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Tavis: Director John Sayles is one of the true pioneers of the independent film movement. His impressive résumé includes two Oscar nominations and films like "Passion Fish," "Lone Star," "Brother from Another Planet," and most recently, "Silver City." His latest project is the re-release of a short story collection called "The Anarchists' Convention," winner of the O'Henry Award for short fiction. But back to the movies for a moment. From one of his most acclaimed films, here's a scene from "Passion Fish."

May-Alice: Where'd you put all the liquor?

Chantelle: I threw it out.

May-Alice: In the trash?

Chantelle: I poured it out.

May-Alice: It's in the trash?

Chantelle: I poured it out. The bottles are in the bin.

May-Alice: You poured it out?

Chantelle: The recycle people don't want nothing left in the bottles.

May-Alice: Look, Chantelle, I am not ready for this. When I get stronger, I'll quit drinking.

Chantelle: If you keep drinking, you will not get any stronger.

May-Alice: OK. The deal was 24 hours, right? I've already done that. Kearny's closes by 9:00--

Chantelle: I'm not getting you any more.

May-Alice: What?

Chantelle: You want it, you get it yourself.

John Sayles: Thank you.

Tavis: Glad to have you on the program. I've been dying to talk to you in part because you are one of those persons whose independence I absolutely admire. I mean, you know, it takes courage to cut against the grain, as you well know, and go your own way. But talk to me about why it is and how it is, I should say, that you started out as one who was determined to write and produce and to raise all the money for your projects. I mean, you--you got this thing down to a science now.

Sayles: Yeah. I think some of it is I did start in fiction. I was a novelist and short-story writer. And I got spoiled. When you're a fiction writer, you write the first, second, and third draft of your story, and you pretty much control it. So when I came to movies, even though I came through screenwriting for other people, when it was time for me to make my own stories, I just felt like, well, that's the kind of control I want. And you pay something for it. You probably don't get $100 million. You may not get $10 million. You may not even get $5 million. But you do, at the end of the day, control the story that you're going to tell.

Tavis: Is it worth it?

Sayles: Yeah, it is worth it, when you get to work. You don't always get the money. I've got movies that I've written that I've never been able to raise the money for. But, uh, there's just stories you're gonna be able to tell that you'll never get done through the Hollywood system, that, you know, they have an enormous amount of pressure to make a lot of money on every movie, that if you make a smaller movie, you just don't have that pressure.

Tavis: Aside from the money--'Cause I know money is an easy answer, but since are you a storyteller and not just a financier or a fund-raiser, as it were, what's most disturbing for you, what's most wrong with Hollywood as we know it from a storytelling perspective? Not from the--I know the money is always an issue. But from a storyteller perspective, what...

Sayles: Well, I think a little bit right now because so many Hollywood movies, they live or die on their first weekend, they think more about elements--who's in it, what genre is it--and they don't put that much work into the story. 'As long as we have these elements and it's a sequel to a popular movie, we can throw anything out, and just as long as we meet the date and it's only a year from when the first popular movie was there.' So, you know, sequels are often very disappointing.

Tavis: Yeah. What's the most difficult part, when you pull a project together and try to get the fund-raising for it, the underwriting for it, what are you--what's the difficulty in actually closing the deal?

Sayles: Well, some of it is that we're really offering people, "Here's the--We've written this movie. This is what the movie is going to be. There may be well-known actors in it. There may not be, but you don't actually get to rewrite it, recast it, or reedit it." You know? We retain that control. So a lot of people invest in movies is because they want to play moviemaker, and that's totally understandable. It's their money. But we're not really offering that. We're offering them an investment in somebody else's story.

Tavis: Yeah. Speaking of stories, you have been really good over the years about telling stories that have a--trying to find the right way to phrase this--a race--racial component to it. I happen to believe that race is still--racism certainly the most intractable issue in our society. You've never shied away from addressing that issue. Tell me why you've not shied away from it.

