John Sayles began as a novelist and short story writer. After selling his first novel he got his first agent in Los Angeles. His first project was a rewrite on Roger Corman’s Piranha. Sayles would continue to work with Corman on ‘creature features’ and this is where he was inspired about how to make an independent film as Corman told him that you could make Lawrence of Arabia for half a million dollars if you shot it all in a tent. This inspired him to write something well that he could make for that much money. This became the beginning of his independent filmmaking career. Sayles believed in starting with what’s basic to human beings in terms of story, as that is eighty five percent of drama.
Eight Men Out Was written by Sayles as a way to show his writing in the industry. He believed it was a film that would have a hard time getting financed because of the scale it was on, but when he was told that he could make it if he got three of the ten actors on a list from the studio he could make it. Those three actors turned out to be John Cusack, Charlie Sheen and D.B. Sweeney.
With this film in particular Sayles wanted to have two different perspectives. One of cynicism, where people hope things go bad and people are corrupt because that means they can be that way too. And, that of realism or pessimism, where things may not turn out well, but people still try to do something to try and make it better. We see this in respect to Chick, Swede and Abe specifically as well as some of the Sox team, and we see the realism come to life with Bucky and Eddie once the pitcher knows that he’s made the wrong choice and decides to pitch his heart out. Sayles believed in making films based on something in the world around him that he hadn’t seen before in cinema, and this helped inform what projects he would write and direct.
As for Sayles as an actor in his own work, he says that he decides to act in his films when he has a better idea of how to play the character than he does of how to cast them. In Eight Men Out we are able to see the director’s touch on screen in the human performances he gets from the actors, and we also get to enjoy seeing him portray Ring Lardner...how ‘bout that song he sings on the train to Cincinnati? It makes the film that much more enjoyable to know that he participates and puts himself on the line as much as the other actors do in order to tell this story.
