Life
is good for Maggie Renzi. As the producer of eight films by John Sayles, with whom she has
lived for 23 years, the two have created a world that seems uniquely blessed
with cinematic and personal achievements. Together, they have brought to the
screen Return of the Secaucus Seven, Lianna, The Brother From Another
Planet, Matewan, City of Hope, Passion Fish, The Secret of Roan Inish, and
most recently, Lone Star. In doing so, Sayles and Renzi have realized an
ambitious union of talent and know-how that goes beyond critical plaudits.
For John Sayles, the praise comes easily and often. Besides directing his own
films, he is a scriptwriting whiz — uncredited for his work on Apollo
13, for example — and acclaimed as a short story writer, actor, novelist,
and playwright. For Maggie Renzi, Sayles’ producer since 1978 and off-set
partner for 23 years, the payback is a little more complex.
Renzi has not only produced or co-produced those eight films with Sayles
dating back to Secaucus Seven, but she has also acted in a number of
them, notably Passion Fish and Eight Men Out, as well as having
produced three Sayles-directed videos for Bruce Springsteen, “Born in the
U.S.A.,” “I’m on Fire,” and “Glory Days.” Even when the rewards are rich and
obvious, Renzi doesn’t take them lightly. Each project will be followed by yet
another project, and it’s Maggie Renzi’s job as producer to balance the various
elements.
In person, Maggie Renzi is disarmingly handsome, a trim woman in her
mid-forties whose inquisitive blue eyes shimmer with intelligence and humor. A
big fan of the cultural underground, an affinity well-illustrated in her
productions, she’s as comfortable in Austin bouncing on the balls of her feet
at Emo’s during South by Southwest as she is at the Cannes Film Festival. Back
home in New York from a publicity tour, Renzi was typically animated on the
phone during a recent conversation.
Lone Star, Renzi’s most recent collaboration with Sayles, was filmed
last summer down along the Texas border around Eagle Pass, where Sayles wove
his tale of the uneasy relationships between the whites and the Mexicans with
stars Chris Cooper, Kris Kristofferson, Frances McDormand, and Matthew
McConaughey. The film opened last week in New York to an impressive cascade of
critical praise and sellout crowds on opening weekend. This weekend it opens in
Austin. With crisp wit and eloquent wording that somehow befits her New England
upbringing, Renzi is always pleased about such hosannas but, as usual, first
talks about her next project.
“What I’m doing for the first time now is producing a movie [with current
working partner Paul Miller] that John is writing but not directing. [It’s]
from a Doris Lessing book called The Fifth Child — a great, scary book
that women particularly find haunting, about the perfect family who has four
children… and then the fifth one is a troll. We’re gonna find an English
director for it, which for me, is like finding a husband… I feel like I
should be putting together a personals ad!”
That Renzi speaks of her job with such a humorously personal metaphor is
indicative of her devotion to it — a woman who likens her movies to children,
unable to choose when asked if she had a favorite. But Maggie Renzi knows the
priorities, she just has a little edge. “I do a lot of what all producers do —
locate the money. I make sure the money is solid, hire the crew, and especially
the heads of the departments who hire their own crew. What’s unusual about me
is that I usually start with a script and a director, which is John. Most
producers have to go out looking for those people.”
“So I’m luckier than a lot of producers because I have this personal
relationship with this really good writer-director, and I don’t have to go
hunting for that. And, also, my budgets are always lower because John doesn’t
demand the same kind of money that another writer and director would cost. The
`above-the-line,’ which means, among other things, the writer and director, is
always lower on ours because John doesn’t take that kind of money.”
Renzi prides herself on this point with Sayles’ films because his movies are
so notable for their thoughtfully chosen locations, and for being economical
while delivering an expensive look. Producer in this case also means that she
looks through his eyes to determine what needs to be done.
“I’ve worked with John a really long time, so I can `predict’ him. One of the
things I can predict is that John wants to stay on budget and on schedule, so
we don’t have that adversarial relationship that producers sometimes have with
directors who don’t have the same vision. My job with John has always been to
figure out what it is he wants and make that happen.”
Of course, becoming a producer is not exactly something for which you study in
school. In fact, it’s not unusual for people to sort of fall into the position
out of simple talent for organization and an eye for detail. “We didn’t know
what I was doing was `producer,’ so I don’t have a producer credit for
Secaucus Seven, but when we finished it, we realized that must be what
it was. It wasn’t really until we started Lianna that we realized what I
had done was a lot of what producing was. For me, a lot of it was that I had
been living with John. He wanted to do this and asked me if I wanted to help,
and help turned out to be this job that was like producing. And I liked it.”
“Back when Ms. was an important magazine, I was being interviewed by
this heavy-duty lesbian feminist who said, `So, you didn’t go to film school,
and you’ve produced two movies… what do you feel qualifies you to be a good
producer?'”
“And I said, `Oh, my mother is a great hostess…’ and I could just see the
interviewer’s face fall, like, that’s not where it’s supposed to come from. But
it is where it comes from! You know — everybody got a drink? Everybody got a
chair? Are the right people talking to each other? That’s a lot of what the
real finessing of producing is. That and making sure everyone’s having a good
time.”
