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Amigo

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : A fictional account of events during the Philippine-American War.

 

Interview with Director John Sayles

 

(Q) : So Mr. Sales, you make a movie about the United States invading another country where they don't know the culture or the language. Where'd you come up with that?
 
(John Sayles) : It's interesting. I came across this existence of the Philippine-American War when I was doing research years ago for a novel I wrote called "Los Gusanos," which is about the long history between Cuba and the United States. I was probably in my late 30s. I have relatives who lived in the Philippines, I know where it is, how come I've never heard of this? Then I asked some of my Philippine-American and Filipino friends "What do you know about this?"

And they said "You know, it wasn't taught in our schools." "We were taught we were occupied by Spain for 300 years and then they sold us to the United States for $20 million, leaving out that we had a Philippine Republic, we fought for our independence, we lost, a half a million to a million people were killed." So I got suspicious; how does that history disappear and why, in both countries? So what it led to me is getting kind of fascinated with this kind of  turning point, and it's kind of the crux of this novel I wrote called "A Moment in the Sun," which came out a couple months ago of this kind of smaller, micro-history kind of treatment of it.

What I saw when I looked into it was this kind of not so much switch in how we behaved, but switch in how we thought of ourselves, and we went from being people who thought okay, we're the champions of liberty. We're going to go down to Cuba where they're putting people in concentration camps and all this and we're going to help the Cuban people throw off the yolk of these nasty Spanish imperialists. And then only months later somehow we were saying it's great that we're in the Philippines killing Filipinos to take over their country. And we are proud, card carrying imperialists, and now we're players like the British and everybody else. We're involved in the Boxer War in China, and this is who we should be. It's our white, Christian duty to do this.
 
(Q) : If this issue was Cuba why'd they go into the Philippines?
 
(John Sayles) : Well that was the question a lot of these soldiers asked, which is where is the Philippines, why am I here, I thought I came here to kill Spaniards. When they got on the boat they were supposed to go over and kill Spaniards in Cuba as well as the Philippines. What happened is we declared war against Spain and it was one of the few wars in which the young people were more into the war than the older people. You had this whole generation of young men who had been listening to Gramps and Dad talk about the Civil War, there was no slaughter to see, but they wanted to prove themselves.

And here were these awful people doing these awful things and it seemed like we should get into this thing. So every state had a volunteer force, and most of the Cuban part of the war, which only lasted a couple of weeks, and the first year of the Philippine war was volunteers. You elected your officers in some cases or they were just the mayor of the town or whatever who raised the regiment. So people were very "Gung ho" about this thing.

They didn't know where Guam, Puerto Rico, or the Philippines were, they just heard Cuba, we're going to go there. So only about a quarter of those troops even got to Cuba, and the rest of them are sitting around "What are we going to do? Is the war over? We didn't get a chance to shoot anybody and cover ourselves with glory," as they said in those days. And some of them were told "You're going to go to the Philippines." Others were told "Oh, you're going to go to China," and went all the way and got in the Boxer Rebellion. Why are we going there? Oh well there are Spaniards in the Philippines.

The first thing that happened is Admiral Dewey went and sank their fleet. We had steel boats, they had wooden boats, it was about a two hour engagement and we sank their fleet. But while that was happening the expansionists and the imperialists within the US government said "You know, it's about time we became players on the world stage, and Philippines is on the way to China, where we're going to have a piece. We'd like a coaling station; we'd like a piece of this thing."

And the moment, 1900, is one of the most racists moments in our history where it's not just the poor and uneducated people who are racist; professors are spouting this stuff that they got from some German philosopher. Eugenics is starting, Rudyard Kipling wrote his poem "Take up the White Man's burden / Send forth the best ye breed" to straighten out these little brown people. The subtitle of the poem is "The United States and the Philippine Islands." He's writing an open letter to the United States saying it's not just your opportunity, it's your white Christian duty to go and sort these little brown people out.

