Casa de los Babys is John Sayles' 14th picture as director. That's pretty good for a director who always tackles difficult and controversial subject matters. Though Casa is more like his film Matewan because it tackles a subject which involves the politics of an entire country. The film follows six different American women played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, Daryl Hannah, Marcia Gay Harden, Susan Lynch, Mary Steenburgen and Lili Taylor as they await word on their foreign adoptions as they must wait in this unnamed Latin America country for at least two months. Some of them have been there even longer.
Sayles' always creates compelling and often difficult characters. This time Marcia Gay Harden is the standout as the Midwestern women Nan who will do anything including bribery and trampling over her countrywomen to get a baby.
Sayles is an enigma amongst his independent filmmaking peers. He doesn't make stylish films involving the death or dismemberment of its main characters ala Darren Aronofsky or Tarantinoesque crime dramas with dialogue that snaps easier than a gangster's neck. Instead he creates the personal dramas which many of us have experienced or know someone who has experienced them.
Sayles started out in the 1970's writing low budget horror films such as Piranha and Alligator for producer Roger Corman. He directed his first film Return of the Secaucus 7 in 1980 and since then he has created human dramas like Eight Men and City of Hope. In 1996 he was nominated for an Academy Award for screenwriting for his most celebrated film, Lone Star. Though that didn't seem to impact his career all that much. It is still difficult for him to raise the funds he needs. But writing and directing is what this man dies and he has no peer in that field.
Daniel Robert Epstein: I don't think I will see a scene this year that was as powerful as the scene between the Irish woman [Susan Lynch] and the maid [Vanessa Martinez] in the hotel room where they each tell each other their heartbreaking mother stories. How do you direct something like that?
John Sayles: What I usually do is give each character a biography of how their character got there and who their other relationships are with. That stuff is not always in the script. I also don't do rehearsals. Then you adjust things as you go. I told Susan that we wouldn't do many takes for this scene and that she would feel when gets character gets emotional and that's it. We only did three or four takes. A scene like that you don't want to intellectualize that much.
When you have five or six actors in some of the other scenes, what I do is set parameters then maybe you adjust one actor at a time and see how it affects the dynamic of the group. Marcia Gay Harden's character is the most complex so a lot of my direction with her is to see how many different ways she can play it. I want to see them all. She just came up with incredible stuff without changing any lines but she's such volatile character who can be hot or cold. What was nice for the other characters is that they never knew what she would be from line to line so they were always on their tiptoes with her.
DRE: Many of your movies, including this one straddle, that line between political and personal.
JS: For me those two things are unavoidable. What was interesting about this movie is that we had this behind the scenes crew there in Acapulco. I told them that people have seen the kind of thing they've done before, so why don't they ask our North American actors and go out in the community and find out what they think of foreign adoptions. North Americans saw it as a very simple thing, there are these kids who need adopting, someone has to do it and that's a great thing which I agree with. Then the Mexican people were saying that these are kids who might never know their culture. One very cynical man even said that with money you can buy anything. Then there were people who thought that the countries that do it were a little shameful because they can't take of their kids. I agree with that as well. It's a very complex situation.
Korean people don't come to the United States and adopt our children. People always smile at that and think that's a funny idea but it's not any funnier than Americans going to Korea and adopting their children. It's just this assumption that Americans have that they are doing everyone a big favor to become an American. It is a good deal to get adopted even by wacky parents if the alternative is ending up on the street. I think the political part is unavoidable, very often that's something the audience sees that the characters aren't aware of. The only characters who talk politically are the three old lefties who speculate on what happened to the left in their country.
DRE: Marcia Gay Harden's character confronts the lawyer who is trying to go through the proper channels to get her a baby to adopt. Why did you choose to have that scene?
JS:. There is this uncomfortable thing that finally no matter how well the agencies are run, some of them are run very well, you can't escape the fact that these people are getting to do this because they have the money. Very often the person who gave birth to the child gave the baby up because of economic reasons. Then when you add different cultures to it there is this whiff of cultural imperialism that can't be escaped. So you have this lawyer who is doing a pretty good job but he is not immune to pressure. He's got the government and these people on his back. He doesn't have a beautiful office and he's not getting rich from this. Very often they have to deal with corruption even if they are doing it legitimately. Some people think that if they bribe the cops they can bribe the adoption guys as well.