Sayles: Well, some of it is just I tend to make movies about recognizable human behavior. Most of them are set in the United States of America. To avoid race, you really have to go all the way around the block to not see it, to not have it be a part of people's lives. So it's just there, and it's something that, you know, I grew up with. It's part of our lives. It's part of an awful lot of people's lives whether they like to admit it or not. You know, certainly the civil rights movement solved certain problems, as far as written laws, but that didn't solve the problems that caused those written laws in the first place. So it's just part of the fabric of how this country got to be this country and what this country is now. So as far as I'm concerned, you can't avoid it if you're going to make an honest movie.

Tavis: So speaking of an honest movie, how do you determine, um, success or failure on a project from your perspective? I mean, obviously studios decide success or failure on how much money it made. Since you're not in it for the money, you're in it to tell a story, and not always with A-list stars, what defines a successful film project for you?

Sayles: You kind of start out with--You make a dare to yourself, and you say, you know, "This is what I'm going to try to accomplish with this story. This is the kind of emotions I want to get out of the audience. This is what I want them to be thinking about or wondering about when they leave the theater." And that--I've been pretty happy with most of my movies. It would be nice if they make a lot of money. They usually break even or make a little bit more than they cost, which is great. But truly it is you kind of make that deal with yourself, and then you have to live up to it. You have to feel like, well, you know, this is a story that, you know, the things that I was interested in, if I was an audience member, when I went to it, I would be satisfied that, "Boy, that really got into some areas, and I, you know, really cared about that character." A lot of it is really making characters who even though it's not heroic behavior, the audience still identifies with and, you know, they get involved in their stories the way you do with your friends.

Tavis: Let me put you on the hot seat for just a second. There are times when ideas pop into my head for things I want to do on this TV show or on my radio program, or I might be invited to give a particular speech somewhere, as I am throughout the year, and a particular thought or idea or theme might pop into my head, and I say to myself, "Tavis, you know you can't sell that. That--that dog will not hunt." And it may be very truthful. But people just can't handle it. I just know that that is not going to work. So have you had that experience?

Sayles: Well, yeah.

Tavis: You sat down to write something you know, "This may be good, but I can't sell this"?

Sayles: You know, it may be I can't sell this now. But for instance, our movie "Matewan" was made seven years after I wrote the script. Our movie "Eight Men Out" was made 11 years after I wrote the script. If it's--If it's a good idea, most of them are not things that have a time limit on them. You know? You can change that story and make it contemporary. You know, maybe three years down the line, you'll just have had a hit, or it's a certain kind of audience that you can aim at now, or there's a certain star who will work with you, and if that star says yes, then you can get that movie made no matter what it's about. So you try hold on to those good ideas. And sometimes I say, "Well, I'm not gonna sit down and write the story now, 'cause there's no way in hell I'm gonna get it made now, but I'm gonna keep that idea." And there may be another opening for that particular idea.

Tavis: Just because I'm curious, what's been sitting on the shelf the longest?

Sayles: The longest right now is a movie that I wrote called "Some Time in the Sun," which is actually about the kind of later years of the Buffalo Soldiers, during what was called the Philippine Insurrection, which was right after the Spanish-American War, about 1901, which was really America's first Vietnam, where for four years, we fought a guerilla war in the Philippines that was barely reported in the United States. And the African-American soldiers in it, many who had signed up feeling like, "Well, this is a chance to prove my patriotism and do something for my country," while they were gone, their rights were being kind of taken away from them as Jim Crow started to creep throughout the South back home.

Tavis: Might this movie see the sun sometime?

Sayles: I hope so. I hope so. I mean, it's a great story, a great big kind of "Ben-Hur" epic story, but it's not something you can make for $1 million.

Tavis: "The Anar-Anarchist--" "The Anarchists' Convention--" easy for me to say--"And Other Stories," it's got a lot of critical acclaim around this book, and now it's back out again.

