Speak.Collaborate.Listen

“As a Hollywood screenwriter, very often what I’m directed to do is - ‘go in this direction but avoid that neighbourhood’ - you have to make a big turn around some thing that exists. If you ever saw the movie The Patriot, with Mel Gibson […] I probably went through twenty, twenty-five drafts of that script, and I bet - early on - he had slaves. By the time the time the movie comes out there’s like these volunteer black people working on his plantation and it seems pretty happy. He was originally based on Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, but then the history got in the way and they had to avoid that. Things that they thought the audience might not like or that weren’t black and white enough tended to get taken out of the movie, until what you had was a beautifully photographed, very very well-made lying piece of shit in some ways, if you care about American history. So, as far as [my work as an independent filmmaker] being political I feel like well, Jesus it’s there, I’m not gonna ignore it. Just to leave it out becomes political. Every movie is political.”

-John Sayles Independent Filmmaker and Hollywood screenwriter in Great Directors by Angela Ismailos (2009)