The Secret of Roan Innish tells us a lot about the career of writer-director John Sayles. Its earnest pedantry and worthy Oirishness make it his least likeable movie, but the fact that the idea for a kiddie-pic not only came to him but that he promptly went right ahead and did it, says just about all you need know. Sayles is single-minded, committed, a no frills kind of a guy.

That's what surfaces most strongly through this extended interview. Sayles is a talented, in-demand artist, but this is nuts'n'bolts, blue collar film-making. It's noticeable how 'we' did this, how 'our' film was that; John Sayles wouldn't subscribe to auteur theory. One wonders if he would even bristle at the suggestion that he's a 'socialist' film-maker:
'I'm always interested in responsibility and when we expect people to just be responsible for themselves'.

Of course, the story of this long overdue book is one of a career touched by no small measure of luck. 'Indie' is now a debased, catch-all currency (Alan Rudolph argues that only someone like James Cameron can be truly independent), but Sayles' refusal to direct for hire does rather bestow upon him that sexy, maverick status. As a young film writer with two acclaimed novels to his name, he inevitably found work with Roger Corman, penning some of the best of the semi-satirical horror flicks of the late seventies: Alligator, Joe Dante's The Howling and Piranha. His earnings were ploughed back into his 1979 debut behind the camera with that modest chamber piece The Return of The Secacucus Seven, and he's negotiated a similar relationship between commerce and artistry ever since. Writing gigs like Mimic and Apollo 13 exist to put food on the table and film in his camera.

As a relentlessly serious film-maker, critical plaudits have inevitably been more forthcoming than box office, but financial reward has seldom been the point. 1996's Lone Star, his most critically and commercially successful movie, has not, for example, led naturally to Godzilla 2: the forthcoming Men With Guns is a politically aware South American thriller shot entirely in Spanish.

Curiously, for a somewhat wilful outsider, the John Sayles that emerges from these pages is John Sayles: Classical Film-Maker. Even at his most politicised (you won't name a more committed American film in the last decade than his brilliant socialist western, Matewan), he never loses sight of his need to tell a story. Techniques have become steadily more sophisticated with City of Hope's elaborate narrative spiral or the chronological and cultural divides of Lone Star, but never at the expense of plot. It's what makes Sayles the true inheritor of the seventies Golden Age.