If you look at your tax form one of the things that it says is that bribes paid to businesses in foreign countries cannot be taken off your taxes. There is an assumption by the IRS that this is part of doing business in foreign countries. It is part of doing business in this country so there is an assumption that it is in any bureaucratic transaction.
DRE: Many of your films involve characters that were anarchic and liberal when they were younger and as they grow older they move to the right without realizing it. Then they try to go back to left. How does that fit in with this film?
JS: Once you have to be responsible for other people it changes your life. When you're just yourself and 20 your life can go in any direction and you can be freer with your decisions. You can make more radical decisions without them affecting anyone else. As you get older and if you choose to take on more responsibility of a family you can't just make the decision to move anytime anymore. You just can't live in the anarchic way. You can't just decide to be a Buddhist. Everything isn't possible anymore.
There are three movies that I made that are very specifically influenced by the age. Baby, It's You [released in 1983] is about kids in their teens who realize that they can't do anything in life. Something may turn out wrong and be permanent. Return of the Secaucus 7 is about people turning 30 and they're starting to realize that the world isn't going to turn out the way they wanted it too. They're going to have to live feeling like outsiders. Passion Fish [released in 1992] is about two women who are just forty. That is about some things that are just final; if you are paralyzed from the waist down you are going to stay that way. If you are a 40 year old actress and you are not Meryl Streep yet then you never will be.
DRE: As an artist you have to be anarchic. How do you fit into that?
JS: To a certain extent. I probably won't write a big epic movie for a while because the last two I wrote we haven't been able to finance. When I was 25 or 30 I might have said, hell I'll just write another and maybe 11 years from now I'll make it. I'm 53 now and 11 years from now I'll be 64. There's not that many 64 year old directors getting to make big movies. There's a little economic censorship. Until I get to make those other two epics I probably won't write another.
DRE: What were those epics?
JS: I wrote a movie called Sometime in the Sun which is set right after the Philippine insurrection around 1901. That was really America's first Vietnam. Teddy Roosevelt just felt that America should be an empire. McKinley was president at the time who just happens to be our president's favorite president. I also wrote another called Jamie MacGillivray which is about a Highlands Scottsman who's defeated at Culloden and sent as an indentured servant to the New World, instead of being hung by the British, and escapes and gets involved with the Indians in the French-Indian War. Robert Carlyle brought that to me.
I've also just written a movie called Silver City which I think is about to come together. It's about a disgraced journalist who investigates a contemporary murder mystery set in the middle of a gubernatorial campaign in Colorado.
DRE: Is your name going to be on The Alamo?
JS: I've asked for it not to be. It was a lot of fun to work on it when Ron Howard was doing it. But the guy who's directing it now, John Lee Hancock, did a rewrite on it. I saw the set and its going to look really cool.
DRE: Why do you not want your name on it?
JS: Well I read the script that they say is the final movie. You either feel like it reflects it your work or not and this didn't.
DRE: Is it getting harder to do political movies?
JS: Part of it is because of the economic climate. The mainstream movie has kind of painted themselves into a corner. They're into winning the weekend at the box office and that's it. I was hearing recently that 2 Fast 2 Furious got about $18 million in endorsements just for having products in the movie. You have to be on 3,000 screens to make that money worth it. That has become the movie business and anything else is an aberration. Little movies have to compete with those movies.
DRE: Are you still editing your movies traditionally?
JS: Casa de los Babys is the first movie I've edited digitally. Some of it was because I need glasses to read now and we shot this in Super 16 mm to make the budget lower. I couldn't read all those little numbers on the film so I went digital. It was fun. A friend of mine from NYU came over and gave me a tutorial.
DRE: You do a movie about every two years. You've written novels and written for countless other films. How do you find time to experience life to keep coming up with interesting stories?
JS: I don't live in Hollywood which helps quite a bit. Most of friends don't work in the move business so I hear their stories. I play basketball which is nice because it's like jazz music, if you can play you can stay. There's nobody older than me playing. A lot of the guys I play with are firemen and cops because they work night shifts. I still travel quite a bit and you have to pay attention.
DRE: Have you been writing for other directors lately?
