John Sayles

“They used to show Italian movies with subtitles where I grew up in Schenectady. We had a big Italian-American population, I think it was some of the reason they did that. My father had been in Italy in World War II, and so I had some kind of ideas about what it was like. I actually understood the language a tiny bit from hearing it around the neighborhoods. And this was a kind of mind-blowing movie when I first saw it. Anthony Quinn was a filmmaker, actor from much more mainstream movies than I had ever seen, so it was interesting to see him in this really kind of stark story, very human, that Fellini made. There were a whole bunch of directors who I started tracking down their stuff, Mario Monicelli being one of them, and Ermanno Olmi, and certainly De Sica, and Fellini's movies were ones that I started tracking down. For one thing, the people seemed actually from the neighborhood, familiar in some ways, but also it was this interesting thing of a society rebuilding itself after everything had been bombed and knocked down.”

“This is a Mario Monicelli movie called The Organizer with Marcello Mastroianni. It's one of his greatest performances. It's set in the industrial north of Italy when unions were a pretty new idea up there. A wonderful cast, there's a couple great French actors, there's some of Monicelli's usual guys. He was very good at what I eventually figured out was Italian regional humor. So there's usually some Roman who's full of himself dealing with some Neapolitan or some Sicilian, and making wisecracks based on how awful each other's region is.”

“This is a movie, His Gal Friday, Girl Friday, that I had not seen many of these except on TV, and finally they showed them enough, these kind of fast-talking comedies. This is based on a play that Ben Hecht was one of the writers for. I'm a screenwriter for hire, and Ben Hecht was an everything for hire. He had his name on a lot of things, he did a lot of work on most of them, sometimes his name just got on them. And this is one of those dialogue-driven movies where the dialogue is so good that you forget that the filmmaking's actually pretty good too. That the director really realized what his job was, was about pace and physically keeping the thing moving, as well as the lines just coming one on top of each other. Yeah, I'd say it's one of the tightest comedies I've ever seen, and it's one of the very few times where I feel like a play worked perfectly for a movie. And some of it is the chemistry of the leads, and some of it actually is the directing. This is Howard Hawks, and he, you know, he made a bunch of good movies. He was good. One of the things that he was the best at was he was one of the first directors, American directors, to really capture that people often talked at the same time. And we had great group scenes where people would talk over each other and keep the energy going up. And so that this very written dialogue doesn't feel quite as written, there's a kind of spontaneity to it.”

“This is State of Siege. You know, I saw this, I had seen Z first, and the, you know, this is a movie in a very, very political time. You could actually, if you weren't an American, get away with making a very political movie. This was a filmmaker who had really a lot of political analysis about what was going on in the country, but managed to make these thrillers. And to a certain extent, you had to be careful where you shot these movies. You had to go to a place where, you know, it's not just are they going to stop us from shooting, are they going to threaten us, it's also what's going to happen to the people who collaborated and cooperated with us, that we are going to leave behind while we're shooting. And you have to think of that before you go. When we shot our movie Men with Guns, we didn't shoot in Guatemala because we felt like anybody who works with us, when we leave, is going to be on somebody's list. So we shot it in Mexico across the border.”