The Secret of Roan Inish
Trained at the Roger Corman Film School, like Coppola and Monte Hellman, John Sayles is one of the best-kept secrets of American author cinema over the last forty years. His films reflects a desire to portay the outsiders, steering clear of formulaic narratives, glamour, and glitzy urban settings. The program features four rarely screened films from our collection, directed between 1980 and 2000.
In the mid-1940s, an Irish family of fishermen left their island and moved to the Donegal area. During the journey, the youngest son is swept away by the sea. Everyone thinks he's dead, but a few years later his sister, back in the area, is convinced he's still alive.
John Sayles
John Sayles is an American independent film director, screenwriter, editor, actor, and novelist. After college, he moved to Boston where he worked a variety of blue-collar jobs while writing short stories for The Atlantic, culminating in his first novel, The Pride of the Bimbos, published in 1975. Like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, Sayles began his film career working with Roger Corman. He has been called "the greatest screenwriter to ever work at New World." In 1979, Sayles used $30,000 he earned writing scripts for Corman to fund his first film, Return of the Secaucus 7. The film received near-unanimous critical acclaim at the time and was added to the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1997. Sayles is also known for writing and directing the films The Brother from Another Planet (1984), Matewan (1987), Eight Men Out (1988), Passion Fish (1992), The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), Lone Star (1996), and Men with Guns (1997). He has funded most of his films by writing genre scripts, such as Piranha, Alligator, The Howling, and The Challenge, and by working as a script doctor; he did rewrites for Apollo 13 and Mimic. Twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, for Passion Fish and Lone Star, Sayles also saw Matewan being added to the United States National Film Registry in 2023.