JS: I have and I like doing it. But it seems like the more I get paid the less likely the movie is to get made because if you get paid more you are probably working for a studio. They develop a lot of things but make a few. When I was working for Roger Corman, if he paid you $10,000 to write a screenplay he was going to make that movie. The last fun project I did was Mimic which Guillermo del Toro directed. It was a big cockroach movie.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
Sayles' always creates compelling and often difficult characters. This time Marcia Gay Harden is the standout as the Midwestern women Nan who will do anything including bribery and trampling over her countrywomen to get a baby.
Sayles is an enigma amongst his independent filmmaking peers. He doesn't make stylish films involving the death or dismemberment of its main characters ala Darren Aronofsky or Tarantinoesque crime dramas with dialogue that snaps easier than a gangster's neck. Instead he creates the personal dramas which many of us have experienced or know someone who has experienced them.
Sayles started out in the 1970's writing low budget horror films such as Piranha and Alligator for producer Roger Corman. He directed his first film Return of the Secaucus 7 in 1980 and since then he has created human dramas like Eight Men and City of Hope. In 1996 he was nominated for an Academy Award for screenwriting for his most celebrated film, Lone Star. Though that didn't seem to impact his career all that much. It is still difficult for him to raise the funds he needs. But writing and directing is what this man dies and he has no peer in that field.
Daniel Robert Epstein: I don't think I will see a scene this year that was as powerful as the scene between the Irish woman [Susan Lynch] and the maid [Vanessa Martinez] in the hotel room where they each tell each other their heartbreaking mother stories. How do you direct something like that?
John Sayles: What I usually do is give each character a biography of how their character got there and who their other relationships are with. That stuff is not always in the script. I also don't do rehearsals. Then you adjust things as you go. I told Susan that we wouldn't do many takes for this scene and that she would feel when gets character gets emotional and that's it. We only did three or four takes. A scene like that you don't want to intellectualize that much.
When you have five or six actors in some of the other scenes, what I do is set parameters then maybe you adjust one actor at a time and see how it affects the dynamic of the group. Marcia Gay Harden's character is the most complex so a lot of my direction with her is to see how many different ways she can play it. I want to see them all. She just came up with incredible stuff without changing any lines but she's such volatile character who can be hot or cold. What was nice for the other characters is that they never knew what she would be from line to line so they were always on their tiptoes with her.
DRE: Many of your movies, including this one straddle, that line between political and personal.
JS: For me those two things are unavoidable. What was interesting about this movie is that we had this behind the scenes crew there in Acapulco. I told them that people have seen the kind of thing they've done before, so why don't they ask our North American actors and go out in the community and find out what they think of foreign adoptions. North Americans saw it as a very simple thing, there are these kids who need adopting, someone has to do it and that's a great thing which I agree with. Then the Mexican people were saying that these are kids who might never know their culture. One very cynical man even said that with money you can buy anything. Then there were people who thought that the countries that do it were a little shameful because they can't take of their kids. I agree with that as well. It's a very complex situation.
Korean people don't come to the United States and adopt our children. People always smile at that and think that's a funny idea but it's not any funnier than Americans going to Korea and adopting their children. It's just this assumption that Americans have that they are doing everyone a big favor to become an American. It is a good deal to get adopted even by wacky parents if the alternative is ending up on the street. I think the political part is unavoidable, very often that's something the audience sees that the characters aren't aware of. The only characters who talk politically are the three old lefties who speculate on what happened to the left in their country.
DRE: Marcia Gay Harden's character confronts the lawyer who is trying to go through the proper channels to get her a baby to adopt. Why did you choose to have that scene?
JS:. There is this uncomfortable thing that finally no matter how well the agencies are run, some of them are run very well, you can't escape the fact that these people are getting to do this because they have the money. Very often the person who gave birth to the child gave the baby up because of economic reasons. Then when you add different cultures to it there is this whiff of cultural imperialism that can't be escaped. So you have this lawyer who is doing a pretty good job but he is not immune to pressure. He's got the government and these people on his back. He doesn't have a beautiful office and he's not getting rich from this. Very often they have to deal with corruption even if they are doing it legitimately. Some people think that if they bribe the cops they can bribe the adoption guys as well.
If you look at your tax form one of the things that it says is that bribes paid to businesses in foreign countries cannot be taken off your taxes. There is an assumption by the IRS that this is part of doing business in foreign countries. It is part of doing business in this country so there is an assumption that it is in any bureaucratic transaction.