So there's a lot of that sentiment getting thrown into this. It's also good for a few people are going to make a lot of money. Like most wars; somebody's going to make a lot of money, and they have some influence. So all of a sudden people are diverted into this second thing. We have a one day battle with the Spanish, which was a fix, it was a mock battle so that the Spanish commander could surrender to the Americans rather than the Filipinos, who had been fighting against Spain for 300 years and weren't going to be very nice when they took over. They said "Oh please let us surrender to you people, so at 7 o'clock we won't be on this parapet, you bombard that, then you come here and we won't shoot there."

And maybe 60 people got killed but they surrendered right away, and then all of a sudden the Americans who had told the Filipinos "Give us your positions. We've got artillery; we can go into the walled city of Manila and take it over," run up the American flag, not the Filipino flag, turn the guns around and say "Any Filipino who tries to enter Manila, your capital city, will be shot." And within a year we're in a war with them. So all of a sudden, soldiers who thought they were going to be fighting Spanish maybe fought them for one day, and then within months they're fighting Filipinos trying to take the Philippines away from Filipinos.

So there was confusion at the time. In the same unit you might have one guy who said "It's terrible what we're doing here," another guy who said "Oh this is fun, killing niggers," which is what they were calling Filipinos, "This is like a rabbit hunt." And another who might say like most soldiers, "Well look this is what we were supposed to do and this is what they tell us to do. I just want to go home. I don't know why we're here but I'll do what I'm told." So I got interesting in that situation for the Americans of "Why am I here?" and basically getting down to the daily thing of "You know what, it's hot, I want to get drunk, are the local girls screwable? Are they going to shoot at me? Is this guy who's smiling at me going to stab me in the back? Is he a good amigo or a bad amigo?" which was the parlance of the day.

And then the situation which I think is a universal situation of the guy who's the amigo, who's the mayor of this town who wakes up in the morning and says "How much can I cooperate without being a collaborator, without being a traitor to my people? How much can I resist without getting killed?" And there are not any good answers to that, and he hasn't seen the end of the movie so he doesn't know.
 
(Q) : The Americans, the head of that garrison, had the same dilemma.
 
(John Sayles) : Yeah, and he's a guy whose backstory is he was a guy who was a volunteer who has joined the regulars. I said when I sat Garret Dillahunt down with Chris Cooper who plays the Colonel is the Colonel's been through the Civil War, he's still got a bullet in his hip from the Civil War. He's seen thousands and thousands of people killed. He's beyond caring about one guy who you're going to hang. The Lieutenant's pretty new at this.

He still might think "Well maybe we should have a trial. Maybe we should know whether he really betrayed us or not." A guy I knew went off, he got up to Captain, and he did two tours in Iraq. And the first tour he actually thought he was doing a good thing, the second tour he just said "You know what, the way the situation is we're not doing any good. We're creating more terrorists than we're killing."
 
(Q) : That's somewhat different than what you just described.
 
(John Sayles) : What I'm saying is that he got to a point where he actually had to think in a complex way about something that he thought was simple to begin with, whereas the Colonel has gotten to the point where he doesn't want to think about complexity. No, we're here to make war on these people. Don't confuse the issue. We're here to kill these people. Don't confuse the issue. The Lieutenant's still at the point where he's saying "Aren't we supposed to be winning their hearts?" That phrase, "hearts and minds," which I had always associated with Vietnam, I kept running into it when I was researching this war.

There's Teddy Roosevelt saying "We have to win their hearts and minds in the Philippines." And then I tracked it all the way back to the Bible, so I assume that military commanders since the Roman invasion of Judea have been saying "Oh we're going to win their hearts and minds," and then when that doesn't work, "Well let's just kill a lot of them and then they'll behave themselves."

(Q) : It falls in with the Christian rational.
 
(John Sayles) : Yeah, in the long run we're doing them a favor. And the last line of Rudyard Kipling's poem is "And they'll thank your gods and you." That's the arc of that poem, and that was the thinking of the time. It was called the march of the flag and they literally, this is an American senator on the senate floor talking about we are the white Christian descendants of the people from the cold woods of the Germanic tribes, and therefore we have been bread to conquer and all this kind of stuff.

It was very, very naked, racist stuff. A lot of the same stuff goes on today, but the way it's described has to be very, very different. Much more politically correct. But the justifications change but the behavior and the situation that people get put in are very similar, and I got interested in that, that universal situation.
 
