SOURCE: Sayles, John, and Claudia Dreifus. “Interview with John Sayles.” Progressive 55, no. 11 (November 1991): 30-3.

In the following interview, Sayles discusses the place City of Hope occupies within his body of work.

John Sayles manages to do what no one else does in the world of the cinema: He calls his own shots, writing, directing, financing, and editing movies about the hidden corners of American life. In an industry in which Terminator 2 is the money-cow ideal, the forty-one-year-old Sayles somehow pulls off wonderful small pictures on themes that the rest of movieland ignores. Baby, It's You, his only major-studio production, sheds warm light on the big American secret—social class. His classic Return of the Secaucus Seven looks at a group of 1960s activists at midlife, still grasping for their ideals. Matewan, his masterpiece, concerns a coal miners' strike in West Virginia.

And this fall, we'll see Sayles's newest...