DRE: Many of your films involve characters that were anarchic and liberal when they were younger and as they grow older they move to the right without realizing it. Then they try to go back to left. How does that fit in with this film?
JS: Once you have to be responsible for other people it changes your life. When you're just yourself and 20 your life can go in any direction and you can be freer with your decisions. You can make more radical decisions without them affecting anyone else. As you get older and if you choose to take on more responsibility of a family you can't just make the decision to move anytime anymore. You just can't live in the anarchic way. You can't just decide to be a Buddhist. Everything isn't possible anymore.
There are three movies that I made that are very specifically influenced by the age. Baby, It's You [released in 1983] is about kids in their teens who realize that they can't do anything in life. Something may turn out wrong and be permanent. Return of the Secaucus 7 is about people turning 30 and they're starting to realize that the world isn't going to turn out the way they wanted it too. They're going to have to live feeling like outsiders. Passion Fish [released in 1992] is about two women who are just forty. That is about some things that are just final; if you are paralyzed from the waist down you are going to stay that way. If you are a 40 year old actress and you are not Meryl Streep yet then you never will be.
DRE: As an artist you have to be anarchic. How do you fit into that?
JS: To a certain extent. I probably won't write a big epic movie for a while because the last two I wrote we haven't been able to finance. When I was 25 or 30 I might have said, hell I'll just write another and maybe 11 years from now I'll make it. I'm 53 now and 11 years from now I'll be 64. There's not that many 64 year old directors getting to make big movies. There's a little economic censorship. Until I get to make those other two epics I probably won't write another.
DRE: What were those epics?
JS: I wrote a movie called Sometime in the Sun which is set right after the Philippine insurrection around 1901. That was really America's first Vietnam. Teddy Roosevelt just felt that America should be an empire. McKinley was president at the time who just happens to be our president's favorite president. I also wrote another called Jamie MacGillivray which is about a Highlands Scottsman who's defeated at Culloden and sent as an indentured servant to the New World, instead of being hung by the British, and escapes and gets involved with the Indians in the French-Indian War. Robert Carlyle brought that to me.
I've also just written a movie called Silver City which I think is about to come together. It's about a disgraced journalist who investigates a contemporary murder mystery set in the middle of a gubernatorial campaign in Colorado.
DRE: Is your name going to be on The Alamo?
JS: I've asked for it not to be. It was a lot of fun to work on it when Ron Howard was doing it. But the guy who's directing it now, John Lee Hancock, did a rewrite on it. I saw the set and its going to look really cool.
DRE: Why do you not want your name on it?
JS: Well I read the script that they say is the final movie. You either feel like it reflects it your work or not and this didn't.
DRE: Is it getting harder to do political movies?
JS: Part of it is because of the economic climate. The mainstream movie has kind of painted themselves into a corner. They're into winning the weekend at the box office and that's it. I was hearing recently that 2 Fast 2 Furious got about $18 million in endorsements just for having products in the movie. You have to be on 3,000 screens to make that money worth it. That has become the movie business and anything else is an aberration. Little movies have to compete with those movies.
DRE: Are you still editing your movies traditionally?
JS: Casa de los Babys is the first movie I've edited digitally. Some of it was because I need glasses to read now and we shot this in Super 16 mm to make the budget lower. I couldn't read all those little numbers on the film so I went digital. It was fun. A friend of mine from NYU came over and gave me a tutorial.
DRE: You do a movie about every two years. You've written novels and written for countless other films. How do you find time to experience life to keep coming up with interesting stories?
JS: I don't live in Hollywood which helps quite a bit. Most of friends don't work in the move business so I hear their stories. I play basketball which is nice because it's like jazz music, if you can play you can stay. There's nobody older than me playing. A lot of the guys I play with are firemen and cops because they work night shifts. I still travel quite a bit and you have to pay attention.
DRE: Have you been writing for other directors lately?
JS: I have and I like doing it. But it seems like the more I get paid the less likely the movie is to get made because if you get paid more you are probably working for a studio. They develop a lot of things but make a few. When I was working for Roger Corman, if he paid you $10,000 to write a screenplay he was going to make that movie. The last fun project I did was Mimic which Guillermo del Toro directed. It was a big cockroach movie.
by Daniel Robert Epstein