(Q) : Are you in a way mirroring today's conflicts in the Middle East?

(John Sayles) : I certainly was aware of it. It's not why I made the movie, but I think it's unavoidable. Since probably 1812 the United States has been more in the invading mode than the being invaded mode, so we've been on that side of the fence. And whenever you get a situation like that you're going to have these situations. But this same story could have worked about the Nazi occupation of France, or the French occupation of Algeria, or the French Japanese or American occupation of Vietnam.

There were these mayors and these soldiers there, why am I here, how am I going to deal with my brother who's in the guerillas and the American or whoever he is, Algerian or French or Nazi who's telling me "Your people better stay in line or it's going to be your head." So certainly it's always in your mind, but I didn't have to go out of my way. For instance, water boarding, it was called the water cure at that time; it's where we first learned how to do it.

It was controversial in the time, a lot of my information about it comes from the congressional record because there were congressional committees, like there were after Vietnam saying "Wait a minute. Americans don't torture people. What is this?" And people who had done it saying "Well, it's not really torture," or from the other guises "Well usually it worked, but one out of four drowned. We were still learning how to do it."
 
(Q) : With all that in mind, you did this big book, you've done all this research; when did you focus in on and narrow it down to this particular story and then you wanted to make this as a movie? Obviously, it's much easier to have characters that we can identify with rather than having the large scope, so what made you decide on this story?

(John Sayles) : The way that it evolved is probably 12 to 15 years ago I had already known about this story and wrote a screenplay called "Some Time in the Sun," which deals with a fraction of what happens in the novel. But it took place in America, Cuba, the Philippines, and Wilmington, North Carolina. So we scouted it and realized we'll never raise the money.
 
(Q) : That's a lot of locations.
 
(John Sayles) : Yeah, for a two hour movie. And then about seven years after that I started thinking you know what? That was a great project, we'll never get enough money to make it as a movie, but if I made it into a novel; I always felt like I was cramming too much information into two hours of movie.

What if I expanded it and did that by writing a novel? So I started writing this novel on and off, mostly off because I was doing other things, and then I forget the year but there was a big Writer's Guild strike and all of a sudden I had like seven months where I wasn't employed, and I wrote most of the book and finished it. It took about two years to get it published but finally it's out.
 
(Q) : Who published it?
 
(John Sayles) : McSweeney's. But then in the last couple months of me working on the novel I went back to the Philippines, where I'd visited for fun before and done a little research, and I had gotten to know Joel Torre, who's the lead in the movie through my associate editor, Mario Ontal, who grew up with him on the island of Negros. And Joel wasn't working that day and so we drove around his car up in northern [14:58] looking at some places that were in my book that I wanted to see, and I started talking to him about the Philippine movie industry. I knew they had a real industry; I didn't know what things cost.

And I remember it from when I first worked for Roger Corman, Cirio Santiago and Eddie Romero were making wet t-shirt movies for Roger over in the Philippines. Women in chains kind of prison movies. And Joel started telling me about some of the movies he'd been in and I said "Well, that's an epic, how could it only have cost $2 million?" And he started explaining what things cost in the Philippines and how they worked, and a little light bulb went off and I said "If I kept it on a small scale I could make a pretty ambitious movie here for about a million and a half, which is all the money I have left after having made a couple other independent movies.

And there's real talent here. There's real technical talent and really a lot of acting talent. And so it's one of the few cases where I wrote a movie knowing who the main actor was going to be and thinking about you know Joel is a guy who's likeable. Pretty much everybody in the Philippines can get along with him; he's played most of their national heroes. He's a very generous actor, other actors like him, and he's kind of a peacemaker, a moderator between people. What if he was to be the mayor? I had run across this statistic that hundreds, if not thousands of these mayors were killed by one side or the other.

And then I kind of realized if we shot it here and we used an all Filipino crew, which we can certainly find a good one, and most of the actors are Filipino so we only have to fly in about six or seven people, we could afford to do this. So I realized I have to do it on a village level, so none of the characters are the same as exist in the book, but it seemed this is a doable movie. From having made 16 other movies I have a sense of what things cost, and okay I can do this.

