>> JARED BOWEN: I'm Jared Bowen; coming up on Open Studio, while many writers are intimidated by the blank page, acclaimed filmmaker and novelist John Sayles finds it liberating.

>> In a book, you got blank pages.

You have... get to choose what you put in there, and what you emphasize and when you say it, and those kind of things.

>> BOWEN: Then pioneering photographer Rosamond Purcell's first retrospective brings her 50-year career into focus.

>> Taking a photograph can constitute a page in, in a permanent book of memories.

That is, I can look at a photograph and remember the circumstances or, or things surrounding it.

>> BOWEN: Plus, one-on-one with boundary-breaking ballerina, Misty Copeland.

It's all now on Open Studio.

♪ ♪ First up, acclaimed independent filmmaker John Sayles has twice been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, first for Passion Fish, and then again for his 1996 picture, Lone Star.

>> You're being mighty careless with your mouth, son.

>> You ever shoot a man who was looking you in the eye, Charlie?

It's a whole different story, isn't it?

You're fired.

>> BOWEN: Sayles has always been a storyteller-- as an actor, director, screenwriter, and novelist.

I recently sat down with him to talk about his latest book, Jamie MacGillivray.

With his saga set in the 18th century, Sayles takes us from Scotland to the American colonies in a sweeping and closely observed work.

>> BOWEN: John Sayles, thank you so much for being here.

>> Great to be here.

>> BOWEN: Congratulations on the book.

What brings you to Scotland and then all over, ending up in Canada, for this?

>> You know, over 20 years ago, I got a call from the Scots actor Robert Carlyle, who I didn't know-- I'd been recommended to him as a screenwriter, and he said, "I have this great idea for a movie, Scots Highlander who was defeated at the Battle of Culloden, where he's, you know, been a rebel against the English crown.

And instead of hanging him, the English transport him to the New World and he escapes and then gets involved with Native tribes there.

And I liked the idea so much I wrote a screenplay on spec.

We, we got to travel around with Robert Carlyle in the highlands of Scotland, which was a lot of fun.

And then we came back and scouted places that also show up in the book, the kind of former Georgia penal colony area in the Florida-Georgia border, um, central Pennsylvania, up in Canada.

And over the years we never were able to raise the money to make a movie.

And so about 20 years later, I just felt like it's such a good story, why don't I try to make it into a novel?"

>> BOWEN: I mean, your story is your life as an actor, director, screenwriter and, of course, novelist.

But you've been sitting with this for 20 years.

Was it marinating?

Did you, were you returning to it in your head?

>> Not so much, because I've had so much other things to do, but it was always this kind of, "Oh, that was such a cool project," you know?

"I wish there were some way we could get it done."

And as it's gotten harder for us to make movies and-- most people to make movies-- rather than easier, it just seemed like, that's just not going to happen.

You know, that kind of money for a standalone feature.

And, you know, there are differences between, you know, writing a screenplay and obviously writing a novel.

I think one of the main ones is, um, if I'm making a movie and I have a scene in the Tolbooth Prison in Edinburgh, I just say to the art department, Tolbooth Prison, you know, Edinburgh 1747.

>> BOWEN: (chuckles) >> And they do the rest of the work.

In a book, I have to do that research, but also how am I going to describe this?

Why is that important?

And the cool thing about that is that it leads to all these other story ideas.

>> BOWEN: Well, I was, as I'm thinking about your process there, I'm wondering what that teases out of you to exorcize yet another part of your creative brain to have to visualize and employ the research process.

>> Yeah, it's, you know, very often in movies you're trying to move the eye of the, of the audience.

Some of it is camera angles, but some of it is, you know, lighting.

You let some things fall off, some of its focus, some things are out of focus and whatever.

In a book, you've got blank pages.

You have, you get to choose what you put in there and what you emphasize and when you say it and those kind of things.

>> BOWEN: Well this, as you say, it started off as an idea for a film, but now we're in this age of series and this is ripe for a series, is it not?

