South but to foreign countries. So now the city is a shell of its former self. There's one high school instead of two, they're really on the ropes like some of the other manufacturing towns around them.

So I grew up with labor politics all around me—it was something I was just aware of. My father was a teacher, and he was very young when he got named the spokesman for the teachers' union, the local teachers' union. I think he was a little too good at it, so they made him a vice-principal the next year.

BG (laughing) Get him out of the union!

JS Exactly. And his problem, he went pretty far in administration, but he could never go all the way because whenever he would face the school board he would say, “The teachers do deserve a raise. They should be getting paid more.” This didn't go down well with all the tax-cutters on the school board.

So it was something I was around. I started hitchhiking when I was in college. I had never been west of Buffalo, New York, and so I figured to see the world I would stick my thumb out. I remember in the late sixties going through West Virginia and Kentucky and getting a lot of rides from coal miners. They were right in the middle of this very contentious election process between Tony Boyle, who was the incumbent, and Jock Yablonski, who was the reform candidate. They would kind of shake their head and say, “Well, buddy, it's getting pretty bad here, but, you know, if we're not careful it's gonna end up with another Matewan massacre.”

I had never heard of this thing, and it just sounded interesting to me, like, “Wait a minute, how come I've never heard of this?” I'd heard of Custer's Last Stand and the Alamo. How come I'd never heard of the Matewan massacre? I started looking into it. Well, of course, that particular election ended very dramatically with Tony Boyle having Jock Yablonski and his wife and daughter murdered, which kind of threw the UMW [United Mine Workers of America] into a tailspin for a while. But I started looking into that history and it was so dramatic. It was still pretty complex, but not so complex that you couldn't find a good, easy movie story in it. It still had elements of the western. When people later asked me, “So how come you made the Baldwin-Felts agents so bad?” I had to say, well, I left out the part where they put the kerosene in the milk that the Red Cross was sending to the starving children in the strikers' camp!

The poster for Matewan.

BG If you'd been true to history, they would have been much worse?

JS Yeah, yeah. You wouldn't have believed it. So it had that kind of thing, and it literally ended with a showdown on Main Street at high noon. It had a movie-genre form to it, and I felt like, “Well here's a way to talk about labor in a movie form that people are familiar with.” My main twist on it was, usually when the kind of bedrock guy comes into town and says he doesn't fight, when it finally comes down to the showdown he says, “A man's got to do what a man's got to do,” and he takes his guns off the wall, and it turns out he used to be a gunfighter. [In Matewan] our guy's not only a socialist, he really is a pacifist.

Now, he does get killed, which is the other thing. You have to examine pacifism, not just war, and say, “When does pacifism work and when does it not work?” It just seemed like a good incident to hang a lot of stuff I'd been thinking about on.

BG One of the things that was interesting to me both about Matewan and then about Eight Men Out was that you picked this very particular moment of 1919–1920, which is not actually the moment that most people think, “Well, you're going to make a labor movie”—I see Eight Men Out as a labor movie—

JS Oh yeah.

BG —but if you're going to make a labor movie, you're going to do it about the thirties, and not about this earlier moment. You found these dramatic labor stories in this earlier moment. It's the period I happen to study, so I think it's terrific, but are there things that you saw in that earlier moment before there were labor rights in this country that made the period particularly appealing from a narrative perspective?

JS It was very raw, and some of what I wanted to talk about was about why we have unions at all. The big-budget version of Matewan includes the Battle of Blair Mountain, which is after Sid Hatfield—who is the character that David Strathairn plays—and his deputy were murdered by the Baldwin-Felts Agency with their wives right next to them, just riddled with bullets.

