The chief export of the United States is myth. Frontier myths. Success myths. Freedom myths. Myths so powerful that generations have organized their lives around them, defended them, killed for them, crossed oceans to become part of them.

Across films such as Matewan, Eight Men Out, City of Hope, and Lone Star, John Sayles has challenged the chief American export, returning to the same questions: Who benefits from the story a country tells about itself? Who gets excluded from it? At what point does a useful myth become a dangerous one? Long before the current moment, Sayles was making films about labor exploitation, corruption, race, borders, inequality, historical memory, and the gap between official narratives and lived reality. Not as abstractions, but as ordinary human experiences. The systems that live through our neighbors, relatives, workers, and through us. We spoke with the great filmmaker about the mythology of the nation, the weakening of institutions, the triumph of profit over culture, the meaning of solidarity, and a question that runs through much of his work: when we say “we,” who exactly do we mean?

AA: Your films have addressed the American story in ways that few American artists have. Was America ever real?
JS: I think you can ask that question about every country. A country is an idea. People draw borders on a map, but the land doesn’t care where those lines are. Nations exist in people’s heads. Sometimes that’s useful. It helps people organize, build roads, create institutions. But those stories have to be examined constantly.
That was part of the basis for Lone Star. I grew up with the myth of the Alamo. I saw the television shows and movies. Then I looked into it more closely and realized something wasn’t right. The freedom many Texans were fighting for was the freedom to own slaves. That was one of the central reasons they wanted to break away from Mexico. At a certain point you have to ask whether a national myth is doing more harm than good.
AA: In Lone Star, the Kris Kristofferson sheriff—Charlie Wade—how would he define America?
JS: Racially. He comes out of the Texas Ranger tradition, which was heavily focused on controlling Mexicans. It didn’t matter if your family had lived on that land for six generations. If you were Mexican, you were not afforded the same rights as people who considered themselves fully American.
AA: I watched Matewan last night. It struck me that many of those West Virginia miners fighting the company would probably vote for Donald Trump today. How does that happen?
JS: Desperation. There is very little work left in many of those places. There’s debt. There’s economic insecurity. There’s also a strong fundamentalist Christian culture. If somebody comes along promising to fix everything while telling people that the other side is threatening their children and their way of life, many people will support him.
AA: Eight Men Out is a great baseball film, but it’s also a study of American corruption.
JS: It was fundamentally a labor story. Players belonged to a team in a way that’s difficult to imagine today. If they challenged the conditions they worked under, the owners could effectively tell them: sit down, we own you. We own your career. The bribes were wrong, but they emerged from a corrupt system. In different forms, we’ve seen some of those pressures increase over our lifetimes, especially with the weakening of labor institutions.
AA: How do you see that deterioration playing out now?
JS: One example is the media. A generation ago, a news organization could take certain risks and expect to survive them. Today, corporations own most of the major outlets, and those corporations depend on government approval for mergers, acquisitions, and regulatory decisions. That changes the incentives.
If you’re threatened with massive lawsuits, or your parent company has billions of dollars riding on government approval, the pressure becomes much greater. People aren’t just worried about losing a job. They’re worried about never working in that industry again. In many cases, the people inside those organizations no longer control the institutions they work for.
AA: Do you think independent culture is under greater pressure now than at any other point in our lifetimes?
JS: Certainly everything I’ve done has been marginal to the movie business. But one thing that’s changed is who makes the decisions. It used to be that people who loved movies ran movie studios. Now the people making those decisions are often executives looking at spreadsheets.
They don’t have much connection to the work itself. They’re looking at quarterly profits, stock prices, mergers, streaming numbers. If something doesn’t fit that model, the impulse is often to get rid of it. The decision-making process has become so profit-driven and so detached from the actual experience of making art that it can feel deeply alienating. It’s difficult to feel like you’re working for human beings anymore.
AA: A few years ago you spoke about reaching a point where the political and cultural situation in the United States made you question what could realistically be changed. Where do you stand now? Do you still wake up believing there’s something worth fighting for through art and culture?
JS: You have to take the long view. I’m seventy-five years old. I don’t expect to solve these problems. No system is ever going to solve everything because we’re dealing with human beings. Human beings learn how to manipulate every system, whether it’s capitalism, communism, or something else.
One thing the American right understood very well is that power isn’t won overnight. They spent decades taking over school boards, state governments, courts, and eventually the Supreme Court. They worked patiently.
So the question becomes: what can I do with the time I have? You make choices every day. If you run a business, you can decide whether maximizing profit is the only thing that matters. You can decide how the people who work for you are treated. You can decide whether making a little less money is worth treating other human beings with more dignity.
AA: But there seems to be a growing belief that helping other people is irrational. That if it doesn’t increase your own wealth or status, why bother?
JS: Oliver Stone was onto something in Wall Street when he gave us the line, “Greed is good.” Everybody remembers it because it reflected something real.
After the upheavals of the 1960s, when a lot of people were asking who was getting screwed and how to change it, there was a powerful push in the opposite direction. The message became: take care of yourself first.
It’s a strong message, especially in a country with a weak safety net. People feel vulnerable. They feel they have to be ruthless to survive. But that idea has always been present in American life. It’s there in the robber barons. It’s there in corporate culture. Sometimes it becomes dominant, and sometimes it recedes.
I hope we’re living through one of those moments that eventually passes.
AA: One of the things I loved about City of Hope is that nobody wakes up in the morning thinking they’re corrupt.
JS: That’s right. If your brother’s kids need to eat, are you really going to refuse him a no-show job because of some abstract principle? That’s asking a lot of people.
AA: Especially in cultures where family comes first.
JS: Exactly. What kind of person denies his brother a job when he has the power to help him? That’s where things get complicated. The question is always: when we say “we,” how big is that we?
Does it mean your family? Your neighborhood? Your city? Your country?
That’s a question that runs through a lot of my work. Sometimes people who have nothing in common discover they share a common enemy. You saw that in the history of the mine workers. People who normally wouldn’t stand together suddenly realize they’re facing the same problem.
AA: That’s a hell of a way to end it.
JS: Well, it’s a question that never really goes away.