John Sayles on 'Honeydripper'

The father of American independent film – the grandfather, he says – ‘Honeydripper’ director John Sayles has directed 16 films over nearly 30 years charting how America is, and how it came to be. His latest film, set in the Deep South at the birth of rock ’n’ roll, examines matters of class, race, age and place as struggling bar-owner Danny Glover attempts to stage an ‘electric’ blues concert

‘Honeydripper’ is not a film about race but race hangs ominously over it.
‘It’s not a film about a lynching, but you have to feel like that’s a possibility. For me the heaviest line in the movie is when the sheriff says to the young guy coming down the road: "Take your hat off." In Harmony, Alabama in 1950 that’s not because he’s the sheriff but because he’s a white man.’

Were you apprehensive writing a script for a mainly black cast?
‘We’ve made some before – “The Brother From Another Planet”. And I grew up in America around a lot of different people. I was saying in Dublin the other day that I would have a much harder time writing a movie set in Ireland than I do in the African-American community in the United States.’

Your films are often about people coming together.
‘That coming together happens for a moment when there is a common enemy that everybody dislikes. It happens during wars. In the United States we got a lot of emotional support right after 9/11 but then George Bush squandered it all in two weeks. I’m always interested in the things that we allow to separate us. Is it borders, class, is it race, is it sex, is it ethnicity, or an imaginary line that somebody drew that says this is Mexico, this is the United States? Is it the railroad tracks?’

We see a lot of railway tracks in ‘Honeydripper’.
‘I can remember going to the Deep South as a kid, and you could look across the tracks and see those buildings were much shabbier. And if you were black and you were on the white side of the street you had to have a reason to be there, and vice versa. We didn’t even know that Georgiana, where we shot the street with all the railroad tracks, was Hank Williams’ childhood home until we started shooting there. People started coming up to us and telling us Hank stories.’

Is it true that you had to hold filming a year to wait for the cotton?
‘Oh yes. We had Danny Glover attached and went out looking for money. And the cotton wasn’t in the ground so we had to wait for another cotton crop. Everybody in that county over 50, white or black, picked cotton when they were kids. They closed the schools, so even if you were middle-class you picked cotton to make some money. Nobody under 50 knew how. A lot of those black kids, they never been in a cotton field before. And there was a feeling, should I be here? Because there is a little shame associated with those days.’

Does it get easier to make films? You financed this one yourself.
‘No, it hasn’t gotten easier to raise the money. It’s gotten a lot harder to get the movies seen. There are fewer screens available to us. But it’s gotten a lot easier to get well-known actors. That is the one thing that gets easier, which is the biggest compliment we get, when these incredible actors say yes.’

Will you make another movie?
‘Like most independent filmmakers I never know that. I’m working on a novel. And we’ve been to about 30 cities with ‘Honeydripper’, so that’s
a lot of time on the airplane.’

You write on the plane?
‘I could write while we’re talking here. No offence! But I could write with the TV on or in a bus line.’

That’s very disciplined
‘I don’t think it’s discipline. It’s schizophrenia.’

‘Honeydripper’ opens on May 9.

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