As a protest, miners from all over Kentucky and West Virginia started marching on this town of Welch wearing red handkerchiefs. First the National Guard was called out to stop them, then federal troops were called out to stop them, and Billy Mitchell who later became the father of the US Air Force came to the governor and said, “I have this great idea! You know those airplanes? We could throw bombs from them!” They ended up with an armed camp, and barricades, and a lot of guys who were World War I veterans shooting, first at the gun thugs that the mine owners employed. Then when the federal troops came in, they said, “We're patriots, we're not going to fire on the US flag,” and they handed their guns in and had their union basically kicked out of West Virginia for almost another twelve or thirteen years, and most of their leaders jailed.

So for me there was something very raw about it, and it was coming right at—if you remember Ronald Reagan's, almost his first act, and it was very symbolic coming into office—was to bust the air traffic controller's union.

I just felt like, “Well, wait a minute! Public opinion was not necessarily with these guys, you know, so what's the deal here?”

BG So your impulse was, in fact, tied to the politics of the eighties as well as to an attraction to …

JS … of let's make this question—if we're going to ask, “Are labor unions needed?” let's ask the question, “Why were they needed in the first place?”

I did labor jobs, and I did some union jobs and some non-union jobs. I've never yet met a company that did anything that wasn't for its own profit, and that did anything for the workers that it was not forced to do. Once in a blue moon it's good for both, and so they do it. Generally, it's just, you know, “Let's look at the bottom line here, and if we've got to lay some people off, we lay ’em off, or if we've got to speed ‘em up, we speed ‘em up.”

I worked as a meat packer, and these old Italian guys—you know, almost everyone else in the factory was Italian (this is in East Cambridge [Massachusetts])—and one day, the guys down on the floor, they just said, “Okay, call the shop steward.” The guy was—the local was terrible but the international was actually pretty good—he mostly was a bookie. He ran bets around the factory. But they said, “It's going too fast, get the stopwatch out.” And sure enough, the line was going faster. They had been incrementally ramping it up, so they [the workers] were doing stuff in fifty-five seconds that they were supposed to do in a minute, and these old Italian guys just felt, “It's going too fast.” And so he [the stop steward] rolled his eyes and he said, “You guys are bustin’ my balls!” But he went up and they slowed it down.

And that's a lot of what the movie is about: “Okay, let's go back to the beginning and ask, ‘Why is there a union at all? Why do we need unions?’ ”

BG So, talking about Matewan again, what was the response from the audience in the eighties when you made this movie—a movie about something that's sixty years old at that point. Did people make those connections?

JS Well, the audience that we got did, but our movies don't get seen very widely. You know, that only cost like three and a half million dollars and I don't know that it's ever made its money back. So it didn't get seen by many people. It got nice reviews; people who saw it liked it. Some labor unions showed it, including the UMW, at conventions and things like that, or for training organizers. It's been shown in labor history courses and all that kind of thing, but as far as being a mass market movie that got into the consciousness of American people, I don't think I've ever made one of those. Even Eight Men Out and Lone Star, which are our biggest movies, are tiny compared to something like Norma Rae or Erin Brockovich, or those other kind of small-person-against-the-machine movies.

BG Now just looking at what you've done over the years, my own sense is that you did a lot more “here's-the-labor-battle, this-is-about-a-union-struggle” work in your early years. And it seems to me that while working-class people are still very much at the center of your stories, that you've moved out from that and aren't so much making films about unions, about particular labor struggles. Is that a fair characterization?

JS You know, in terms of movies, it probably is, but not for any conscious reason. The latest movie—Honeydripper—-that goes to 1950 and the Deep South. Most of the pickers are either basically indentured servants who are working for scrip, or they've got a line of credit with the company store that they never quite get any profit from, or else they're day laborers who work by the pound, especially during the harvest. So I'm interested in the labor situation of the time.

I'd say it shows up in my fiction more often. In my last short story collection [Dillinger in Hollywood] a couple of the stories are very specifically about labor. It's like in Studs Terkel's book, Working, you know, someone says, “The only thing you do more than eight hours a day is sleep.” You don't make love for eight hours a day, unless you're a prostitute, I guess …

BG (laughing) … depends on your job, right?

