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John Sayles

If the filmmaking medium is an inherently powerful one for storytelling, John Sayles is an auteur who still understands its potential.

The director and two-time Oscar-nominated screenwriter — for Passion Fish in 1992 and Lone Star in 1996 — once again places his primary focus specifically on narrative, character, time and place in his latest film, Amigo, set during the American-Philippine War. To see the movie is to feel taken aback, when what now dominates the multiplexes almost treats story as afterthought, at best.

Sayles, whose directorial debut was 1979’s Return of the Secaucus Seven, has been carving his own distinguished niche in American indie filmmaking since before its greatest heights in the mid-‘90s. Years after Hollywood forsook indie distribution, the director of Men With Guns (1997) and Sunshine State (2002) carries on as ever, albeit against greater difficulties in an ever more commercialized industry. Sayles took the time to give Uptown an assessment of his career at present.

Uptown: In his review of Men with Guns, the critic Roger Ebert wrote that you have demonstrated a filmmaker can be completely independent if he so chooses. Is it really just that simple, or is there more luck and/or circumstance involved?

Sayles: I've been lucky in that I have a bread job, screenwriting for Hollywood (2008’s The Spiderwick Chronicles), that has allowed me to self-finance films when nobody else will. I have films I've written I'll probably never be able to afford to make, but I've never had to apologize for one of my own pictures and say, "You should have seen the director's cut."

Over the years, has it become easier or more difficult to realize your projects?

Right now there is almost no independent movie "business" — very few distributors, those not putting up front money — so although many costs have gone down, it is harder for us to get our movies seen than ever. The last three (2003’s Casa de los babys, 2004’s Silver City, 2007’s Honeydripper) we've had to pay to have distributed.

As an independent, low-budget filmmaker, you continually make films with large casts, multiple points of view, deliberately paced two hour plus running times and a density and detail in story and setting. Why is this approach seemingly so important to you?

I tell stories I'm interested in, and these are often complex, requiring a real "community" rather than just the star and the girl and the bad guy. There are plenty of stories about real people being made (not many by the studios, but that's nothing new) they're just less publicized.

We've been making movies for 30 years and can get a lot out of a low budget and five weeks shooting, though my future in movies, if I have one, seems to be lower budgets and less time to shoot.

What was it about Amigo’s historical backdrop that compelled you to make a film about it? Was part of your interest that this chapter in American, dare I say, imperial history has been all but forgotten?

Absolutely — how and why does a war that killed nearly a million people disappear from the record, even in the country it occurred in?

The Phil-Am war was a huge turning point in the way Americans thought of themselves – from the champions of liberty and the underdog to proud imperialists.

What is your assessment of the future of (American) independent filmmaking? Recent developments indicate it just may have a safe and even nurturing, profitable home in video on demand.

I think the future may see most movies released in all formats at the same time, with the pay-per-view serving as word of mouth for selected theatrical screenings. Getting money back to the filmmakers to make more movies is the toughest part of this equation — it will change month by month so you can't plan too far ahead.

Amigo screens until Feb. 16 at Cinematheque.