A Man and His Myth : Is John Sayles’ fantasy-based film ‘The Secret of Roan Inish’ a deviation from his working-class stories about identity and community? He calls it ‘pushing the metaphor.’

Filmgoers who have seen John Sayles’ new film, “The Secret of Roan Inish,” no doubt settled into their seats expecting this master of gritty realism and champion of the American working class to apply his unsentimental brush strokes to a Gaelic canvas.

In scene after scene, however, expectations have been jolted. In one scene, a seal sheds its skin and becomes a beautiful woman. In another, a young girl races after a little boy she believes is her brother, lost years before. Just when she is about to catch him, however, he leaps into a magic cradle that floats away.

Could this be the work of the independent writer-director who, more than any director since John Cassavetes, has explored and portrayed slices of everyday life in films such as “The Return of the Secaucus Seven,” “Passion Fish” and “City of Hope”? Has Sayles really given up on reality and turned to fairy tales?

The 44-year-old Sayles snorts at the idea. “All fiction stretches reality to get at truth. In all my films, I’ve explored questions of identity and community. In ‘Secaucus Seven’ the community are these people who are glad to be around others they don’t have to explain all their jokes to.

“In ‘Matewan,’ there is a short-lived community that happens when there’s a common enemy. And ‘Roan Inish,’ it’s the children who realize that by abandoning their homes on the island, they’ve also abandoned their identities. In ‘Roan Inish’ the use of magical elements is simply a way of pushing the metaphor one step further.”

The novella on which the screenplay is based, “Secret of Ron Mor Skerry” by Rosalie K. Fry, was first brought to Sayles’ attention by his live-in partner and producer of 20 years, Maggie Renzi. Originally set on the Scottish coast, the story is moved by Sayles to the stark and wild western islands of Ireland of 1949; he adds several new characters and plot lines to flesh out the story.

His version tells of 10-year-old Fiona, who is sent away by her failed, widowed father to live with her grandparents in a remote fishing village. She learns from her grandfather the sad history of her family: How during World War II, they were removed from their ancestral homes on the mysterious island of Roan Inish and how during the evacuation her infant brother, Jamie, asleep in his cradle, was carried away by a strong current and never seen again.

From a strange cousin she hears how one of her ancestors on Roan Inish captured and married a “selkie,” a mythical, half-human, half-seal creature and comes to believe the selkies may be responsible for her brother’s disappearance. Obsessed with the idea that by returning to Roan Inish, she will appease the forces that stole away her brother, she persuades her adolescent cousin to help her restore the cottages on the island.

“Roan Inish” is a textbook example of “magic realism,” a literary label attached to such works as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Juan Rulfo’s “Pedro Paramo” or Laura Esquivel’s book and Alfonso Arau’s movie of “Like Water for Chocolate.” In this form, the lines between the real world and a magical world are indistinct so that the fantastic walks hand in hand with the everyday. “It is the common belief in South American cultures,” says Arau, “that we live in two worlds at one time.”

Though magic realism is most often associated with Latin American artists, Sayles points out that it was a widespread system of storytelling from the pre-Christian Irish to Native Americans. “A lot of these myths have an instructional as well as spiritual aspect to them,” says Sayles. “It not only tells you about the spirit of something such as an animal, but also its habits and its importance to the life of the community. In Native American myths, there is always an important, practical lesson in the tale of the crow or the coyote.”

Sayles says his interest in making a film of the “Secret of Ron Mor Skerry” intensified as he got deeper into the tradition of Scot and Irish storytelling. “I found there was a period in which stories about hunters feeling remorse over the killing of seals began to appear . . . and like ‘Roan Inish,’ many were stories about ‘selkies.’ I realized there was a generation of hunters who no longer had to kill seals to make a living, but continued to do so as part of their tradition. Obviously, there was tremendous emotional conflict and guilt which led to the creation of these myths and stories.”

Like Latin America, Ireland is a land where Christianity was grafted quickly onto an indigenous populace that never quite relinquished its animistic roots. Like Marquez’s characters who exist in a gumbo of African, Indian and European Catholic cultures, the classic character of Irish stories is a God-fearing, Rome-facing devotee who, nonetheless, has a healthy respect for the powers of “the little people” and anthropomorphic entities. “One of my favorite scenes,” says Sayles, “is one where (the grandmother) scolds her husband for his superstitious tales and then turns right around and uses the old Druid practice of blessing the fire in the hearth.”

Though the film is chock-full of magic imagery and inexplicable occurrences, Sayles never resorts to any special effects more dazzling than a slow fade. Says Arau, “In ‘Erendira’ (a film adaptation of a Marquez novel), the movie didn’t work because they drew attention to the magic with the use of special effects. The whole point to magic realism is that the magic must coexist seamlessly.”

“One of the reasons I set the film in 1949,” says Sayles, “is so that the little girl, Fiona, imagines the events we see through her eyes in a way that is untouched by film or television. When her grandfather tells her these stories, she sees them literally . . . without special effects.”

Another reason Sayles set the film in postwar Ireland was to focus on his recurring theme of community and identity. “This was the period when a lot of people in western Ireland and Scotland left the islands for an easier life on the mainland and in the cities . . . and, of course, there is a long tradition dating back to the famine of them having to leave their homes. And, of course, what happens is that when this generational tie to the land is severed, so is the sense of identity. You’re suddenly uprooted and living in Australia or America and who are you? My purpose in ‘Roan Inish’ is to show how these characters come to re-establish their identities.”

It might be postulated that the Schenectady, N.Y.-born Sayles, whose parents were both half-Irish, was drawn to the project in a quest to establish an identity relative to his own Gaelic roots. Ethnicity, however, is the least of Sayles’ interests. Familiar Sayles themes such as questions of community and identity, class struggle, the power of myth, the value of hard work and environmentalism make “Roan Inish” part of a continuing body of work that is consistent with the filmmaker and novelist’s leftist-humanist vision.

