Filmmaker John Sayles is one of Hollywood’s more poignant social commentators.
Many of his films revolve around social and political climates, striking a cord with audiences and forcing them to think about issues. His 1987 Matewan examined West Virginia coal miners’ struggle to be unionized; 1988’s Eight Men Out was about the Chicago White Sox taking money to deliberately lose the 1919 World Series; and 2003’s Casa de los Babys, which looked at six women who are forced to live in South America in order to adopt children there.
This year, Sayles and his longtime producing partner and companion, Maggie Renzi, have done it again.
Their newest collaboration Silver City takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to our current political situation. Set against the backdrop of a mythic “New West,” the satire follows grammatically challenged, “user-friendly” candidate Richard “Dickie” Pilager (Chris Cooper), during his gubernatorial campaign. When Pilager happens upon a dead body, floating in a lake, during the taping of an environmental political ad, his ferocious campaign manager, Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss), hires former idealistic journalist- turned-rumpled private detective Danny O’Brien (Danny Huston) to investigate potential links between the corpse and the Pilager family’s enemies. The investigation, however, uncovers a complex web of corruption involving high-stakes lobbyists, media conglomerates, illegal migrant workers–and, of course, toxic waste dumps in a silver mine known as Silver City. The film also stars Daryl Hannah, Maria Bello, Billy Zane, Ralph Waite, Kris Kristofferson, and Tim Roth.
Sitting down with Sayles and Renzi to discuss the film, as well as our country’s current political trends, was an invigorating experience, to say the least.
What were your thought processes going in to Silver City?
John Sayles: We started thinking about doing something with electoral politics. I mean, certainly, we’ve made movies that had, to a certain degree, politics in them before. But when we were in central Florida making Sunshine State, we were hearing from locals about how appalled there were over the election. They were saying, “What’s wrong with the national news? Don’t they know that the real story is all these African-American people didn’t get to vote?” And I started to examine that. I mean, that information was available, is in a book but has never been on the mainstream news. I feel like our media is very, very shallow and its avoiding the really important stuff. I also wanted the audience to draw a loosely veiled line from the movie to things happening in real life.
Maggie Renzi: For me, it was that last year you couldn’t say “boo.” If you criticized what was going on, you weren’t a patriot. I just wanted to gather people together so they could see that there were other people who were resisting what was happening. To get together to laugh at the bastards. Now, of course, Michael Moore is cutting a wide swath for us–and we couldn’t be more delighted. People who may not have bothered before are starting to question what they are being told again. There’s an urgency now. I mean, before we were such a great inspiration to the smaller countries, as this pillar of democracy and now, we are so not.
JS: This German journalist I was talking to told me that the feeling in his country was that the U.S. owed them one. To get rid of [Bush]. And when I tell him that the election is still too close to call, he started yelling at me.
MR: John really can’t be bullied. He’s a lot taller.
JS: When we go on television here, of course, it’s a little more conservative. “How can you do this during an presidential election year? Isn’t that partisan?” And I say, “Well, partisan for democracy. [Silver City] isn’t an anti-Bush film, it’s a pro-democracy film and if you fall on the wrong side of that, that’s too bad.”
OK, back to the movie…you probably didn’t make it with these political treatises in mind. It’s really more a detective movie.
JS: It does have some similarities to Lone Star in that it’s an investigation. Danny Huston‘s character is the one connecting the dots but, at first, I didn’t know if he should be a reporter or a detective. So then, I thought, why not both? A disillusioned reporter who becomes an apathetic detective but who, in investigating Silver City, gets his spirit back. The further he delves into the mystery, the more serious the film gets.
Then you amassed this fabulous cast.
MR: One of the things that was really fun was that we knew we should, and that we could, cast stars. Familiar, recognizable faces. And it helped once a few jumped on the bandwagon to get the rest. For example, Michael Murphy is not an actor we knew. When I talked to his agent (and who could have been perhaps the oldest agent alive), I had to explain to him that Michael would not have his own trailer, would not have an additional first-class ticket for his wife and the agent was like, “Well, what is [Kris] Kristofferson getting?” He didn’t care about Maria Bello, and he didn’t care about Chris Cooper. He cared about somebody of Michael’s vintage which was pretty much Kristofferson and [Richard] Dreyfuss. With all the big names in the cast, we wanted it to be like a revelation, like, who was going to open the door next?
How did your long-standing relationship with Chris Cooper start?
JS: He was one of the first actors I met with when I was casting Matewan. We had many more well known actors come in but we just kept going back to him. So we decided to take a chance. The thing is, Chris is such a hardworking, serious actor that he inhabits whatever role he takes.
Cooper definitely has the showiest role in Silver City as Dickie Pilager.
MR: He’d do Dickie at home, just to torture his wife.
And how about Richard Dreyfuss? Was he eager to play a manipulative Carl Rove-ish snake in the grass?
JS: He was also another one who signed on board right away. I just told him, “Richard, whenever you are on screen, you just have to take over.” He got this smile on his face and said, “I can do that.” When researching his character [Chuck Raven], I realized Raven could be a guy working for either side, to be where the action is. The “take no prisoners,” scorched-earth mentality–who just doesn’t want to beat the other guy, but blow him away. And Richard played him beautifully.
MR: Richard actually had a political tutor for awhile, to get him up to speed on the issues.
Why did you pick Colorado as the setting?
JS: I really liked this metaphor of this place that’s so beautiful that people want to move there. The Rockies, the lakes and streams. But then just under the surface–and sometimes on top of the surface–there’s all this toxic waste. And since Silver City is about hidden information, I got the idea that all this toxic waste is being dumped down a silver mine, where it wouldn’t necessarily stay there. It’d have to rise up.
Which, of course, brings us back…
JS: Full circle.
Silver City opens in limited release Sept. 17.
