Men with Guns
Writer and director John Sayles
Men with Guns (Hombres Armados), written and directed by John Sayles, deals with the harsh realities of political naivete and willful ignorance. In an unnamed Latin American country, a prosperous doctor living the capitol is nearing retirement. He decides to take a trip to visit the young doctors he trained several years before, who were dispatched to bring modern healthcare to the country's poorest and most remote communities.
The polite facade of the doctor's comfortable life is shattered by the journey: his good intentions, when mixed with a lack of understanding about the politics of brutality enforced by his country's all-powerful army, may have cost his students their lives.
"He'd never been out there," says John Sayles at the 1997 Toronto International Film Festival. "He sent his kids to a place he had never been, and into a culture he really knew very little of. He starts to realize, 'That was my responsibility and I didn't live up to it.' Once it's in front of him, to his credit, he can't turn away and say, "No, I don't want to know anymore.' Too many people do."
"He's somebody who belonged to a part of the culture who didn't want to know," Sayles continues, "and who didn't want that complication. They wanted the benefits of that [system], which is cheap labor and a certain kind of economy, but they didn't want to know the nitty gritty of it. You have to be very, very careful about what you decide not to know."
When Sayles is reminded that he's made a lot of films about issues people don't want to confront, he replies with a laugh. "Yeah, it's a bad habit."
John Sayles is not only one of this country's most forthright, politically conscious filmmakers but a touchstone figure for any discussion of American independent cinema. Since 1980's Return of the Secaucus Seven, he's made eleven distinctive films (including Lone Star, Matewan, Passion Fish, and Eight Men Out) that are thoughtful, complex and emotionally truthful without falling into self-righteousness or insipid navel-gazing.
A novelist (Union Dues, Los Gusanos) and a 1983 MacArthur Award-winner, John Sayles frequently works for major Hollywood studios, writing screenplays and as a script doctor (a well-compensated re-write specialist who usually receives no onscreen credit). He then takes those funds to make his own low-budget but ambitious films like Men with Guns (made for $3.5 million).
Although Men with Guns was filmed in Mexico (including the state of Chiapas) in early 1997, Sayles was careful not to make the story specifically about one place, emphasizing instead the unfortunate universality of the situations.
"A lot of what I thought about when I was writing this didn't necessarily happen in Latin America," he explains. "I was thinking a lot about Vietnam, Bosnia, the former Soviet Union, African states. Wherever tribalism has risen up again, and people who used to be neighbors all of a sudden say, 'I want to be neutral, I don't want to kill the guy across the street.' And they [the faceless, powerful men with guns] say, 'You have to. If you don't do it, we're going to suspect you and we're going to shoot you. There is no neutral here'."
But in choosing to make it a Latin American story, Sayles made the conscious decision to make language — and methods of communication — a large part of the story. While the doctor and most of the cast speak Spanish, other indigenous languages, such as Maya and Tzotzil, are also represented.
Of the many people the doctor encounters as he travels further and further away from what he sees as civilization are groups who identify themselves simply as "salt people," "banana people," or "gum people." These names weren't an attempt to de-emphasize individuality, or even place them in an allegorical context, Sayles says.
"It was more a description of people who are at that level of survival that the crop defines them and the seasons of that crop define them more than the somewhat artificial things of politics that people elsewhere have built up."
Sayles also very much wanted to represent an often-ignored point of view in Men with Guns: that of the native population. He uses the framing device of an Indian woman telling her daughter a story about a mysterious, perhaps magical, stranger to cast a different light on the doctor's heart of darkness journey.
"I wanted to just say to the audience, 'Well try looking at it from their point of view'," John Sayles explains. "It's not a story, maybe, about a western doctor who's going to take us into exotic lands. It's a story about these people. They have a way of looking at the world, and here's some alien coming to them. And he's the exotic one."
© 1997, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.