My first movie happened in a tiny town in New Hampshire and we had like one interior that had a bunch of different rooms so we could dress it, and the woods, which are free. This, we made this village, but when I went to the set the only power tool there was a chainsaw, and they were using it to rip cocoa lumber. A guy with bare feet was standing on a log cutting it, and everything else was made with a bolo and tying rattan and bamboo that was local.

Local people knew how to make these huts still; some of them lived in these still. The local people became our extras. We bought their rice crop so we could destroy it, and we only destroyed about a quarter of it so they got to sell it twice. The skinny ones got to be extra ones, the not so skinny ones got to watch from the sidelines.

(Q) : And they respected you and your business acumen?
 
(John Sayles) : Not our business acumen, but they like movies. They watch them on little videos and stuff like that. Truly our biggest problem with local people is that the big sport there is sabong, which is fighting cocks. Everybody thinks they can raise fighting cocks and they don't just crow at dawn, they crow all day long. So we had to relocate a lot of fighting cocks because they were messing up the soundtrack.

(Q) : Were fighting cock extras killed in this movie?
 
(John Sayles) : No, no. They got the rubber claws instead of the real razor claws. They were sparring. And the nice thing is that they had the skills, they knew how to harvest rice by hand, they still plow with a caribou; they can't get a tractor into where they live. So they still have a lot of those skills. The kids, the young actors in the movie are local kids. Our kid James, I said "Can you climb a coconut tree?" he said "Yeah, watch me," and he goes right up to the top.

They cut little notches in it. So they had those kind of skills still, which you wouldn't find with a preppy kid from Manila, who probably doesn't know how to squat and talk anymore. So yeah, that was a nice thing about the connection with the village. And because we really shot 95% of the movie within a one mile radius of this village and we just found most of our locations right nearby we were pretty much there every day.

(Q) : Was a lot of that money spent on post-production?
 
(John Sayles) : We did the post-production there as well.
 
(Q) : Did you shoot on film?
 
(John Sayles) : We shot on Red cameras; first digital movie. Lee Meily, who shot it, did a terrific job. She had worked with not only a Red camera but these particular cameras before, so she really understood them, and a lot of the long conversation that I did with her before I shot it was about okay, what's the nature of these cameras, what can you point out without giving away that it's video? So there are certain times of the day we didn't point at the sky because it just will burn out. The other thing that did cost us some money with the digital is it sees every little grain.

Did you see that Johnny Depp movie where he played Dillinger? There are parts on it where you see every hair on Marion Cotillard's face, or everything on his tweed jacket. Well you can't get away with synthetic fibers, so Gino Gonzales, our costumer, was a guy who mostly worked in theater over there. We said "You've got to go with real wool, if it's a close up real leather or whatever," and that cost us some money, but it helps the actors. They really are sweating; they're not acting. When they're sliding down the hill they're really sliding down the hill, they're not pretending to do it.
 
(Q): Was it a conscious decision?
 
(John Sayles) : It was a conscious economic decision. Of my last four movies two of them were shot on super 16, which was also an economic thing. But also, this is about the Red 23 or 24. When Steven Soderbergh made "Che" it was like the Red two or three. They had to wrap it in ice packs because it's basically a computer with a lens. Now they have fans and they take film lenses now. They keep improving that camera and some of the other digital cameras so it really is hard to tell, if you're smart about what you point it at and when.

And she had a lot of experience with it. I'd say that the post production was excellent for video, sound. They don't do synch sound there. The only crew people we brought were the boom operator and the sound recorder, because they mostly dub everything. But they also usually shoot 24 hours and then take 24 hours unpaid off, no unions, and so they were really happy; we were working 14 hour days and they were thrilled to go home at night and hang out and drink San Miguel.
(Q) : Were you thinking about how to distribute the film?
 
(John Sayles) : Unless they read the final credits most people thought it was shot on 35, so that today, the quality of digital has gotten to the point…
 
(Q) : I'm not talking about that so much, I'm just talking about…
 
(John Sayles) : How to market it.

(John Sayles) : The minute you're not making a studio film today you've got a big hill to climb to get to distribution. From about the mid-90s to about 2002 there was such a thing as an independent movie business. The Weinstein brothers were the most famous guys within it and they kind of brought it to the peak of what you might pay for an independent film or what an independent film might expect to make. That doesn't really exist anymore.

