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I never actually do rehearsals. That's one of the reasons that I write those bios and if I can meet with the actors I'll meet them or talk to them on the phone. What I want is for them to come on set knowing their lines and knowing who the character is.

John Sayles

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John Sayles
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: September 28
Actor
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Writer
Schenectady
New York
John Thomas Sayles
Never
Talk
Rehearsals
Actually
Rehearsal
Actors
Phone
Write
Phones
Character
Reasons
Reason
Meet
Come
Lines
Writing
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Bios

More quotes by John Sayles

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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.
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In a movie you have all these logistical problems all these practical problems. But you're also going to have people come who can do things that you can't do, and you get to direct their talents.
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It's a mixed crowd at the dogs - black, white, hispanic - but to Walt they all look like Jackie Gleason. Heavyset guys with big plans and polyester souls.
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I think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference.
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I don't have a social agenda. I just don't choose to ignore what's in front of me.
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I probably wouldn't have done as many as I did in one year, which I did when I was trying to raise money.
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The less money and time you have, the more you haveto plan ahead and be careful about your coverage. It's like a gas:it expands or contracts depending on the size of the container.
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There were not fifteen people in the story department and twenty-five producers and stuff. And Roger had produced 1,000 movies and directed a couple of hundred, and their comments were always very, very specific.
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Fahrenheit 9/11 took public domain information that should have been on the news every night and put it in a film that a lot of people went to see. But still Bush has never had to answer those charges.
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I'm never at a loss for new projects.
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I've always got five or six things that would either make a good feature or TV show. And you just never know. You go and you pitch and it may be exactly what they're looking for, or they may stop you after two sentences and say, Oh, we've already done something just like that.
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The hardest thing about movie acting is that if you're playing a character who changes within the movie, you've got to do that, but you've got to do it out of sequence, because we never have gotten to shoot in sequence, and that's really, really tough.
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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.
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America is a very divided country now. Not only are there red states and blue states, there are now red facts and blue facts. The right-wing believe in creationism. The left in evolution.
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I figured, 'When is that ever going to happen again?'. So I basically set out the opposite way movies are made I set out with a budget first. I said, 'What can I do well for $40,000?'.
John Sayles
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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.'
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I like to act. I work for scale. I don't have an acting agent. I'm in the book.
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As a screenwriter I'm often writing in genres where there have been thousands of movies whereas when I direct movies they tend to be in between genres. They tend to have a little bit of a genre to them, but they're really about the people, and they're people we haven't met before.
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There are very few distributors left to do off-Hollywood movies, and those distributors generally have got thousands of movies to choose from. So you're pretty lucky if you get one to even take your movie and it's pretty rare that they pay anything upfront.
John Sayles
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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.
John Sayles