Spring Magazine spoke with legendary independent filmmaker and author John Sayles and producer Maggie Renzi on their recent visit to Toronto for Declarations of Independence: The Cinema of John Sayles, a retrospective of their films currently screening at TIFF Lightbox.
John Sayles is primarily known for his independent films, which vary widely in genre but always contain astute political observations about the world around him. For example, pairing sci-fi with themes of race and immigration in The Brother From Another Planet (1984) and romantic comedy with class and ethnicity in Baby It’s You (1983).
Twice-nominated for an Oscar, Sayles has directed historical adaptations like the classic labour film Matewan (1987) which dramatizes the events of the real life 1920 coal miner strike in Matewan, West Virginia and the subsequent Battle of Matewan. In the films Men With Guns (1997) and Amigo (2010) he takes on war and US imperialism in Latin America and the Philippines respectively. Silver City (2004) is a political satire of the Bush era that feels perhaps even more prescient to watch in Trump’s second presidency.
On top of writing and directing films, Sayles is also an accomplished author of several novels and short story collections. His most recent novel, Crucible (2026), is set in Detroit against the backdrop of Henry Ford’s automotive empire and again weaves together themes of labour history, class struggle and race relations.
Maggie Renzi, Sayles’ longtime partner in both work and life, has produced the majority of Sayles’ films, beginning in the early 80s with the film Lianna (1983). She has also acted in several of their collaborations. Together they make up a dynamic duo who are candid and uncompromising in their politics both on screen and in life. We spoke with them about filmmaking, their 1987 masterpiece Matewan and why we need young filmmakers to bring back the labour film.
The conversation below has been condensed and edited for clarity. Declarations of Independence: The Cinema of John Sayles runs June 11-18th at TIFF Lightbox in Toronto.
You have both worked on a lot of different types of films — period dramas, sci-fis, westerns, political satire. How do you manage to work across that many genres? And what is it, ultimately, that draws you to a specific project?
John Sayles: For me, it’s basically interest. Very often, the movies that I do and the books that I write are about things where I feel like I know enough to be really interested in how this works, but where I don’t know so much that I feel like, “Oh, I know all that and everybody knows all that.” So, I usually start with something I want to figure out, and the basic one is always, “Okay, if people act this way, what can possibly be going through their heads and why?”
Because, it’s not all just individuals making the right or wrong decision. It’s, “Where are they coming from? What’s their culture? How were they brought up? What are the pressures on them?” And I think in many of [my films]it’s about a lot of people. Are they going to be able to get together or not? And what are the things that they allow to keep them apart?
Maggie Renzi: For me, it’s mostly that we need to have enough money to do it so that I can do my job well. And, sometimes John wants to go ahead and make a movie when I don’t think we have enough money. He did that with Go For Sisters, which is a terrific movie and a really wonderful screenplay. But I wasn’t sorry that I didn’t do it, because the stories that I heard about it made me feel like, as the producer, I would have felt responsible for people’s hard days. They all got through it, and any one of them would work with John again, I think. But I don’t like to put myself in that position.
There are a lot of films that I would specifically like to ask you about if we had more time, but one that is a big favorite amongst the leftist film fans I know is Matewan. And I’m wondering what drew you to that story in particular?
JS: I hitchhiked a lot, back when there weren’t as many serial killers on the road, in the late 60s and early 70s. And, when I hitchhiked through West Virginia and Kentucky, I got a lot of rides from coal miners. And several of them were talking about, “Oh, you know, our union, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), is very contentious right now. We’re having this fight over who’s going to be the next president.” And it was a running between a guy named [Joseph] “Jock” Yablonski, who was the reform candidate, and this guy who was a bit of a thug called “Tough Tony” Boyle, which ended with Tough Tony Boyle having Jock Yablonski, his wife and daughter, murdered on Christmas Eve.
That had not happened yet. But it was like people were hitting each other, it was really, really, really violent disagreement within the union members. And several of them said, “We’re going to have us another Matewan Massacre.” And I’d never heard of this event. Labour history is not taught in American schools, really just not taught. In the 50s, if you used the word “class” to talk about American life, as a teacher in high school or college, you could get fired. You couldn’t say that word. Like we have no class in America. So I got fascinated with this event, and then I thought, Oh, that’s a really interesting time in union history. It was a time when American born people were starting to really feel like we’re going to have to have unions in these things because the treatment is so bad.
