John Sayles

I made it about a three-day weekend so people wouldn't have to change their clothes a lot. We didn't have an art department; we didn't have a make-up department.

For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.

I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, 'Okay, you fall off the horse this time.'

I certainly grew up seeing more movies and television than I read books, but when it came time to do the thing itself you don't have to hire a lot of people to sit down and write a book, so that was the story-telling medium that was available to me.

I've always felt like I was on the margins. Once upon a time that's what independent used to mean.

Well, acting is cheap; I knew all these actors who weren't in the Screen Actors Guild yet, and it happened that they were all just about thirty years old.

And it was out in the theaters in two weeks. This is not, 'We're going to develop twenty-five and maybe one's going to get made,' so the first three things I wrote got up on the screen and, good, bad or indifferent, I got to see them on their feet.

To this day, I get rewrite offers where they say: 'We feel this script needs work with character, dialogue, plot and tone,' and when you ask what's left, they say: 'Well, the typing is very good.'

Not that I've always loved the movie when they finally come out, or if they ever come out-because many of them don't come out-but I've gotten to work with really good story editors and stuff like that.

I like to act. I work for scale. I don't have an acting agent. I'm in the book.

The media in America has become so cowed and compromised.