Work and Class in Movies, with John Sayles

Some of the most exciting movies being made today are tackling class tensions and the role of work in our lives. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, our cover story last issue, is one major example, with its twisty upstairs-downstairs thriller set-up. But many other films have been taking up the subjects of work and class in a variety of different ways: Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, Stephen Soderbergh’s High Flying Bird, Mike Leigh’s Peterloo, Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, and Greta Gerwig’s upcoming movie Little Women (the cover of our latest issue). For our latest Film Comment talk at Film at Lincoln Center, we were delighted to discuss work and class with veteran independent filmmaker John Sayles, whose film about striking miners, Matewan, is now available in the Criterion Collection. Also joining Sayles and FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold was Teo Bugbee, a contributor to Film Comment and The New York Times who also works as an organizer for Writers Guild of America East. Starting off with how Matewan was conceived, we covered a lot of ground, spanning decades at the movies and in American history.