Filmmakers on film: John Sayles on Yojimbo

Filmmakers on film: John Sayles on Yojimbo

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 13/07/2002

'The last thing I want people to leave my movies thinking about is other movies," says film director John Sayles. "I want them to leave thinking about their lives and the lives of people around them."

America's most consistent independent film-maker, Sayles has forged a 25-year career writing and directing intimate movies about everyday American communities. As commercial Hollywood has gorged itself ever more voraciously on glamour and fantasy, Sayles has stuck steadfastly to his small-scale political concerns. Given that he's essentially a Hollywood outsider, it's no suprise that when he nominates a favourite film, it is one that was made in Japan.

Yojimbo is one of the most enduring creations of the "emperor" of modern Japanese cinema, Akira Kurosawa. The 20th film of a 30-strong canon, it stars Kurosawa's celebrated protege, Toshiro Mifune, as a wandering, down-at-heel samurai who gets entangled in a vicious feud between landowners in a deadbeat rural town. The wind blasts, dust swirls, and the anonymous samurai ruthlessly plays the two factions off against each other through a sequence of perfectly crafted set pieces.

John Sayles, director
Born 1950, Schenectady, New York
Selected films
Return of the Secaucus Seven (1979)
Lianna (1982)
Baby It's You (1982)
The Brother from Another Planet (1984)
Matewan (1987)
City of Hope (1991)
Passion Fish (1993)
The Secret of Roan Irish (1994)
Lone Star (1996)
Men with Guns (1997)
Limbo (1999)
Sunshine State (2002)

"I was about 19 when I first saw Yojimbo, and I remember being immediately struck by how beautifully graphic it was," recalls Sayles. "At the start of the movie there is no verbal exposition. First you see a guy dressed like a samurai but scratching lice, so you know he's not a very well-to-do samurai. Then he comes to a crossroads and tosses a stick in the air to decide which way to go, so you know he's kind of at a loose end. Then a dog runs past with a human hand in its mouth and you know the town he's going to is in trouble. Everything is set up purely with images."

Like Kurosawa's earlier film, Seven Samurai (1954), Yojimbo pays homage to both the John Ford western and the Japanese samurai myth. But its startling innovation comes in the listless, arrogant form of the mercenary central character. Mifune's was the face that launched a thousand anti-heroes: from the cowboys of spaghetti westerns - a genre launched by Sergio Leone when he remade Yojimbo as A Fistful of Dollars in 1964 - to the testosterone-fuelled musclemen of the modern action movie.

It's tempting to draw parallels between Sayles's and Kurosawa's political concerns. One of Kurosawa's big themes was the displacement of Japan's ancient feudal order by a corrupt business class - hence the social chaos that has descended on Yojimbo's town. Similarly, Sayles's movies tend to feature individuals struggling to deal with what happens when the values of one generation give way to another. In 1991's City of Hope, the youth of a gritty New Jersey neighbourhood clash with their elders. In Lone Star (1996), a Texas border town sheriff uncovers dark truths about his family history. And in his latest film, Sunshine State (which opens here on July 26), two women - mesmerisingly played by Angela Bassett and Sopranos matriarch Edie Falco - see their sleepy Florida beach town besieged by real-estate developers who want to reinvent it as a super-sanitised holiday resort.

Sayles quickly brushes such comparisons aside, insisting that it was Kurosawa's visual flair that left the strongest impression. "I was just at college at the time and knew nothing about the film's history or Kurosawa's politics," he says. "What really got me was the incredible use of space and visual motifs. The director seemed to be using so much more than the script to tell his story."

Dialogue is sparse throughout Yojimbo, and Kurosawa relies heavily on music, changing camera positions and what Sayles calls "the dance of the people" to set the mood and progress the plot. "Kurosawa groups people allegorically," he says. "Our guy is often isolated in the middle, and as the camera sweeps across, we see big gaps of space between him and the two gangs on either side. Only when he steps out of the way can the groups come against each other, which is the whole point of what he's doing in the movie. He's goading these people into a confrontation. The film is full of these visual metaphors. I particularly like the beautiful way the leaves blow around the street, mirroring the way the two sides keep approaching each other and then retreating."

Sayles's reputation was built on his remarkable facility with words, so it's fascinating to hear him preach the gospel of visual technique. He wrote or co-wrote all of the 13 movies he has directed to date, picking up an Oscar nomination for the Lone Star script. He has written at least 15 other screenplays and a number of novels, and has a lucrative sideline performing emergency script surgery for Hollywood blockbusters, including Apollo 13 and The Quick and the Dead. But the first thing he does before he shoots a movie is sit down and decide, scene to scene, how he would make it as a silent film: "That's the best film-making trick I've learned."

Asked to name the most impressive thing about Yojimbo, Sayles doesn't hesitate. "The tone," he says. "I am always telling film students that every movie you enter is its own world and has its own rules. Is it a comedy? Is it super-realist? Is it a fantasy? It's essential to let people know where they are in the first five minutes. You have no doubts in Yojimbo. In fact, you always know where you are with Kurosawa."