[It's my brother! He's lost right there! He hasn't lost at all. He's just with another branch of the family.]
David Hast: Scott, have you seen The Secret of Roan Inish?
Scott Vander Werf: I recently saw The Secret of Roan Inish and it's the first time that I've watched the movie even though I've seen many of John Sayles films over the years going back to The Return of the Secaucus 7 which I saw in Grand Rapids when it played first run at the Bijoux Theatre.
DH: That was, uh, what? Wasn't that one of his very first, uh...
SVW: That was his first film, 1979.
DH: First film as a director.
SVW: : Yes, and it was a lot of people thought that it was very successful as an independent, true independent film.And a lot of people thought that Lawrence Kasdan stole the idea for the Big Chill.
DH: Right. John Sayles could be called the Dean of American Independent Filmmakers. But let's talk about that after we talk about the movie. The Secret of Rowan Inish is at first it looks like a children's film, and I think it would be a good film for smart children, but it really is more aimed at adults, I think. Both.
SVW: I would go with both.
DH: Both, I think it's just a really smart film. It's a family film, you know, but not a goofy family film at all. And it's set on the west coast of Ireland in 1946, and it was shot on location, mostly in Ireland.It's based on a children's book by Rosalie Fry, and it tells the story of a 10-year-old girl, Fiona, who's trying to get her grandparents to move the family back to Roan Inish, the little island they'd lived on for generations off the West Coast of Ireland. To do this, it tells the family histories, both recent family histories, including Fiona's own when she was a little girl living on Roan Inish, all the way back generations in the family history.And it's done that way with really using the oral tradition of storytelling. Fiona's grandparents and the strange relative of her named Tige, tell stories, they start to tell them and then it goes into a flashback. And so we see stories from the distant past and also from the recent past.And what's happened in the recent past, we find out pretty quickly, is thatwhen they moved off the island, not just a few years ago, Fiona's little baby brother, who was in a cradle, floated off on the water and was lost. The family couldn't recover him. And he's just lost and presumed dead. But she tries to find out what really happened.And that's the secret of Roan Inish, that among other things. What happens in the movie, andI'm going to give a little away, but I'm not going to spoil the whole story. But what becomes interesting is it draws on Irish folklore, besides being this naturalistic, realistic story of Irish fisher people living on the West coast of Ireland, it draws on Irish mythology specifically on the myth of the Selkie. A Selkie is a human, usually a woman, but could be a man too, who can transform into a seal.And the reverse, the seal can become a person. They can go back and forth.And the Selkie also appears in Scottish mythology. think the word Selkie comes from a Scottish word. It's Gaelic. And in other cultures, I mean, really basically it's the mermaid myth.It's an amazing, realistic, naturalistic film with wonderful cinematography by a great cinematographer, American cinematographer Haskell Wexler. Most of the cast and crew were Irish. And the supernatural stuff, the stuff with the mythology, just seems unforced and believable.Did you notice that? mean,
SVW: Yeah, it's just naturally a part of the entire story and the way that the the grandfather and the cousin tell the stories. just it seems like it's not this is folklore. It's like this. These are the real stories. And in terms of the structure of the film, the flashbacks in the stories are more than a major role. It's really the structure is built around them and the film could be seen even if things don't play out the way they do towards the last few scenes. If it just continued to be another one or two stories, it still would be a fulfilling film as an experience. It's really, it's like you're sitting there hearing the story as well.
DH: And that's part of why I think it's a marvelous film. A very charming, small film, family film, but I think it elevates itself because it goes beyond just telling this naturalistic story into this kind of realm of the supernatural. What you sort of start to see as the movie goes along is that nature itself seems to have a sort of consciousness and Sayles in interviews have said that was his point, was that all the elements of nature, the seals especially, the seagulls, the sea, even the weather, it's all conspiring together to make things happen to the humans and to make them do what they're supposed to do.
SVW: It's sort of like our previous conversation about Dursu Uzala, who's an animalistic or animistic where he,everything from the water to the various creatures of nature are people. And in here you see the interaction between all of these elements of nature with theIrish folk.
DH: Yeah. And it's very clear even before those sort of uh spiritual elements come in that that's how they are.mean, they are people of the sea. mean, when you find out that the grandparents might have to leave even their coastal village now and live inland in the city,the grandmother is like, this is going to kill him because he just physically cannot be separated from the sea.
SVW: And in terms of the performances,Fiona, the little girl played by Jenny Courtney is amazing. And it really is her film.
DH: Yeah, we once didone show on Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon, which of course starred uh Ryan O'Neill and his daughter Tatum O'Neill. Tatum O'Neill still to this day is the youngest person ever to win an Oscar for Best Actress. She was 10 years old and she was amazing. But I would say here's another performance on that level. And Jenny Courtney did not come out of entertainment. She was not the daughter of a famous actor. She was just they cast they literally saw like a thousand Irish girls to play this 10-year-old character.And they cast this little girl Jenny Courtney. And it's just amazing.