And do you do you find a link there?

And in this new way of storytelling, is that where you think this might be headed?

>> A miniseries is often a better way to tell a big novel than a single, you know, film.

And I've had to adapt very good books into, you know, screenplays, and you just say, "Oh, my God, you know, maybe if I just do the first half of it."

There was a movie set in the same century, Northwest Passage.

And, you know, it's a Kenneth Roberts novel.

And they just decided, oh, you know, the main guy, Robert Rogers, he's kind of a great guy in the first half of the book, and kind of a heel in the second.

Let's just do the first half of the book.

Spencer Tracy is going to play him.

And you have to make those kind of decisions.

In a miniseries, you actually might say, "Oh, it's going so well, let's invent some new stuff, and make it even bigger."

>> BOWEN: Well, you're a man synonymous, of course, with independent film.

How do you look at the, the future of film?

I hate to ask such a clichéd question but I think a lot of people wonder, "Is it done?"

>> It's a big question mark.

You know, the conditions for when we started making movies, right about 1978, 1980, were kind of perfect.

You know, just, just the stars aligned where it was a very possible thing.

There were more theaters that showed off-Hollywood movies.

Their... home video was just showing up.

There weren't streamers.

People weren't getting things on their computer.

There weren't computers that you were getting things on.

And so a lot of things have changed.

And so for me, it's a big question mark.

Certainly, the Sundance Film Festival gets an awful lot of people sending in movies every year, thousands of them.

So people are still making movies, and that's kind of easier than it used to be.

Getting them seen and making any of your money back, if you spent any money, which you probably did, is getting harder and harder.

>> BOWEN: What about how people are seeing them, and on phones and tablets?

I saw Everything Everywhere All at Once on an airplane.

It just happened to be the most convenient way to see it.

And so I availed myself of that because... >> There it was.

>> BOWEN: I hate to say it, but I'm less inclined to go to a theater these days.

>> Yeah, did you at least pay for the headphones and not watch it over somebody's shoulder?

>> BOWEN (laughs): They were my headphones.

>> Oh, good, good.

Yeah, well, it's, you know, you're not getting the full benefit of the movie, especially if it had some size to it and good cinematography and a great soundtrack and those kind of things.

You're just getting less of the experience.

One of the big differences as an audience member between books and movies is that in books, you can get people to feel things, to know things, to think about things, but they have to go through your head first.

In a movie, there's stuff that just goes straight to the viscera, and less of it comes through to the viscera if you're watching it on your phone, or a very small, you know, screen.

And, you know, there's great technicians who work in the movie industry who do all this work to make it a great theater experience.

And you just, you kind of understand, you know, I saw the second Dune, which I thought was very well made, but I saw it on an airplane.

And, you know, if I get a chance, I will go back and actually see that movie on a big screen.

>> BOWEN: And so I feel slight-- if you're watching on a plane, too, I feel a little bit better.

>> Yeah.

>> BOWEN: I want to go back to your book for a moment.

You write about... there's... there are a lot of tough things that happen here, as would happen in that time frame in the 18th century.

I'm wondering, as you're writing and seeing the state of the world today and how the ill humanity in people, how much that came to the fore in what you were writing.

>> Yeah.

I mean, what's fascinated whenever you go into a period and different places than you grew up is... my, my big interest and what I spent a lot of my time doing is trying to get in the heads of the characters.

And which, you know, I was an actor for a while and you do that as an actor, and if you do it thoroughly, you have to ask those questions of, "Okay, is this before the women's movement?"

"Is this before the concept of democracy?

"Is this before capitalism?

Is this before Freud?

"What, you know, what agendas will people have and what, what can they see?"

There may be stuff right in front of them that they can't see because of the prejudices of their class or sex or time or, you know, whatever.

So when you factor all those, those things in, this is a tough time to stay alive.

People are fighting over stuff that now we think is crazy and, and ridiculous.

