Return of the Secaucus Seven
Lianna
Baby, It's You
The Brother from Another Planet
Matewan
Eight Men Out
City of Hope
Passion Fish
The Secret of Roan Inish
Lone Star
Men with Guns (Hombres Armados)
Limbo
Sunshine State
Casa de los Babys
Silver City
Honeydripper

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

In 1982, while still in the throes of post-production on Baby, It's You, his first movie for a major studio (Paramount), the writer-director of The Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980) and Lianna (1983) learned that he had been awarded one of the McArthur Foundation's coveted "genius grants." It was an unimaginable windfall: $33,000, tax free, for each of the next five years. One of the first fruits of the award was The Brother from Another Planet, a radical departure from the down-to-earth films that had endeared John Sayles to the Foundation, and to a loyal core group of fans.

In point of fact there were three dreams, eruptions from Sayles exhausted catnaps in the mixing room. One of them involved a group of alien clerks at the Department of Motor Vehicles: "I just remember the title of it coming out at me in 3-D Assholes from Outer Space. And then there were these guys with antenna saying, 'You'll need another form.'" The others were a pure genre piece, Bigfoot in the City, and a moody dream clip of a black man, "wandering around 125th Street, and he just seemed lost and alienated. I woke up and thought, 'Well, here's an idea that's kind of interesting. Who would be a more interesting guide into Harlem than somebody who looked like he belonged but didn't even know what planet this was?'"

Sayles stored the "alien in Harlem project" in the back of his mind while he finished Baby It's You and prepared to begin pre-production on his next project, an ambitious historical drama called Matewan, about a violent labor struggle in the Appalachian coal country in the 1920s. But with just one day remaining before the scheduled move to West Virginia, the investors called to say they'd lost their line of credit. Sayles and his associates were left high and dry.

The story of the Matewan Massacre, which had first been told as a flashback in Sayles' 1977 novel Union Dues, would take three more years to reach the screen. In the meantime the Sayles team had a production office, a staff, and two gung-ho producers, Maggie Renzi and Peggy Rajski, champing at the bit. And according to Renzi, "John just took all that energy and redirected it into The Brother," deciding on the spot to finance the film himself with $300,000 he had saved from the MacArthur grant and from his Hollywood gigs writing witty horror scripts like Piranha and The Howling.

Sayles had planned a 360-pan to convey The Brother's disorientation, "and it was obvious," he says, "that there was nowhere for us to put those hundred onlookers. Ernest [Dickerson] said, 'Well, what if I go up and over them and into the streetlights and when we come down he's stoned?' I said, 'Yeah, and while we're up there, he can come real close, so we can change the focus, and he'll be right in our faces.' That's my favorite shot in the movie and it just came out of me wanting to do something woozy with the camera and the fact that all those people were there."

"Joe did a really good thing," Sayles recalls, "which is that he stayed away from the other actors. So once they got into a scene with him, he was often meeting them for the first time, and they would do what people usually do when there's somebody who doesn't speak their language or who is deaf, they talked a little louder and a little slower. Joe also came up with the idea that he had to look into people's eyes to understand what they were saying. So if they would be talking to him and look away, he'd get over in their eye line so there was something a little weird about his body motions."

As some kind of science fiction movie, The Brother From Another Planet benefited both from John Sayles' experience writing chiller screenplays and from Ernest Dickerson's fondness for the genre. But as a top-speed, low budget project the picture was anything but high tech. Instead it was embellished with what Sayles calls "purposely very tacky special effects, to say, 'Folks, this isn't Star Wars. This is a $1.98 universe you've walked into. This is about the character and not the effects.'"

As a wise critic said in a very different context, "good acting is the best special effect." John Sayles has compared The Brother From Another Planet to vintage TV shows like Route 66 and The Fugitive, stories about wanderers who find their way into pre-existing communities: "It's almost like [The Brother] is in a short story collection. He's wandering into these dark short stories. But there is that through-line of this guy trying to find out about the planet, and he's our eyes. It's really a drama of assimilation, and it was Joe Morton who made that happen, acting out the different stages of that process in scenes that were shot totally out of sequence. Each time we see him, he moves and looks a little more like one of us."