Almost none of those independent companies that are left will front money for a movie anymore. And there are all kinds of movies with really well-known actors that never get a theatrical distribution. So we go in thinking we probably will have to distribute this ourselves. Somebody may take a chance, but usually what they do is say "We'll take your movie. You give us the money to advertise it." So it's that kind of deal. Our last three movies basically we distributed pretty much ourselves, like this one.

So what we're doing is kind of what we did with our first couple movies back in 1980, which is we have 10 film prints of this, two digital things, we're opening in 12 theaters in areas of the country that have a big Filipino-American population, that's the first plot form.
 
(Q) : Which happens to be Southern California.

(John Sayles) : Yeah, well mostly in California. Bergen Field, and we're at the New York, one of the multiplexes here. But we're in Stockton, California is opening the same day as New York because that's how it worked out, and they're mainstream theaters. We're not playing in an art theater until like four weeks down the line, and that will be the second wave of things. But we're doing it where we figure a successful independent movie now plays two to three weeks, not 30 like we used to play.

So in two to three weeks that print will go to that place, and if we get wildly successful we'll make a new print, which is exactly what we did with our first movie so that you don't eat up all the potential profits or even making your money back by making too many prints. Whereas as corporate structure, like a studio, they just gamble the whole thing.

Once they decide they either put it on the shelf, release it in video, or they say "We're going to spend $50 million in advertising, it's going to be on every bus in New York, on every TV show there are going to be very expensive ads, and we're going for one big weekend. If that weekend is big enough maybe we'll get a second one, but it doesn’t matter. If that big weekend is big enough our gamble has paid off." And that's just the corporatization of the business, and what's tough is there are a lot of people who work in the studio who make very good movies who are having a hard time getting anything interesting made. They're not really independent filmmakers but they want to make a drama, and there are studios that say "We don't do drama."

(Q) : They either want comedies or science-fiction.

(John Sayles) : Yeah, or comic book movies. I forget which studio, they just like issued a fatwa; we don’t do drama. Don't even send us a script if it's just a drama.
 
(Q) : The fact that you write, direct, and edit. When you come down to editing, obviously the final rewrites in the editing room, you've been so close to the material, do you ever have issues with maintaining your objectivity about the material?
 
(John Sayles): You know, I write books too, and I write the first, second, and third draft. I also, while I'm making a movie, not while I'm shooting it but usually while I'm prepping it I'm writing movies for other people to afford to do what I do. I forget what I've done so quickly that I say "What's this one about? Okay, Spanish Civil War, 1930s, okay here I am," and the same thing happens with my footage. Yes I recognize I was there when I shot it, but I get objective pretty quickly. The other thing is that I've always had this attitude of here's your new universe.

I don't care what you wrote; here's what people did on the day you shot it. You wanted to get five angles, you only got two. Forget about those other angles; this is all you've got. Now let's look at the story you're trying to tell. Is there another way to put it together? So our movie, "Silver City," I ended up getting lucky. I think I cut one scene, one one minute scene from the movie. I tighten things but I didn't cut that much that I shot.

But almost nothing in the movie is in the same order that it was in the screenplay, and I got lucky in that we decided that the lead character would be something of a Hamlet, so he'd always have a black shirt on. And if you watch the movie very carefully his shirt may change three times in the same day, but it's still black so people don't notice it so I could flip it without getting out of continuity. But it helped the storytelling.
 
(Q) : What is it about Chris Cooper? He's been in a number of your movies.
 
(John Sayles) : I think with Chris, not so much in this movie but in a lot of the others, he's an actor, he's a very good actor, a very steady actor and generous with other actors, he's really there for the other actors. On a low budget movie he can use the day to his advantage, so on "Lone Star" very often I said "We have a day player coming in, this is a big five minute scene, this is their only day, they don't know anybody on the set. They're going to get the first three quarters of the day and we're going to be behind you, so use your time to get yourself where you want to."

