John Sayles Sets Out to Bring Down The Bush Presidency

[sintax]

Liberal America's last stand

With his latest film, John Sayles set out to bring down the Bush presidency. He tells Xan Brooks how

Thursday July 21, 2005
The Guardian

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, of an ageing, out-of-favour Orson Welles touring his one-man show around the half-empty theatres of middle America. Taking the podium, he would clear his throat and introduce himself as a film director, a writer and an actor, an amateur magician, designer and painter. "Isn't it strange," he would remark to the audience, "that there are so many of me and so few of you?"

Today there is another multi-hyphenate in danger of extinction. John Sayles is a writer and director, a sometime actor and occasional novelist. One might hail him as the champion of independent American cinema, except that the independent sector has largely been co-opted by Hollywood these days. Alternatively you could call him the leading liberal storyteller of his generation, were it not for the suspicion that he might also be the only one. His latest film aims to expose the corrupt machinations behind the Bush presidency and was released to coincide with the run-up to last year's election. But he admits that many distributors refused even to look at it. So Silver City wound up on the margins of mainstream debate; a lone cry in the wilderness.

Fortunately Sayles - a lupine 55-year-old - appears to relish his outsider status. "Oh, I've always felt like I was on the margins," he says cheerfully. "Once upon a time that's what independent used to mean."

Silver City charts the rise to power of Dickie Pilager, a wannabe governor of Colorado whom actor Chris Cooper plays with a deft mimicry of George W Bush. Pilager is a pampered, ill-informed dauphin, dominated by his senator dad (Michael Murphy) and bankrolled by a billionaire industrialist (Kris Kristofferson), who wants to roll back environmental controls and sees "privatisation" as the future of the west. Running parallel to his tale is the investigation by Danny O'Brien (Danny Huston), a disaffected ex-journalist. O'Brien uncovers a scandal involving illegal migrant workers and toxic pollutants that inevitably leads right back to Pilager.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1532956,00.html

[autorank]

1. I'm all for Sayles but this movie was a "stinker," could barely sit throug

it...and I was READY to like it. Someone has to do an Orson Welles, make a real masterpiece and blow everybody's mind while they're entertained and gripped by the entire experience.

[Poiuyt]

2. Oliver Stone is making a movie about the Iraq War

But it doesn't look like it's one of his conspiracy type movies. Just a pro-troops film.

[Cha]

5. Zactly! I thought it would be better

but I liked it more than you did :)

And for the second sentence is precisely what we need.

Surely someone can do that!

Farenheit 9/11 was pretty damn close.

The Manchurian Candidate wasn't too bad.

[autorank]

7. Right, both of them were excellent. I want a total killer like Kane

But I'm greedy. I think Manchurian Candidate, the remake, will become a classic, some sort of pre-cognitive omen for our times. Of course the truth has to come out fully for that to work.

Let's hope God loves Hollywood.

[rosesaylavee]

3. Lupine?

What - he has fangs or walks on all fours? What does that mean?

[Enraged_Ape]

4. Um, hasn't this movie been out for, like...a year?

Is it just now making it over to England?

[no_hypocrisy]

6. What's he going to do? Reunite the Secaucas Seven?