Grass roots agenda

Indie director John Sayles tells ALISTAIR HARKNESS what drew him to tell the story of the birth of rock 'n' roll

FOR SOMEONE WHO IS OFTEN described as a cinematic hitchhiker, John Sayles is getting a little bit tired of having to do so much travelling of late. This has nothing to do with the actual film-making process, you understand. How could it? Since 1980, he's written and directed 16 movies, many of which (Matewan, Lone Star, Passion Fish, Limbo, Sunshine State…) have seen him hop from region to region to tell multi-layered, character-driven stories that have given audiences a rich understanding of the diverse nature of American life.

No, it's to do with the fact that after nearly 30 years of acclaimed and sometimes financially successful films, this two-time Oscar nominee, the film-maker frequently credited alongside John Cassavetes as the godfather of independent cinema and one of Hollywood's most sought-after script doctors, still has to hit the promotional trail as if he were just starting out.

Take his new film, Honeydripper, which tells the story of the birth of rock 'n' roll in the Deep South in 1950. For the last few months he has tirelessly toured jazz and blues festivals across America with a mini all-star band, conducted countless interviews and has been on a gruelling tour of the film festival circuit in an effort to build awareness. When we meet in Glasgow on a crisp February morning, Sayles has just spent the weekend as the star attraction at the fourth Glasgow Film Festival, introducing Honeydripper screenings and chatting about his career to a capacity GFT crowd. All very nice, but to be honest, he'd much rather be at home so that he could concentrate on writing or making another movie.

"Unfortunately it's necessary to get out there," he says, sighing. Given his hectic schedule, he looks remarkably robust. "We just don't have any money. Our movies are not really distributed by large companies, if at all; we're basically distributing this one ourselves in the US. When you don't have $15-20 million to plough into advertising, you have to do a lot of legwork, so we're doing it the labour-intensive way."

Sitting in the wine annex of a Glasgow restaurant (the bar area is too noisy, so we've had to relocate), Sayles, at 57, certainly doesn't look afraid of hard work. Wearing khaki slacks and an open-necked denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his imposing physicality and sharp intellect give him the air of a college professor crossed with a retired sports star.

He was brought up in the dying factory town of Schenectady, New York, and has long been part of that great American tradition of rugged, blue-collar, socially concerned artists: the film-making equivalent of Jack London or Bruce Springsteen (as it happens, he directed Springsteen's Born in the USA video).

His approach to storytelling evolved along similar lines. As a kid he hitchhiked across the country several times, which opened his eyes to the fact that there were regions in the US and that people "actually saw the world differently depending on where they grew up. When I'm setting out to make a movie, I'm always trying to think about what place is going to bring what I have to say into the most relief."

That was certainly the case with Honeydripper.

"The minute you start talking about American music, most of what you're talking about comes from the Deep South," he elaborates. "I mean, you could draw a triangle, starting with Memphis at the top, down to New Orleans and then across the Mississippi Delta, and that's where probably 80 per cent of American music originated."

In the film he uses the small town of Harmony, Alabama, to explore the origins and effect of rock 'n' roll. Danny Glover plays Tyrone Purvis, proprietor of the nearly defunct Honeydripper Lounge, who attempts to save his ailing business by hiring a young drifter by the name of Sonny (Gary Clark Jr) to impersonate famous bluesman Guitar Sam. Sonny, however, doesn't play a traditional instrument, but some roughshod piece of homemade kit that he calls an electric guitar...

Eschewing the big flashpoint moments of music biopics, as well as the heavy-handed sermonising that tends to infuse films about race, Sayles shows how artistic and social movements evolve naturally over time out of everyday communities and their everyday struggles. "I guess some of what I was trying to get at was that, just as there was a civil rights movement before there was a Civil Rights movement, there was rock 'n' roll before it was called rock 'n' roll. The people who are just getting on and doing it aren't the ones who end up labelling it."

Naturally, the film also shows how these two movements were intertwined. "Yeah, that's the water they're swimming in," Sayles agrees. "It's segregated in the South in 1950 and I don't think you can have the music without the world."

To capture that world, Sayles did a lot of research, and took his relatively meagre $5 million budget – most of which was his own money – and stretched it to make a period film that looks better than many a studio movie costing five or ten times as much. Sayles puts such efficiency down to the crucial training he got as a writer cranking out creature-feature scripts for B-movie king Roger Corman.

"Generally what would happen with Corman was that they'd sign off on my script, choose a director and he would call me up and say, 'Help! I only have $800,000 to make this movie and you've written a 130-page epic with 73 speaking parts. Either I start tearing pages out at random or you can help me make it more doable.' So that's where I learned a lot about writing things that were doable. It's about figuring out what's capital intensive and labour intensive: what you can do out of cleverness and hard work, and what's going to cost money no matter what you do. In my early movies I had to sit down and say, 'OK, this is what I've got. What can I write that we can do well for that money?' And we're getting to that point again now, because we've had to finance our last two movies ourselves."

That may be a dispiriting sign of the film industry's lack of commitment to good storytelling, but it's heartening that Sayles is still so committed to making good pictures. It certainly cements his reputation as one of the most independent of American film-makers.

Of course, the drawback is that he can't dream big when it comes to his own films – but at least he has an outlet for his imagination as a Hollywood writer-for-hire. His unproduced script for Jurassic Park IV has passed into blogger legend thanks to leaked reports that it features a race of genetically modified, machine gun-toting tyrannosaurs. He also once wrote a movie for another Corman alumnus, James Cameron. "That was great," Sayles recalls. "I was like, wow, I can write stuff that hasn't even been invented yet and if Cameron likes it, he'll invent the technology. It was a pretty good science-fiction movie called Brother Termite, about how bulb-headed aliens have secretly been running the country for 50 years."

More recently he co-wrote current fantasy hit The Spiderwick Chronicles. He's worked on plenty of other big studio movies too, but as often happens, Sayles's work ends up being changed to such a degree that he doesn't always take credit.

"What happens is, I read the final script over and say: first of all, do I want my name on this? Second of all, do I deserve to be on this?" he explains. "On Spiderwick I thought, 'Yeah, there's enough of what I did left for me to be credited.' But sometimes I've read scripts and within ten pages I know there's nothing left. I did a couple of drafts of The Mummy when Joe Dante was going to direct it. There were 15 writers on The Mummy, including George Romero twice, and I read it and thought they did a good job, but the only thing left from my version was the sand and mummies."

Given that credited screenwriters get residual fees, that's a typically principled approach, especially when you consider that Sayles turned down a credit on a script he wrote for Steven Spielberg. The film? E.T.

Any regrets? He laughs. "No, no, not at all. I read that and was like, 'Boy, this is really well written.' Besides, any similarity to my work was because I got all the research from Steven Spielberg. It was research he'd done for Close Encounters, so it wasn't like it was something I'd invented."

He pauses. "Of course, it would have been nice if they'd sent me some money, but, then, a lot of people could send me money."

• Honeydripper is released on 9 May.