John Sayles may be the most important American filmmaker whose work Americans don't go to see. At 47, he has made a dozen movies, most of them finely observed portraits of the communities, tribes and individuals that form the texture of American culture. Sayles seems well on his way to creating a vivid and detailed celluloid quilt of American life and history, with each square steeped in a deep sense of place.

His first film, "Return of the Secaucus 7" (1980), was an ensemble coming-of-age comedy about a group of former 1960s radicals; "Baby, It's You" (1983) was a romance about crossing class lines in New Jersey; "Matewan" (1987) was about a 1920s coal miners' strike; and "Eight Men Out" (1988) told the story of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the 1919 Chicago "Black Sox" scandal.

More recently, Sayles has made films with a pungent sense of the American geography. "City of Hope" (1991) was a sprawling ensemble drama set in the crumbling cityscape of the post-industrial Northeast; "Passion Fish" (1992), which starred Mary McDonnell and Alfre Woodard, concerned two women who forge an unlikely bond on the Louisiana bayou; and "Lone Star" (1996), Sayles' most acclaimed film to date, told the sprawling tale of several families living on the Texas-Mexico border.

But taken together, Sayles' movies, which he produces with his partner, Maggie Renzi, have grossed less than $50 million, a sum that probably approaches George Lucas' catering bill on "The Phantom Menace." "Lone Star," the director's most popular movie, grossed just $12 million.

That Sayles is not more popular may be due to his weakness for polemic. Nor is his politics couched in palatable Hollywood-size morsels; they are usually expressed in awkward, speechy passages. Some filmgoers complain that Sayles' social conscience results in self-conscious, un-visceral movies that feel less like entertainment than civics lessons.

(Detractors may be surprised to learn that he supports his filmmaking habit by rewriting mainstream movies such as "Apollo 13," "The Quick and the Dead," "Mimic," "The Mummy" and the television movie "Passing Glory." They may be less surprised to learn that Sayles is also an author of novels and short stories and in 1985 received a MacArthur "genius" grant.)

Since its initial release last month, "Limbo" hasn't silenced many of those critics. In many ways it hews to what are now Sayles' own moviemaking conventions. Set in the fictional town of Port Henry, in southeastern Alaska, the film begins as the story of a small frontier community, with the usual large ensemble of players embodying the issues currently in play in the region: the environment vs. encroaching development; the disappearing canning industry; the threat tourism poses to Alaska's culture of individualism; and, of course, fish.

But then, "Limbo" takes an unexpected direction when three characters -- a haunted fisherman (David Strathairn), a lounge singer (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and her teen-age daughter (Vanessa Martinez) -- become stranded on a deserted island. Suddenly, what looked like a "typical" John Sayles film has become something else -- at once simpler, more primal and much more frightening.

Sayles spoke to The Sun in Washington last month.

What made you go from the sprawling narratives and casts of characters of "City of Hope" and "Lone Star" to the fundamental triad in "Limbo"?

It was just kind of where the story brought me. I had traveled in Alaska with Maggie about 11 years ago and had been very struck by the place, and had been thinking this would be kind of a cool place to set something. It really has a lot of personality, people are really tied to the culture and tied to the land in ways that they aren't in other places.

And Steven Lang, who plays the bartender in the film [and] who's worked as a grip in a lot of our movies told me the story, because he had been a fisherman in Alaska, about a guy who caught so many fish that the boat sank and a couple of guys drowned. And just the hubris of that story, that you're punished for doing things too well, you know? Who is that survivor, and do they trust anything ever again? It's like people who get struck by lightning. They're always kind of not sure about anything.

I started thinking about risk and people who had been burned. It could be somebody who's had a really bad marriage and divorce and messy custody case or something like that, and they may get married again but they never really risk again emotionally, they never really put themselves into it 100 percent. Then I started thinking about making it a triangle in some way, and how once you're over 30 it gets harder and harder to find a match. You have standards which you didn't necessarily have when you were 20. You're a more formed person. And you add children to that and it gets even harder.

The beginning of "Limbo" looks very much like a typical John Sayles movie, with lots of characters, each of whom has a distinct and emblematic relationship to the community.

I wanted [the triangle] to come out of some context, and first of all a thematic context. So even though the beginning of the movie seems like it could be moving along in that way that it could turn into "City of Hope" or "Lone Star" with those parallel stories, a lot of it is about risk. And a lot of it is about the illusion of risk vs. risk -- you know, being a fisherman vs. playing a fisherman for tourists. And that's kind of what's happening in southeast Alaska. If you think of Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, there's no fishermen left. They're selling this ambience that doesn't exist anymore. You go to Ketchikan, Alaska, and get off the tour boat, one of the first places you go is the old house of prostitution. And there's a gift shop. And they're playing "All Them Golden Slippers" and there's all these old daguerreotypes. Now, I'm sure there's a house of prostitution in Ketchikan, but none of those people from that tour boat are going there! The guys on the crew, maybe.

But there's something weird about that. And it's especially weird to that last generation of people who remember when we were the people who lived with danger. And that's why we came here. And that's how we thought of ourselves. Now we're the people who sell T-shirts? What's going on there? So I wanted that context before I ripped them out of it.

It seems that with every one of your movies, we say that it's a departure, but this really does seem like one.

I'm asking a lot from an audience in this movie. There's some risky stuff in it. And it's about risk. I don't really warn you that much that you're going to take this right-hand turn. That's something audiences usually aren't asked to do. Jonathan Demme's "Something Wild," which I had a tiny part in, does it. But there aren't that many other movies that take that sharp a turn, certainly without any warning.

Every movie to me is like a world that you enter, and when you enter that world you're given the rule book. Violence is going to be comic in "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Violence is going to be deadly serious in "Dead Man Walking." Those are the rules. And in this one, the warnings aren't quite as clear. So really what you're asked [to do] is take the same trip that the characters do. Which means that you're not prepared.

You have received some knocks for the ending of "Limbo," which some people think is a cop-out, or at least emotionally unsatisfying. What's the reaction been like with audiences?

There's two gasps. The first is, "Is this going to be the ending?" And then when the credits actually come up there's the second one of, "Oh, my God, this is the ending." And then some people say, "Oh, no," you know, and then there's some people who think it's really cool, and then there's a lot of talk, which is unusual. So they miss the first quarter of the Bruce Springsteen song.

I'm really asking at the end for the audience to walk out on that beach with those people. Certainly some of the reviewers and some of the audience just aren't going to be able to deal with it. They just think that it doesn't have an ending. And I think it absolutely has an ending. All I really want to say about limbo and risk is that to get out of limbo you have to take a risk.

Pub Date: 7/02/99