JS … but basically, how come that's so small in our celebrated storytelling? So I'm always interested in how that affects a person. The novel I'm working on right now is set during the Philippine-American war, and whenever I get into a working situation, one of the things I do is really include it in the writing: How did people make a living as a teamster? What did they have to know about horses? If you're a soldier, how do you make a living being a soldier? All those things are so much to me a part of who the person is.

So what you see in American movies because of the drama is that the people who get presented the most are doctors, nurses, policemen, teachers, and it's pretty damn rare that you see their union involved in it.

One of the first movies I thought would be cool to make—and I've been disabused of that because of how expensive it would be to make—is about the [1919] Boston Police strike. Fascinating thing! They basically got rid of an entire police force, and the first people who scabbed were Harvard students. The Harvard boys just said, “Those awful, filthy, loutish, bog-trotting Irish are going to let this city go to the dogs! So we're going to go out there and volunteer and put bands on our arms and direct traffic and apprehend the wrongdoers and the evildoers, and the hell with them!”

BG That sounds great. You should find ten million dollars somewhere and make that movie.

JS If you know anyone who's got ten million …

BG I'll get on it.

JS But, you know, another problem with any period movie is that if you're going to show work—if it's factory work, you have to recreate that factory, and the technology doesn't exist anymore. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were sponsoring this thing based on Howard Zinn's books and so HBO had me write [a script] based on one of his stories. I wrote one about the early clothing factory workers in New England, up in Lawrence and Lowell. But you've got to recreate the factory and that's enormously expensive.

BG When historians watch movies depicting historical events, they like to spend a lot of time picking them apart. Not only “Did you get the factory right?” but “Is it the right context?”

JS Yeah, and “There's a nail in that board and they didn't have nails in 1752, you know, so …”

BG Exactly.

JS Usually the thing is being made because somebody thinks they can make money on it. My favorite example is always The Patriot, the Mel Gibson movie. Our friend Chris Cooper was in that, and he was originally really playing Light-Horse Harry Lee, and it was originally really about Francis Marion the Swamp Fox and it was pretty historical. After twenty, twenty-five drafts, nobody has the name of a real character and Mel Gibson is a cotton farmer in South Carolina who seems to have these volunteer black people who are, I don't know, part of the slow food movement, just kind of happily waiting for him to come back from the wars.

Basically what happened is they just said, “This is gonna get in the way of the story. This is gonna make the character seem less likeable. People don't care about that stuff. Let's just make it more romantic and keep the action scenes exciting.” And as a financial entity, maybe they were right. I thought it was a piece of shit, but hey, I'm kind of in the minority.

BG I'm wondering, since historians like to say, “We're the authorities, we can pick apart what's in the film, what's on television”—would you have any advice going the other way? Do you read history? What kind of history do you like to read? Do you think there are things that historians can and should take from film and television?

JS I actually do, because of the things I write. I am writing this novel—I've probably read a hundred books already. The last book I read was called The Color of Horses. You have to know what breeds are what colors. One of my characters makes his living with horses, and it's like today if you were a mechanic, you would say, “They don't make a Lexus in purple.” He would say, “If it's a ‘this,’ it's a chestnut—that's the only color they come in.”

Anyway, I wish more historians were better writers. Sometimes they just surrender themselves to that academic formula, and it's like an excuse for bad writing, and it's just so repetitive. It's really just like the world's worst trial lawyer who can't do an argument without summing it up halfway through it. But, what I also find is that when I do something, I always realize I can't rely on any one history. Stuff gets anecdotal, or one source's opinion gets recreated and recreated and recreated, because over the years they read each other's books.

So that's the other thing, which is that I really admire good historians, just because of the amount of legwork that they have to do. You know, that they don't accept conclusions. They really have to go and find all the raw data and then make their own conclusions. Like a good scientist, you have to eliminate all the variables.