If Renzi showed a propensity for the producer’s hat, she also took to acting.
The lure of cast credits would seem to be ever-compelling, but Renzi has shied
away from acting of late. “It’s disturbing enough to see yourself on film. It’s
even more disturbing over the age of 40,” she declares with a laugh. “You’re
playing another character but it’s amazing and terrifying to see onscreen.
Working with John is even harder. I don’t act enough to feel secure about it
and I need a lot more reassurance from the director than is appropriate to
ask.”
“I haven’t really done any acting in a while and I’ve been saying to John, if
you’ll write me a really good part, I’ll do it. But a lot of times, especially
with these smaller parts, I often think, there’s another working actress who
would really love to have this part. To her, it could be an important
thing, and for me, it’s a kind of a lark. So… I’m interested in playing an
older woman when I get to be older but now that I’m simply middle-aged, I would
actually really rather produce. You have a lot more power. You’re a lot less
vulnerable as a producer than an actress.
“I think acting is the easy job. You just don’t get much personal power
day-to-day. When somebody congratulates me for a movie, I really know that it
is my movie; it’s marked and my fingerprints are all over it. Whereas acting a
small part in a movie, you’re one of the people who contributes but it’s not…
a Maggie Renzi movie in the same way.”
It seems so simple, the way she talks, to creatively make the transition from
idea to end. To listen to Renzi, the heart may be the best instinct. “One year,
I went home to Williamstown and the library was having a sale… all these
books on these long tables. I looked, and here were all these important books
from my childhood being sold for a quarter! So I ran inside and said, `Have you
already sold The Secret of Roan Inish?” I found it on the shelf and they
looked it up and saw that it had been declared, you know, redundant. Not
important.”
“So I bought it for a quarter and carried it around for awhile and proposed to
John that we do it as a movie. And he said, yeah, maybe sometime. Then, right
before we were set to go down to shoot Passion Fish, he said `I’ll write
the script, then when we go back to cut, you and Sarah [Green, co-producer] can
go to Ireland and start scouting for it. That’ll be the next one we do.'”
Still, Renzi’s passion is for production, and all the gratification it brings.
Nevertheless, the relationship between the personal and the professional is a
delicate balance, one that she treads “all the time. And I’m pretty used to it
and it doesn’t usually get under my skin.
“Part of it is that I understand that there is the hard side of it, which is
there’s not much distance between us. I’m close enough to John and he trusts me
enough that it’s possible for me to say, `We really need you to do this… we
really need you to reconsider the location… we really need you to think about
changing your schedule because we can only get this actor for these two days.’
Because John trusts me and loves me, and has worked with me for so long, he’s
not going to arbitrarily say no. Like you, I read those horror-show stories
about directors who misbehave and that just doesn’t happen with us. I think it
would be really hard if I wanted to be a director or if I were writer, but I do
something John doesn’t do.
“I don’t think I have the talent to be a director. I’m a much better
commentator from the sidelines. And I’m good up front. I’m good at helping to
cast, for example. I take a lot of pride in our casts, which I think are really
good. That’s one of the places I’m most involved. John’s big joke is that
`creative producer’ is an oxymoron, but I guess it is, in fact, quite creative.
From the time John talks about a story I have input, and from the first draft
he writes I can respond in a way that’s more private than strictly
professional. So I can do something insidious, I think… like the whole
decision to make Lone Star.
“John had had a really difficult time with The Secret of Roan Inish,
complicated by bad financing. It was hard to get it sold, nobody wanted to buy
it for distribution, we had a hard couple of years. I realized it was time for
us to make another movie, time for him to leave home and go on
location. To do this thing he really likes to do, which is to make a movie from
beginning to end. All he’d done in between was write for other people, which is
satisfying for him but doesn’t satisy the whole thing.
“That’s when I decided to go down to Amistad [on the Mexican border]. One of
the things John was talking about was this Texas movie, so I thought maybe if I
get him out of our backyard and down to the border, he’ll see something down
there that will make him think it’s time to make a movie, and this is the one
to make.
“We spent about four days driving around Amistad, the border, and about a week
after we got back home, John said, `Let’s make the Texas one. I’ll write
it.'”
Renzi takes great pride in recounting these moments, these stills from their
own story. She seems to delight in noting them, their details, and filing them
away in her mind for future use. “Sometimes my job is to say, `John, tell the
story about the soap opera star… the sheriff on the border…’ because the
more he tells it, the more he tells the story, the more he finds out if this is
gonna be the next movie he makes, or if it’s not quite working out. Part of his
gestation is private and part of it is telling it to other people. It’s part of
the balance.”
“My credentials, in my tiny world, are sufficient that it doesn’t matter if
I’m a woman or a man. All that probably matters is that I’ve got a line to John
Sayles. You’ve heard that great line about Ida Lupino, that she fucked her way
to the middle? Well, here I am! The middle will do for me.”
This article appears in June 28 • 1996 and June 28 • 1996 (Cover).