A LONE STAR IN HIS OWN RIGHT; FILMMAKER JOHN SAYLES EARNS ENVY, ACCLAIM MAKING SMALL-BUDGET GEMS THAT TAKE A CHANCE.

Byline: Glenn Whipp Daily News Film Writer

Thousands of film school students want to be John Sayles, and it's easy to understand why.

Sayles' approach to movies is bare-bones basic. He writes his own scripts, usually on commercially risky subjects like a coal miner's strike or the 1919 ``Black Sox'' World Series scandal, and then directs them. He often comes up with his own financing and typically pays himself scale. If his pictures make a profit - which, given their modest budgets, they usually do - Sayles gets paid. If not, there's always next time.

Two years ago, Sayles enjoyed his biggest commercial success with ``Lone Star,'' a contemporary border western that won him a second Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. (Sayles was previously nominated in 1993 for ``Passion Fish.'')

Colleagues and studio executives loved the film and Sayles could have parlayed its success to make just about any movie he wanted - even one with a budget totaling more than, say, $5 million.

But budgets and box office don't much interest Sayles. And he did end up making the film he wanted. His latest effort, ``Men With Guns,'' is a Latin-American political drama about a doctor who sends medical students into rural areas to help the poor farm people. Years later, he learns that his students may all be dead, victims of ``men with guns.''

The film, which opens Friday, is done almost entirely in Spanish with English subtitles.

``I guess it's not the best career move,'' the 47-year-old Sayles says, laughing. ``But then, I wouldn't really know what a good career move might be.''

While basking in the sun on the patio at Santa Monica's Shutters on the Beach (``We don't get much sun this time of year in New Jersey,'' Sayles says), Sayles talked about personal responsibility, the challenges of making a movie in a foreign language and his personal exercise regimen of carrying sandbags through the jungle.

Q: Do you deliberately like to confound people's expectations or does it come naturally?

A: Usually, all I'm thinking about is whether we can get the money to make the movie. I never really think about my career.

When people say ``Men With Guns'' isn't the right movie to make after ``Lone Star,'' I think, ``Well, Francis Ford Coppola made `The Conversation' after `The Godfather,' which certainly wasn't a good commercial move.'' It turned out to be one of his best movies, though.

Q: Why make the movie in Spanish?

A: I didn't feel like I had a choice. The story was about this guy (Dr. Fuentes) who travels outside his capital city and realizes that there's this whole other world in his own country that he didn't even know about.

Q: Where did the idea for the film come from?

A: I remember this survey during the Gulf War, where something like 65 percent of Americans said they were glad the Army was censoring the news. Their reason was that they just didn't want to know the details. They had known the details in Vietnam, and the details made them feel bad. And they didn't want to feel bad about this war.

Q: Just like the doctor didn't want to know about his government's actions against the peasants.

A: Exactly. During the Gulf War, when the media did dig, people complained that it was all gloom and doom instead of celebrating our brave boys over there who were risking their lives. Well, both things were going on. They were over there risking their lives, but the bombs fell and they blew people up and those people weren't always combatants.

Q: Is this willful ignorance just part of human nature?

A: I think so. Americans seem to have learned something from the Vietnam War and that's to be a little slower on the trigger. If somebody is going to go shoot somebody in your name, I think you have a responsibility to know a little more about it than the official version.

And that applies whether you are in America and it's Iraq or if you're in Germany and they're marching into Poland.

Q: You don't identify the setting for ``Men With Guns.'' Why?

A: Right. It's not called ``Salvador.'' It's about people - and they could be anywhere - who are trying to just raise their kids and raise some rice. Then men with guns come, and everything changes.

And it doesn't matter which side comes first. They come and they say, ``Your kids are in the army now. Here's some flags, here's some slogans, you're on our side.'' And then a week later, other men with guns come and say, ``Here's our flag, here's our slogans, now you're on our side,'' and they punish the people for cooperating with the ``enemy.''

Most of these people don't want to choose a side. They just want to raise their kids and their rice.

Q: Again, you could draw a parallel to the situation in Iraq.

A: Sure. They're thinking, ``We're not going to mess with Saddam Hussein. He's got one of the biggest armies in the world. Obviously, we're not going to overthrow this guy even if we're not crazy about him. And now some other people are going to come and bomb us from the sky.'' They're caught between a rock and a hard place. They can't win.

Q: You wrote this movie in Spanish and pretty much just spoke Spanish to the cast and crew. I'm guessing your language skills improved dramatically.

A: Well, I tried my best. They had to tell me if I wasn't making sense. If I didn't hear anything, I figured I had made my point.

We had four other languages spoken, too; so sometimes I would watch the scene for the emotions and if they made a line error, they would have to tell me so we could start over.

Q: You didn't leave yourself much time, what with 40 locations in just 37 shooting days.

A: We did a lot of schlepping. We were rarely in one place for more than two days. And a lot of time we were in isolated areas, so we had to carry all the equipment a mile or two into the jungle.

Q: Is that how you work on your arm strength?

A: Carrying sandbags is definitely a great workout. I do no other exercise, really, even when we aren't filming. But if you're going to walk a couple of miles into the jungle, you should carry something.

One guy was telling me about this famous actor/bodybuilder who insisted that his weights be carried into the forest so he could look really flexed for his shots. And they told him, ``Hey, we've got these lead weights for the crane, can't you use those?'' Nope. And he wouldn't carry anything.

Q: Well, they probably had that built into the budget. Free-weights handler, $50,000. But with your budgets, I don't imagine you could do that.

A: Well, we made ``Men With Guns'' for $2.5 million. And that's filming in Mexico City, Veracruz and Chiapas - 40 locales between the three of them. The equivalent would be like filming here in New York, Cincinnati and Wyoming and having to take an 11-hour bus ride to make the scouting trips.

Q: Sounds like an adventure. How do you bring a movie like this in at that cost?

A: You just have to plan it out carefully in pre-production and move fast. There were a couple of sequences where I didn't get enough footage, so I had to improvise in the editing room. But that was the story for my first four or five movies, so I had plenty of experience doing that.

You could say it brought back some wonderful - and not-so-wonderful - memories.

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2 Photos

PHOTO (1) Writer-director John Sayles talks with young Dan Rivera Gonzales on the set of ``Men With Guns.''

(2) Dr. Fuentes (Federico Luppi) comes to an awful realization about his country in the film.