Sayles: Mm-hmm. Yep. I have the--a new one called "Dillinger in Hollywood," which is my--my most recent story. This was my first short story book. And a couple of my movies have come from ideas--The new one that I want to make, that's kind of set in Alabama in 1950, about the beginnings of rock 'n' roll, is based on a short story that's in "Dillinger in Hollywood," a couple of the stories here combined to give--You know, every once in a while, I give myself an idea. And the nice thing about fiction is if you say the sun is shining, it's shining, you know, as opposed to moviemaking, where you may need a sunny day, but, you know, the sky may not cooperate.

Tavis: Yeah. I suspect if you have enough time, you can get your point across. That is to say, if a story is long enough, if a story has no limits, eventually you can get around to tell the story that you really want to tell and get all the points out that you want to make. In a short story, you gotta--if I can borrow from the Godfather of Soul--in a short story, you gotta kind of hit it and quit it. Tell me what, for you, makes a short story work, because you're really good at this short-story thing.

Sayles: Yeah, a lot of it is that there--there is a simple, strong arc to it, you know? Very often, it's just a moment in somebody's life. It's a little bit more like a snapshot, a really good snapshot that you can read into that snapshot and say, oh, this means this, and, you know, this captures just this incredible moment in time of this group of people or this person. Whereas a novel is a bit more like home movies or a whole movie, where, you know, you're gonna--it takes place over time. So a lot of the stories are in very different styles, very different kind of people, very different worlds. You know, some of what a collection is about is the way, you know, we in modern life live in such different worlds. There's the world of stock-car racing. There's the world of religion. There's a world of, you know, almost anything that you can think of. There is a world where it's very kind of closed world and very often just parallel to everybody else's world, and there's very few things that are shared with other people.

Tavis: One of the worlds--One of those worlds, I think, is parallel to pretty much everything we do from the cradle to the grave, that you have not been shy about entering into repeatedly, is the world of politics. Your stuff's pretty political, as well.

Sayles: Yeah. Well, I'd say that, you know, people talk about our movies being political. I think they are politically conscious, as opposed to politically unconscious, you know? If you look at movies made in 1935, you say, "Oh, my God. Look at the racist things in that or the sexist things in that," or whatever. Well, 30 years from now, look at the movies that were made in 2005, and you're going to be saying some of those same things.

Tavis: Right.

Sayles: So our movies are just conscious of what's going on, instead of just kind of repeating the status quo and accepted wisdom and not questioning it.

Tavis: 30 years from now--since you went there--will movies--will movies be better than they are now or worse than they are now?

Sayles: Oh, I think they'll be the kind of same percentage of good ones to ones that you just kind of consume like a Big Mac and forget about, you know, or that aren't very good at all. I do think a big thing is changing, is that it's a more private experience than it used to be. We used to go to the movie theater, buy the popcorn, sit with everybody else, and have that group experience. And, you know, now, even for independent movies, over 60% of your revenue is gonna be not from people going to a theater, is gonna be on TV--

Tavis: DVD sales.

Sayles: DVD sales or whatever. And people have nice screens and nice home theaters now and nice speaker systems, and they kind of put it on. And the big difference, I think, is that it used to be when I made a movie, I made it for a two-hour experience unbroken, and now I have to know that more than half my audience are going to, just like a book, be able to put it down and pick it up and put it down and pick it up.

Tavis: Yeah. One of those things that works in a short form is the music video. I just read the other day Bruce Springsteen, the Boss, is going out on tour by himself for the first time in years. And you did one of those videos, didn't you?

Sayles: Yeah. We did three. We did--

Tavis: Oh, you got three of 'em.

Sayles: He was first starting, we did "Born in the U.S.A.," "I'm on Fire," and "Glory Days," which were really a lot of fun. Plus I got to cut to Bruce Springsteen music, which, you know...

Tavis: You can't beat that, can you? Speaking of which, why don't we close the show tonight with some of the video John Sayles directed, specifically, Bruce Springsteen's "I'm on Fire." And a reminder, starting this weekend, you can catch me back on radio, public radio on P.R.I., Public Radio International. Check your local listings. I'll talk to you on the radio. See you back here next time on PBS. Until then, thanks for watching. Good night from Los Angeles, and keep the faith.