Each of John Sayles’ movies has a powerful sense of place, and the origin of “Limbo,” a tale about taking risks, was rooted in a trip he took more than a decade ago.
“I started thinking about writing something set in Alaska about eleven years ago, when I went up there and was really struck by the place,” the writer-director said during a recent Dallas interview. “Nature is very, very big and people very, very small there, so you can get lost very easily. Also, I was really struck by how many people had gone up there to totally change their life. There’s still that quality of a frontier about it.”

“Then, probably about seven or eight years ago,” he continued, “Steve Lang, who plays the bartender in the picture…[and] had been a fisherman in Alaska, told me the story of guys he had known who caught so many fish that their boat sank and a couple of them drowned. And just that kernel–like the Greek idea of hubris, of flying too close to the sun (you did so well that disaster befell you)–seemed like the great core of a story to me. I started thinking about risk, and how people react to it differently–how some people have failure after failure after failure and keep coming back for more, while other people get burned once or twice and that’s it. I started thinking about this Joseph Conrad character, this survivor of the [fishing disaster], who’s been almost literally treading water for 25 years, not drowning but not going anywhere either, and what if he met a woman who just came back for more every time she got knocked down. The combination might be greater than the sum of its parts…. Then I started thinking about making the triangle even more dynamic by making the girl [the woman’s daughter] a teenager–and what if she were interested in this guy herself?”
The theme of risk so central to the story he penned is a part of Sayles’s cinematic career, too: since 1978 he’s made twelve pictures, almost all independent projects that he’s struggled to finance himself, often by doing scripts (and rewrites) for others. (“Limbo” is only the second Sayles film backed by a major studio, in this case Sony Pictures).

“All of our movies take risks,” Sayles observed, referring to himself and his longtime collaborator, producer Maggie Renzi. “They’re not genre movies. They’re not heroic. One of the things you do when you make a non-genre movie is that you risk losing some of the audience. I’m used to doing that. And it’s not because I’m interested in staking out new ground and seeing what I can get away with with an audience; it’s that those are the stories that interest me. I’m interested in complex behavior, and most movies are–and I think rightly so–more like roller-coaster rides, and when you’re making a roller-coaster ride, sometimes it’s not appropriate for people to be complex; you want to simplify the people, take some of the edges off them. So risk is something I’m always aware of when I’m making a movie.”
The complexity of the “Limbo” script and characterizations might be daunting to some, but it’s certain that virtually all viewers will react with surprise to the film’s abrupt ending. When asked about it, Sayles shrugged. “I actually didn’t think it was that big a deal. If the rest of the movie had been an action-adventure, then it would have been lunatic or suicidal to end it that way. But there’s two hours and five minutes of movie before the ending which should be warning you–plus the title, which is a consumer warning–that this is not your usual ride.”
Then he added: “For me, this movie ends with these three characters becoming a family.” The future they have as a family, however, is not so clear.

Two of the Chicago-born brothers Quinn, Paul and Aidan, spoke in Dallas recently about the joys and difficulties of their joint project “This Is My Father.”

In one way the film is a labor of love and filial piety. Paul’s script was loosely based on a story told by their mother (it had actually involved a neighbor of hers), and his depiction of the strong-willed young girl who falls in love with a far-poorer farmer was based, to an extent, on his parent. And since the brothers had each spent some years in Ireland, it related to their own experience.

“We lived in Ireland in ’72 and ’73,” Paul recalled. “And we spent a lot of time in the country, because our family had a lot of farmers, and in the Ireland of that time, in certain areas it was like going back hundreds of years. So you get a taste of something old and rich. It really impressed me at that age, and stuck with me.”

The script, however, was not written with Aidan in mind. “It was selfish on my part,” Paul said about enlisting his siblings in the project after the script had been finished. “I thought, the only way I’m going to get to direct this film is if I put everyone I know in it. And who do I know? I know Declan, I know Aidan, I know Johnny [Cusack, with whom he’d earlier founded a Chicago theatre company]. Fortunately, Declan and Aidan really liked the script and responded to it. I think otherwise they would have found their schedule quite busy. Don’t you think?” he asked his brother.

“Probably,” Aidan replied. The actor, who’s been much trimmer and hunkier in films from “Reckless” through “The Mission,” “The Playboys,” “Avalon,” and “Legends of the Fall,” remarked on how he had to change his appearance for this role. “I had a great hair and makeup man,” he said. “And we designed the look–with an eye-piece and false teeth we
had made up at a dentist’s. We really wanted to get away from any good-looking, glamour thing. And Paul had the great idea that I should gain a lot of weight, and I have him to thank because I haven’t lost it all yet.”

Still, the 37-day shoot, while demanding, wasn’t the most difficult part of the project; securing a distributor for the picture once it was completed was. It travelled the festival circuit for a year and was nearly sold to television before the brothers discovered that their sales representative had turned down offers which he considered too low. The brothers then contacted Sony Pictures themselves and reached an agreement to get the film into theatres. “Thank God there were two of us, because there were times you just get so depressed,” Aidan said of the long search for a distributor. “We knew audiences loved it, and we knew critics loved it. So we wondered, what’s the problem?”

And as of now, there isn’t any.