Sayles riding high in Ireland

The famed independent Stateside moviemaker John Sayles knows all about Ireland ... and what he knows is all good.

One of his most successful films was the recent Irish-made The Secret of Roan Inish and he recalls fondly how the Queen's Film Theatre in Belfast helped boost his career, thanks to administrator and big-time fan, Michael Open.

It was in the early days of Sayles' career when Open ran a mini-fest of the lanky American's films.

And whenever a new Sayles film is released Open grabs it for a screening. Today, Sayles still remembers that with affection and whenever he's at the Cannes Film Festival he and the QFT boss always get together for a lunch and a chat.

Sayles is a Hollywood one-off. Fiercely left-wing and a great supporter of the trades union movement, he works outside the studio system to make his own sort of films, in his own way and, usually, with a group of quality actors who have become something of a Sayles Repertory Company.

But it's not just this group who love working with the writer-producer-director-actor-novelist Sayles, just about every other performer in Hollywood dreams of the chance of adding one of his films to their CV.

His latest, highly-praised film - Sunshine State - comes to our screens and, once again, it is a story of high moral tone and social concern. It is also, in case such values alarm you, one of the best films you'll see this year.

Set in Florida, the strongly character-driven story concerns a community coming to terms with encroaching development and commercialism. But most of all, it's about people, dreams and change.

"I think that the first thing I started with was this idea that when huge changes come to a community, especially a small one, some people are going to be able to go with the flow, and some people are going to be left behind. And, you know, that's not just that they'll be out of a job, it can mean they just don't want to go.

"The world that they know is ending, and they're not really ready or interested in starting from scratch. And I'm always interested in who are the people who can pick up and say: 'Well, that's over, and I'm going to try and do something else with my life,' or care about something else, even, and the people who either are just going to give up or get bitter ... and can't start from scratch."

Sayles is famous for his love of American history and several of his most memorable films have touched on turbulent and dramatic events ... he took all he had in the bank from his screenwriting work - he wrote some of the great classics of the horror genre for his early mentor, Roger Corman: Piranha, Alligator and The Howling - and made Return of the Secaucus Seven, about a group of 1960s radicals reuniting for a week-end. He followed that with the 1983 Lianna, the story of a woman coming to terms with her sexuality, and then he turned to comedy with Baby It's You and Brother from Another Planet.

He made the baseball classic Eight Men Out, the story of the notorious Chicago White Sox (who became known as the Black Sox) who threw the World Series. That film, regarded as one of the finest made about the sport, was followed by Matewan, the story of a l920s coalminers' strike in West Virginia. His more recent films have included Days of Hope, Passion Fish and what is generally regarded as his best ever, Lone Star.

He has never been afraid to take risks and his working methods are famous: "A lot of my movies are considered commercially risky - OK, so they do tend to go against the Hollywood trend of the bland and the safe - and it takes a long time for me to raise the money to make them. I do it by working extensively as both a screenwriter and script doctor, and by taking acting jobs. I've worked behind the scenes on many big-budget films, then I slip off and make my own."

On his ability to create such character-driven films, Sayles says: "I always consider that in life there's one bunch of people who feel this way and they're going in that direction, and there's some people who totally oppose them, and then there are some people who are totally out of all that and couldn't care less about that particular fight, but this is their issue and they find themselves involved.

"I like to take a bunch of interesting characters and put them in a situation or location and let them get connected."

Nobody connects with an audience quite like the brilliant Sayles.