SVW: There's the scene wherethe cousin is uh cutting open the fish with some other guys and they point out that she might not want to watch this and the cousin, without even really looking at her, says, she's not disturbed by anything. He recognizes that she's very serious.
DH: That's one of the wonderful things about the Fiona character is that she's not afraid of things. So people are telling her stories that are kind of scary and they’ll say, she's not scared easily, are you? And she'll say, she'll just nod.She's not a girl who gets scared. You pointed out, you mentioned the cousin. He was ayoung man named Richard Sheridan who plays the cousin Eamon. He was a 16-year-old actor but not an actor. Again, never been in a movie before. Now the grandmother and grandfather and some of the other characters are professional Irish actors. So…
SVW: the grandfather was in one of the most popularIrish TV programs.
DH: Ah, okay, yeah. But the movie is carried bythe Fiona character who's just so...so believable and so natural
SVW: And talking about like Haskell Wexler who did the uh who did the cinematography I saw an interview with John sales where he talked about the scene where the flashback the story told whereJamie the little boy is lost at seaand he told Wexler to make it look ominous to make it look dangerousand it was actually what he did is he used a ring on a camera lens and he just stopped it down, it was one of the ways that he made that dark storm look even more menacing than it was.
DH: Yeah. Well that's a classic technique of shooting. just simply, you may be shooting in bright light or day and then you underexpose it by about three f-stops and it looks darker. Yeah, that scene was pretty ominous.Highly recommend this movie. You wanna talk about John Sayles a little bit though? Because he's really an important figure in American cinema.
SVW: Yes, he's like you said the Dean of independent cinema and Return of the Secaucus 7 was a big deal because we talk about indie films and independent films, but they're not reallymost of them the vast majority aren't truly independent anymore. This, when he made Return of the Secaucus seven. He raised the money himself.He wrote it. He directed it. He got the stars together himself. And then he was the one that distributed it. That was real independent.
DH: Yeah. he edits. He edits his own films. So if you write and produce, Maggie Renzi, who's his lifelong partner, has produced a number of his films. So if you write, produce, or are partnering with the producer, direct and edit, you have complete creative control. And you're right. So-called Indie Films now, they're just calling that because they have a financial structure outside of the Hollywood studios and that corporate world, but very often, most of the time I think, the producers still exercise final cut.They put up the money and when the producer comes in with notes to the editor, the editor's got to do it.yeah, he's old school. Some of his films, uh what, Matawan about the coal strike, Eight Men Out about the the White Sox bribery, the Black Sox scandal in the early 20th century. Lone Star is a wonderful contemporary crime western.
SVW: Yeah, and I thought that that we were talking before we started to record we were talking about that I thought that was a big Hollywood film. It looks like a big budget epic type of…
DH: I don’t think so. I mean, it's gotten Matthew McConaughey in it, because Sayles makes some of his money writing for Hollywood and we'll talk about how he got his start. Yeah, but Matthew McConaughey was an unknown that was a long time ago that movie and, Chris Cooper's in it. He's a fairly well-known Hollywood actor, but again, we're not talking the big A names and Chris Cooper's been in a number of his films. So I still think it's an independent film. I don't know for sure, but Sayles is an interesting character. He's a really a writer first. mean, he’s published short stories and novels and he got his start in the classic way for an outsider independent filmmaker. He wrote a screenplay for a Roger Corman produced horror film.
SVW: I did not know this.
DH: Piranha, 1978. And then he also wrote screenplays for movies like Alligator and The Howling, Hollywood movies. And then he wrote other screenplays or acted as script doctor. And I think he made more money from those than all his own films and could use some of that money to help finance his own films.
SVW: OK, that makes sense in terms of him uh being able to stay so independent. He was fairly prolific too. He did Return of the Secaucus 7 was in ‘79. He did six movies in the 80s, six in the 90s. I didn't count up in terms of the 2000s.
DH: Brother from Another Planet.
SVW: Okay, well yeah. And then his last film though was Amigo in 2010. So we're 15 years on without another John Sayles Since he's directed.
DH: Yeah. I don't know what he's up to now. But yeah, so his connections to Hollywood is probably where you end up finding some mainstream actors. So he's the kind of guy that's a role model for people who we talked about like Kelly Rieckert, the director. And you look at Kelly Rieckert films, and she's got Michelle Williams and other mainstream Hollywood people in them, but they're still very independent.
SVW: And her films feel independent as well.
DH: Yeah, as do Sayles, right?
SVW: Yes.
DH: So check out The Return of the Secaucus 7, but check out other movies by John Sayles too.
SVW: And The Secret of Roan Inish is a wonderful movie, especially to watch it with an entire family.
DH: Definitely, I agree. Thanks, Scott.
SVW:Thank you.
