TITAN OF THE US Independent Scene™ John Sayles hadn’t seen his 1996 masterpiece Lone Star with an audience for years. But, after watching it recently at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles in a spiffy new Criterion Collection restoration, he seems pleased with his handiwork.
“I don’t really rank our movies,” he says. “But I was very happy with the casting. I was very happy with the music. When I think of the films, I think of the experience of making them and some experiences were nicer than others. This was one where we had enough money.”
The idea started percolating in Sayles’ mind nearly 20 years before shooting, when he was on location for Joe Dante’s Piranha, doing rewrites on the screenplay and appearing in a cameo as ‘Sentry’. On a day off from filming in Aquarena Springs in Texas, he took a trip to visit the Alamo, the site of a famous siege (and Davy Crockett’s death) in 1836, and was confronted by a Chicano protest group illuminating the Mexican side of the story.