The audience sometimes knows that two people, if they spoke the same language, would get along much better than they get along with some of the people who do speak their language.Īnother thing that fascinates me is that when people are in conflict, it’s not always just because they both want the same thing and can’t both have it. A bunch of my movies have been at least partially subtitled because people don’t speak the same language. I’m also interested in how human beings define each other, the things that we allow to separate us from each other, and the ways around those things. He can’t show his talents in public, but he gets relative safety from wherever he ran away from. He starts to pass as a human being but he has to give up certain things. “Brother From Another Planet” is about assimilation. What do you give up? Is it worth as much as what you get?Įven my non-historical movies deal with this. Whereas in most European countries at that time, or in Japan or in a lot of other countries, there wasn’t that mobility.įor the people who are coming in, with all the assimilation, they have to give something up to get something. If you didn’t like what was going on where you were, you could just move over the hill and suffer whatever you suffered to do that - but you could do it. In many other places in the country it might be totally different ethnic groups working it out or trying to work it out or not working it out.īecause of that special nature of this very, very big, relatively empty, box that we had when Europeans came here, it has a very, very different history than almost anywhere else. I started traveling around the country when I was in high school and college, hitchhiking around the country, just seeing that this really is a country where people have had to work it out. When I went to elementary school, it was just Catholic kids and Jewish kids and then when we went on, there were more Protestant kids of various sorts, even a couple of Mormon kids. It was mixed racially and in terms of class - we have class in America even though we don’t like to talk about it - and eventually in religion. Why?Īlthough I did grow up in upstate New York, I grew up in a fairly mixed society. Q: In your films and novels you use many different cultures and settings. Stories are a part of how we try to figure out the world and, finally, stories are also dreams of what could be. Stories are part of how people declare themselves to other people. Right from the get-go there was this idea that stories had power, and there was more than a surface meaning to them. Quotes from amigo by john sayle full#Before I’d been told what those things were, I knew what allegory was, and I knew what a simile was and what a metaphor was, because those stories are full of them and some of them are very well constructed: The loaves and the fishes or the wedding at Cana. How?Įvery week, the priest tells a story from the Gospel. Q: You have said that being raised Catholic influenced your storytelling. Sayles talked with Faith & Leadership while at Duke University to receive the Lifetime Environmental Achievement in the Fine Arts ( LEAF) Award from the Nicholas School of the Environment. Sayles has received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, as well as numerous film and writing awards, including a best screenplay Academy Award nomination for “Lone Star.” His films explore characters in many different settings and cultures: 1970s Harlem in “The Brother From Another Planet” a 1920 West Virginia coal mine strike in “Matewan” Irish myth in “The Secret of Roan Inish” and small-town Texas in “Lone Star.” It’s a historical epic set in the United States at the turn of the 20 th century that stretches from the Klondike Gold Rush to the Wilmington, N.C., race riot to the military intervention in the Philippines. His fourth novel, “A Moment in the Sun,” was published in 2011. The latest of his 17 movies is “Amigo,” a fictional story set in the Philippines during the Philippine-American war. Quotes from amigo by john sayle movie#Sayles first film was “Return of the Secaucus 7,” a 1980 movie he made using his friends and $30,000 he had saved from working for legendary horror director Roger Corman. Whether the medium is film, screenplays or novels, Sayles’ primary interest is in recounting the dilemmas people face and how they choose to act in response.
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