When I learned about the story, there was this interesting thing — it was not just the mountain people whose land the coal was on. Black miners who would come up from Alabama when their coal had tapped out were brought as strike breakers and they did not know it. They were in locked boxcars. And then there were immigrants from Eastern Europe and Italy, who were separated not just by language and culture, but literally by mine guards. There were guards between where they housed these people. And somehow they got together and said, we’re gonna all go on strike together. And that to me was really, really interesting.
Plus it had this kind of movie arc like a gunfight Western, which ended with a shootout on Main Street. So it’s got this kind of generic thing that will be a comfortable thing for American audiences who just never see labour films. That will at least keep them in it.
I wrote it at a time when Ronald Reagan had just gotten in, and the first thing he did was he busted the air traffic controllers union, for show. Most of what they were asking for, because they were fairly well paid, were things that made people safer in the sky. It was “We need more people. We’re fried. People are drinking to get to sleep and still hung over when they get to work. And we’re making mistakes because there’s not enough of us. And there’s too much pressure.” And he just said, “Well, the union thing is out of control. Who’s going on strike right now?” They said, “Well, the air traffic—” “Yeah, they got plenty of money.” And he just busted that union. Almost nobody who was in that union kept their job when the strike failed.
And then within a year, there were new people and almost everything the union had been asking for, they had gotten because it was safety stuff. I felt like people had forgotten why there were unions, why they were necessary. So it would be a good movie to make. And as I said, there were so few movies in America about labour struggles – partly because of the McCarthy era, but partly just because it’s rarely a clean story. The American labour unions in cities have been very mobbed up. It’s tough to find a simple, “these are the heroes and these are the bad guys” narrative for that.
As you were saying, Matewan was made in the 80s, about an event that took place in 1920. Since then, the labour movement has changed and labour in general has changed a lot. So what, if any, are the lessons or thoughts you want audiences who are seeing the film for the first time in 2026 to take away from it?
JS: Well, I think that movie and a lot of the other movies are about, when you say “We” how big of a “We” is it? And that’s complicated.
Our movie, City of Hope, [asks] basically to have a principle, you may have to sacrifice your family – are you willing to do that? And what kind of guy would let his idiot brother lose his job just because of some principle? “. Why am I hiring Puerto Ricans when there are so many Italian-Americans who finally are going to get a good job?”
Those are the complications when you ask people to work together — to have an ideal of how people should be treated. There are a lot of things in between that are not necessarily evil, but it’s stuff that people have to think about.
MR: I think, just back to the union question, it’s the next generation that you hear from at the very end of the movie. And I think the point is that the struggle continues. I think one reason that it’s not common to make [labour films] in America is because you don’t just win and that’s done. Instead, the struggle continues. And that’s the positive note. At the end [of Matewan], it’s the ghastly death of Joe Kenehan – who, in another story, would be the hero and probably get together with the coal miner’s widow – instead, what you see is the bloody massacre. And that the [coal miner’s] kid has stayed on the side of the union.
JS: And he says, that’s my religion now.
MR: Which I find moving every single time I see it.
Across your projects, you’re able to create stories and characters that are entertaining, but they still manage to be political without being too didactic or feeling too moralistic. How do you go about finding that balance? Is it something you’re thinking about as you’re writing it, or is it in the directing process?
JS: Well, some of it is my point of view, I personally am not very doctrinaire. Almost every system I’ve seen, whether it’s a left-wing system or a right-wing system, eventually people are going to learn how to game the system, humans being who they are. Things that may start out very good may end up being so anti-democratic, in the name of what was probably a good idea.
So some of it is saying, “Well, what’s the point of all this?” And what kind of behavior gets us closer to that point and what kind of behavior gets us far away from that point? And then what are the personal things that people have to go through that have to be overcome? They have to change their thinking or their acting.
And finally, conflict is drama. Often there is a character who may have two choices, and neither of them is good. In our movie Amigo, the main character is a guy who’s the mayor of this Philippine village during the Philippine-American War. But it could be about a guy who was a mayor of a French town during the Nazi occupation or a Vietnamese village during the Vietnam era. He’s stuck between his brother who is in the guerillas and the American soldiers who are in his town. How much can he cooperate without collaborating and how much he can resist without getting hanged? Those are really interesting situations.