BG Do you think there's any chance that the [2007–2008 film and television] writer's strike will lead to a new, subversive, labor consciousness within Hollywood that we're going to see reflected in …

JS (laughing) Um, no. I think it was very interesting because it was a very modern strike, in a way. You know, we're a guild, we're not a union in some ways, and we're kind of a pure guild because there are not assistant writers, and second assistant writers. The director's guild, which I'm also in, has this kind of schizophrenic thing; it's got feature directors and TV directors, and their needs and wants and issues are very different. Plus it's got production managers, first ADs [assistant directors], second ADs, and script supervisors, and some other people. In TV, which is the bulk of the membership, those people tend to be company men. They stay with a show. They don't get residuals. They're on every show, whereas the directors in TV come and go. They might do three episodes of a series a year, and another director does another three, so they might have a stable of six or seven directors, but the same first AD is always working there. So in order to increase their membership, they've basically watered down their passion for negotiating and being tough.

John Sayles in 2004, while on tour to promote his film Silver City. Photo by Dan Perkins.

Whereas the writer's guild is just writers. You generally work alone, or just in a team and kind of share credit and share the money. So they're still kind of like old-fashioned guild tradesmen who are proud of their skill, but don't work together. One of the things I like about a strike is, I go on the picket line and I meet all these people I never see, some whom I know and some whom I've never met before. There's this weird little social occasion that happens at our meetings and our strikes. But let's just say we're very, very spread from each other.

I'd say we won this strike in some ways, but it may have been winning a battle during a losing war, as TV especially tries to have less and less content that is written, and more and more reality shows that they claim are not written, even though they absolutely are. There probably is less money in the pot for the writers as a whole after this strike than there was at the beginning. And also it was a very modern strike in that the guys who were on the negotiating committee came back and said, “There are no studio executives in the room with us. There are just corporate lawyers from the corporations who own the studios.” So we're dealing with corporate lawyers working for Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone, not with the head of FOX.

Eventually they did settle with us and we got pretty much every economic thing we asked for. So it's a weird thing, it's not a simple, old-fashioned, “Here's the owners up in the big house, here's the workers down in the factory in the gritty factory town.” It's a very, very complex thing. And the internet is part of it, and it's a tough thing to make a simple drama about a complex situation, and making simple dramas is what I do for a living. When I make my own movies I actually like to keep some of the complexity in there.

BG So besides the Boston police strike, do you have stories that sit on the shelf that you would like to depict on film, any labor history moments?

JS I wrote a little bit about the Ludlow massacre, but after I did Matewan, I just felt like it was a little too similar.

BG Too many massacres?

JS Yeah, and even some of the characters are the same. But that one that I wrote about the mill girls would make a nice short movie. One of the reasons I made Casa de los Babys is there are very few movies about groups of women. Groups of men [frequently show up on screen]: sports teams, army movies, fraternity movies, whatever. But there's a different dynamic in a group of women than there is in a group of men. I just think that [the Lawrence story] would be a fascinating movie partly because it wasn't even a union yet, but it was a movement just of women, and women of really various backgrounds, from farm girls who were barely literate to people who were suffragettes way before that term was even invented.

So that's one that I think would make a good movie, and there are others that have labor components to them, just because you can't tell a story without that. You know, when people say, “Your movies are so political,” I really just say, “Look, they're not necessarily even that political. What they are is politically conscious as opposed to being politically unconscious.” And “politically unconscious” means that you just accept the status quo and you don't ask questions.

And so I always say, “All our movies do is, if we're going to go from here to here, we're going to walk through the neighborhood.” Generally, what Hollywood wants to do is that if that neighborhood gets in the way of the genre, or they think that some people are going to be made nervous by going through that neighborhood and dealing with those issues, whether it's race, or class, or sex, or whatever—they say, “Walk around the neighborhood.” And so you get movies like The Patriot where it's kind of about the American Revolution, but it's really more about the costumes and Mel Gibson getting bloody again. It's just a backdrop, kind of deracinated, with everything drained out of it that actually means anything. But the people look great in the costumes.