And then boom, "Chris, we've got one hour, the sun's going down, do your five minute scene," he'll be ready. So he's got that kind of technical chops. But also he's an actor who can play a text and a subtext. So he can be saying one thing and you can tell there's something else going on underneath. And this is not just his work with me, this is his work on other things. In this the guy's gotten himself to the point where there's not much subtext anymore. His character is very specifically based on a guy named "Hell Roaring Jake" Smith, who was famous on the Island of Samar for saying "I want you to make this island a howling wilderness. I want you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn the more you will please me.

And I want you to kill one out of every 10 Filipinos capable of bearing arms," and that turned out to be anybody over 10 years old. So a real hard ass guy who had a bullet in his hip in the Civil War and had a really checkered career, but was the kind of Patton, get it done guy who was useful in that situation. You're juggling so many people and so many things then you make a movie, when you can find an actor you've worked with before, you like to work with, that's one variable, I know Chris can take care of himself, or I know how to help in and what he needs so I'm not going to worry about that he's going to freak out because there are geckos on the wall of his room at night.
 
(Q) : What about the other characters in the movie? Were they based on real people?
 
(John Sayles) : The mayor is based on hundreds of mayors who I've read about who got killed by one side or the other. The character that Garret Dillahunt plays is very much based on letters home from various Americans and their mix of emotions, the ones who did have mixed emotions who kind of might have liked the army life but weren't sure about this thing, who had very strong feelings about "We should go down and help the Cubans," but not very strong feelings about what they were doing in the Philippines. And what I gave to Garret is that he's actually decided "I like this. I like being a leader of men, but sometimes where I'm leading them I have questions about can I do that?"

A lot of military people end up in modern wars, there are very few wars that are as cut and dry as maybe World War II was. What exactly are we accomplishing here? I just took the hill and we're going to give it up tomorrow because of some political event? Or we're going to give it up because people decided oh, it was a mistake to be here in the first place? Well if I do that how am I going to order my guys into battle tomorrow? It's not such an easy thing. We have a pretty intelligent military now. These are guys who are very highly trained, educated, they read outside of their field, the officers especially are not just meatballs with a uniform on who just happen to wander into that life. So they have to deal with this stuff.
 
(Q) : During Spanish colonization in the Philippines obviously the Spanish people taught them Spanish, but after Americans took over did they do anything to teach them English?
 
(John Sayles) : Actually what happened is in the 300 years the education was in the control of the religious corporations, mostly the Augustinians, Franciscans, and Dominicans. What they decided was we're only going to educate the richest of the Filipinos. We don't want the rest of them to speak Spanish and come to our courts. So that's why the mayor of the town doesn't really speak any Spanish. And so what eventually happened is when the Americans came they did wonderful things to the educational system.

They said girls should be able to go to school too. If you're poor you should be able to go to school. However, we said "Oh, and we'll write the history for you," and that's why the story got changed to the point where nobody knew about it. So it's that funny thing of yes, there were some great things that happened in the Philippines, and they love American culture, and they love some of our food and all that, and it's very hard to get a Filipino to say anything bad about America now, except for the ones who know about this history and say "Oh yeah, back in 1900 you should have just gotten in the boat and waved goodbye and said 'Good luck.'"
 
(Q) : I guess we have to ask the what's next question.

(John Sayles) : I've written a movie based on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the case where they were executed for espionage in the '50s. I got to know the Meeropol brothers, their sons. I'm looking for money for that. I'm writing a lot of movies for other people.
 
(Q) : Can you tell us what some of those are?
 
(John Sayles) : I'm writing a movie about Alexander Litvinenko, who was the Russian former KGB guy who was poisoned with polonium. I'm working on the screenplay based on a book called "Girls like Us," which is about Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon in the '60s. Really nice book. I've been getting to listen to the music. I'm writing something for myself set in the penal colony in Tasmania in 1820; who knows. Let's see what else I'm working on.

I did a little thing about the Spanish Civil War that was for an independent company that may not make it, that was a rewrite. I was recently writing on a thing based on the first 40 pages of Anthony Kiedis', of the Red Hot Chili Peppers autobiography. HBO decided not to do that. I did a nice treatment for a miniseries about Louis Armstrong that Charles Dutton was going to direct. Once again, HBO said no and nobody else has picked it up yet. That was really fun.

 

End.