And there’s some really interesting things that happen within unions. My last novel takes place in Detroit during 1927 up to 1942. And one of the things that happens is the UAW [United Auto Workers] union comes in and they finally organize Henry Ford’s factories. And he’s a guy who said: “I own this 100%. I’ll close it down.” And finally, actually, it was Ford’s wife who said, “Henry, I’m going to leave you if you do that because people are going to get killed.”
He said, “I have to let them go.” And they did. But within that, almost immediately, one of the locals was more radical than the UAW was. And they were saying, “Well, you’ve only gone half way. We’re going to go all the way.” What happens when what the workers really want is more than what the unions think they can comfortably achieve at that point, and you have that conflict within the union?
MR: And this is some of what keeps you [John] from being doctrinaire. This absolutely Libran thing — seeing both sides of everything, weighing this and weighing that. And you never tilt the scales heavily in another direction. You try to see it all.
I also think that you see people as workers. More than most storytellers. I think John’s very interested in work. And when people have jobs, they’re real jobs.
JS: Hitchcock liked to have people be architects because nobody knows what they really do. So they could take the two weeks off and have an adventure and nobody’s calling them and saying, “Hey, where are you?”
MR: Whereas work interests you. The process of work.
JS: There’s a great quote at the start of Studs Terkel’s book Working, and it’s somebody who says, “The only other thing you do for eight hours a day is sleep.” And so this is a third of your life for most people.
There’s been some debate in the film industry recently about the idea of keeping personal politics separate from filmmaking. So I’m wondering for both of you, do you see the incorporation of your politics in films as part of your role as a filmmaker? Does it feel like a moral obligation?
JS: It’s basically like saying, “Well let’s keep race out of it.” If it’s in life it should be in the movies.
MR: Oh, do we have to talk about gender? Which part of being a human being shall we leave out? One of the movie’s playing here is Silver City, which we made when [George W.] Bush was running again. And, you know, I guess we thought if we made a movie satirizing Bush that would help. And it didn’t. And, we got the worst reviews of our career for making up a movie that was a political satire.
Do both of you have any advice for young leftist or political filmmakers or producers trying to make independent films in the 2020s?
JS: One of the things about when we started out is that you were shooting on film. It wasn’t even that easy to rent equipment. The equipment is so much cheaper, so much more mobile. You’re not shooting film. So I tell people, “Look, it may never get distributed, but if you’ve got the time and you got some friends who want to work on it, make a movie. Or make a ten minute movie or 15 minute movie and learn the stuff that you’re going to learn.” But know what you’re interested in and think it through and make what you can.
We’re not having any luck raising money to make movie stuff. We can’t give anybody any advice about that [laughs].
MR: But what you can do is decide to stay ambitious, to stay focused on what your values are.The arena is not overcrowded with thoughtful films about workers, and it is overcrowded by personal stories or genre or whatever. Filmmakers are being encouraged to follow a formula, but then there you are in a pack. Whereas, if you can make a very good movie about workers, it will stand alone and it will get notice. The challenge is to make a very good movie.
What are your favourite political films?
JS: Z, which is a great movie by Costa-Gavras. The Organizer, which is a great Mario Monicelli movie starring Marcello Mastroianni. A bunch of Ken Loach movies — Riff Raff, Land and Freedom, My Name is Joe. There was one called, I, Daniel Blake. That was a more recent one. Norma Rae — Martin Ritt was an old Hollywood lefty. And then our friend Haskell Wexler, who shot four of our movies, was a socialist. He made a movie called Medium Cool, which is a really, really interesting movie about media and people’s lives and responsibility in media. But there just aren’t that many American ones.
MR: And these movies that you’re talking about apart from Ken Loach…
JS: They’re pretty old.
MR: …are old. It’s fascinating that we stay so far away from, well, talking about work at all when we spend so much time doing it, and when it’s such an important part of our identity.
Do you think fewer films about work is reflective of the decline of labour power and unionization in America ?
MR: I think it’s also because sincerity and the sincere display of your values has been considered cringe for too long. I mean, when you listen to AOC or you listen to Bernie,there’s no fear of cringe. And I think we just have to be courageous again and not worry about what everybody else is thinking and what everybody else is doing. Nothing ever changed that way.
JS: Yeah, well, I think it’s less likely that you’re going to have a traditional union movie because there aren’t that many for sure.
MR: I mean, you could have a fantastic union movie now set with the SEIU, for example. It wouldn’t be glamorous maybe, but most of the time it’s not. I think the stories are still there and they’re still dramatic and every generation needs more of them.
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