John Sayles

Most of John Sayles's trace in the archive belongs to films he wrote and did not direct. Kim Newman records that Steven Spielberg dropped his Night Skies screenplay in favour of the friendlier E.T. Jamie Graham writes that he made the horror-comedy formula his own in the closing years of the seventies, with Alligator and Piranha out of his pen. Philip Kemp, writing on Limbo, counts him among the most political minds of the American independents and names a habit: place is decisive in his work, and it always goes to cultural ground far from his own New Jersey roots. The film's title he explains himself, as a state whose outcome cannot be known. Kemp takes Limbo for the most unexpected thing he has done. For Richard Kelly, nobody else in recent American cinema has offered such brazen dialectical materialism.