Though he was educated at Williams College in Massachusetts, Sayles is quick to point out that he “came from a working-class family (both parents were teachers; his grandfathers were both cops) and went to a working-class high school in a working-class city.” Like many aspiring artists fresh out of college, Sayles took a number of jobs--including meatpacker and construction worker--before getting his first breaks as a writer.

In person, Sayles gives the impression that the Directors Guild hires right out of the teamsters. At 6-foot-4, with biceps the size of most people’s thighs, Sayles possesses a fashion sense that would make a Pic ‘N’ Save buyer cringe. It is a disarming contrast for a man whose intelligence and education disqualifies him from the working class.

Two generations ago, Sayles probably would’ve been leading Wobblies, the socialistic labor union from the turn of the century. Unlike other artists who struggled, he does not look at his working-class stints as menial or transitional. Rather, he maintains, such experience taught him the value of hard work and the value of workers.

In the ‘70s, Sayles was a screenwriter for Roger Corman, turning out scripts for films such as “Piranha,” “Lady in Red” and “Battle Beyond the Stars.”

It was with the money he earned on “Piranha” that he financed his first independent production, “Return of the Secaucus Seven” in 1980. The story of a reunion of ‘60s radicals (sometimes referred to as the “original ‘Big Chill’ ”), Sayles and Renzi brought the film in for $60,000 by commuting to Boston from New York on weekends where he had the use of a free editing machine. Money was so tight that Sayles remembers more than once “running out of gas in some New York suburb and being stuck until we could score more gas to keep going.”

With the modest success of “Secaucus Seven,” screenwriting fees from films such as “The Howling” and “The Clan of the Cave Bear” as well as $32,000 a year for five years from a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1983, Sayles was able to secure backing for two more films: “Lianna” (1983), the story of a housewife who falls in love with another woman, and “Brother From Another Planet” (1984), about a black extraterrestrial who finds himself in Harlem.

Twice in his career, Sayles has attempted to work within the studio system. But the experience of “Baby It’s You” at Paramount in 1983 and “Eight Men Out” for Orion in 1988 convinced Sayles that the easing of the financial burden wasn’t worth the curtailing of his artistic freedom.

“It’s extremely important for me to have the final cut on my films,” he says. “And that’s not something the studios are willing to give.”

Though the absence of Big Brother has severely limited the distribution of Sayles’ films, he maintains that being able to “see a project through from its inception to its completion” is well worth the price. Indeed, Sayles’ uncompromising vision has won him not only the adulation of independent film-goers but the gradual respect and admiration of the more mainstream film community.

“Matewan” (1987), the gripping, true-life story of a West Virginia coal miners’ strike in the early part of the century; “City of Hope” (1991), a finely structured drama of urban hope and despair, and 1992’s “Passion Fish,” a drama of a woman who returns to her Louisiana bayou home after being paralyzed, have established him as a visionary force. (He was nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay for “Passion Fish.”)

Sayles has also gathered praise and recognition in other forums as well. He has published a collection of short stories (“The Anarchist’s Convention”) and three novels (“Pride of the Bimbos,” “Union Dues” and “Los Gusanos”) and written two plays (“New Hope for the Dead” and “Turnbuckle”). He was the creator of the television series “Shannon’s Deal,” and as an actor he has appeared in several of his own films as well as “Something Wild” and “Malcolm X.”

Still, as the production of “Roan Inish” has proved, such accolades don’t necessarily mean people will line up to throw money at your independent production. Sayles and Renzi had to invest a considerable amount of their own money to keep the production going when their partners, Denver-based Jones Intercable, waited nearly two weeks into the production to finalize the deal.

Renzi was quoted during the production as saying that the financial situation was “a really ugly experience” and that she was close to giving everyone a severance check and sending them home. Luckily, their passion for the project won out and despite the potential for coming out considerably poorer than when they’d started, they pressed on.

Filmed on the wild Irish northwest coast of County Donegal, “Roan Inish,” Sayles’ first foreign location, had a few other odd bumps along the way. “One of the first things we had to do was to call a town meeting to dispel the widespread rumor that we were Mormons who’d come to kidnap all the local children,” he said.

Along with a navy of only partially trained seals that rarely followed direction, weather which changed quickly and dramatically made the shoot schedule difficult. Some of the film’s other problems included a mentally unstable local who burned down the set and an irritating cash-flow problem. But the production also had its high points, such as the precocious debut of Belfast schoolgirl Jennifer Courtney, who along with 1,000 other Irish girls auditioned for the role of Fiona.

Sayles credits his Irish cast and crew, especially veteran actor Mick Lally, with the authenticity of the production. “Being Irish was not a big part of my childhood, though being Catholic was,” he says. “Still, I’m sure I was influenced on some level, particularly in terms of the rhythm of storytelling. I had several people--such as Mick Lally and another man who owned one of the local pubs, who are both (Gaelic) speakers--go through the script and point out problems in idiom or dialect.”

A near fanatic when it comes to detail and authenticity, Sayles involved local fishermen in teaching his crew the method of fishing employed in the late ‘40s and located craftsmen who also taught them to build authentic cottages.

“In some ways we weren’t really part of the rhythm of the community because our schedule was so dependent on light and tides,” he recalls, “but in other ways, we moved right in. Because of the budget, we had to board everyone at the little bed and breakfasts . . . which are just private houses. Though I think some of the locals might’ve been a little tentative at first, a lot of people really got into what we were doing because they liked the story so much. At that first meeting, I had a big pile of scripts and told the locals to help themselves. By the end of the production, everyone in town was telling us about their selkie experiences.”*