Lone Star

Buff pins on a badge and tracks down writer/director John Sayles to Investigate his 90s masterpiece…

In the late-70s, when Lewis Teague was shooting creature feature Alligator, its writer, John Sayles, took a day trip to the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas.

Outside the Alamo Church, picketers urged visitors (over 1.6m a year) to not so readily accept the American version of events being preached. This version – a celebration of how former Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett and a small band of men heroically held out, and ultimately sacrificed themselves, against an army of evil Mexicans – is a proud moment in Texan and American history. It’s taught in schools and can be seen in the John Wayne western The Alamo.

‘Print the legend’ goes the line in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. But Sayles got to wondering about how it always seems to be the victors who get to write up the history books. Some 18 years later, he poured all of his research into the Oscar-nominated Lone Star (1996), a masterful western/detective story that ends with one character saying, ‘Forget the Alamo.’

‘Legends are used for: “This is who we are, this is how we became, this is how we got our land,”’ says Sayles with a rueful smile. A founding father of the American independent scene in the 80s and 90s, his socially conscious, politically engaged body of work includes such classics as The Return of the Secaucus 7, Matewan and Eight Men Out. Lone Star is his masterpiece. ‘Legends are usually based on something that happened but they’re not necessarily the truth. When the legend starts to become destructive rather than constructive, what do we do with it? Do we throw it out, do we modify it? In the United States today, there’s all these monuments to Confederate generals. In most of the southern states, they finally don’t fly the stars and bars [flag], which to white southerners, for many years, was a point of pride. To Black southerners and Black people in general in the United States, that’s the Nazi flag.’

Filmed in the border town of Eagle Pass and along the Rio Grande, Lone Star uses a murder mystery to unearth the region’s storied history (‘The War of Texas Independence, the US-Mexican war, the dirty war between Texas rangers and Mexican community…’ says Sayles) and the racial tensions in this melting pot of ethnicities. The murdered man is ‘bribes ’n’ bullets’ sheriff Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson), who disappeared back in 1957 – and his bones have just been found in the desert. Doing the detecting, meanwhile, is modern-day sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), the son of the legendary lawman, Buddy (Matthew McConaughey), who first stood up to Wade and then stepped into his shoes when he disappeared.

‘I said to Chris, “Every question you ask, it’s not ‘Where were you on the night of so-and-so, January ’57?’ It’s, ‘What kind of human being was my father?’”’ says Sayles of Lone Star’s subtext. ‘Sam only knew him this way. So it’s, “You know stuff about him I don’t know. I need to know that. For my heart as well as to solve the mystery.”’ As well as scrutinising race, identity, political corruption, myths, how the past informs the present and the intricate workings of a fully functioning community, Lone Star is a potent tale of fathers and sons.

Sayles explains why such stories often act as the meat of drama. ‘It works in a personal way and a metaphoric way,’ he says. ‘People have a father or they don’t have a father, and the absence of a father can be part of the story. Metaphorically, who’s the person who hands down their world view to you? A lot of the point of the movie, of how the past isn’t really gone, is that we don’t start with a blank slate. The people around us give us the official story: this is how the world works. You can go with it or question it; accept or reject.’

Unfolding over 135 unhurried minutes, Lone Star is entirely riveting, a treat of sun-bleached widescreen lensing, rich characterisation, colourfully demotic dialogue, and flavoursome music spanning many genres to reflect the area’s rich cultural mix. It’s Sayles’ biggest box-office hit ($12.5m from a $5m budget) and garnered rave reviews lauding how perfectly it caught the zeitgeist. Now, it’s more relevant than ever.

‘The scene where the concerned parents are arguing with the teacher over how Texas history is being taught, that could happen tomorrow,’ says Sayles. ‘It’s going on now, in Texas. In Florida, there are African-American clerics who are saying, “Well, if they’re going to lie about our history, and make it a law that you have to lie about our history in schools, part of Sunday School will be about what really happened with African Americans and white people in this state and in this country.”’

As for the Tex-Mex border, in the 90s, unarmed patrol guards just sent those crossing illegally back with a ‘goodbye and good luck’, says Sayles. He shakes his head. ‘There’s a wall there now.’

LONE STAR IS OUT ON CRITERION COLLECTION 4K UHD AND BLU-RAY ON 26 FEBRUARY.