But also sometimes they're fighting over stuff that we would fight over ourselves.

Somebody is trying to take our land, you know?

Somebody's trying to take over our country and tell us, you know, we have to change our religion or our language or whatever.

So the two main characters, Jenny Ferguson and Jamie MacGillivray, are people who are just kind of torn out of one, you know, road of life that they thought they were going to travel down.

And they're thrown into, you know, this totally new one.

And they're just trying to survive at first.

>> BOWEN: Well, it is a fascinating read.

And as I think you can say about the best writers, you can smell so many of the places that you're describing here, you bring us there.

Thank you so much.

>> Thanks for having me.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: Next, we continue to mark Women’s History Month with Rosamond Purcell.

For some 50 years, the photographer has been an innovator in the field of photo play, conjuring mind-bending images.

She received her first-ever retrospective at the Addison Gallery of American Art last year.

So now, a conversation I first had with Purcell just as the exhibition opened.

Rosamond Purcell, thank you so much for being with us today.

>> Oh, it's a pleasure.

>> BOWEN: Well, tell me about-- I gravitated, I said we have to do this interview in this space.

You were very happy to do this interview in this space.

Tell me about it.

>> When I was teaching a workshop up in, up in Rockland, Maine, and it was not supposed to be about found objects at all.

It was about the ambrotype photographs, the early Polaroids.

And... but we went on a field trip, because I don't like being in the classroom very much.

And we came upon sort of piles of... just sort of like dinosaur parts, of scrap metal.

And I just had to make them stop.

And we walked in, and it was 13 acres, as it turned out, of, of scrap metal and found objects and detritus that had been gathered for a number of years.

>> BOWEN: You likened it to dinosaurs?

>> Well, yes, because it was as if... you don't usually come across dinosaurs in a great heap, but it was... because the parts were so enormous, and just were made out of so many disparate parts that it was a little bit like a metal bone room, say, metal bone, bone field.

>> BOWEN: 99 out of 100 people would pass by that field and not see anything, necessarily.

Has it always been in you to look at something like that and see this mountain of opportunity?

>> I just think it shook... shook me out of a current train of thought, which is "I am here to teach these students "how I developed a certain technique using Victorian plates."

And boy, we don't have to do that right now.

(both laugh) >> BOWEN: As you're looking at objects, is, is it an emotional response?

Is it a clinical response?

>> It is looking at something and saying, "You know, that's beautiful."

And then figuring out, "wait a minute, "it's not really designed to be beautiful, "it's an object that has been... "that has been cast off.

Oh, it is a pipe for this."

And so the identification of what it originally was has been sort of concealed by the condition under which it's found.

But then when you find it and you recognize it, that's a way of rescuing, rescuing it.

>> BOWEN: I'd like to ask you about a few pieces.

We see very few portraits of people, um... other than when you first started out.

But we do see Fred Astaire.

I'm curious about that.

>> About Fred Astaire?

Well, when you go to natural history museums, the animals, the specimens don't necessarily have the same myth and history as the, as that particular animal does.

But in the case of primates, and especially apes-- that is, without tails, like the gibbon-- they have a sort of a, a personality that is conveyed by writers who have studied them, that is comparable to... comparing them to, to sort of the character-- he's the gentleman of, of the forest.

He's a beaut... he's in a very, very sort of haunting cry at twilight in the forest, and is supposed to be very sort of decorous and gentlemanly and not a wild and crazy monkey, and... or ape.

And the gibbon that I photographed in the Natural History Museum at Harvard is clasping his legs with his arms.

And that is, of course, the way that the taxidermist has set him up.

And he just has a sort of a... a look of composure, with white cotton eyes.

And that reminded me of the photograph that I'd taken of Fred Astaire.

And they just seem to-- the gentlemen of the forest and the gentlemen of our whole, whole lives.

(chuckles) You know, somehow they go together.

>> BOWEN: The sequence you did on Shakespeare.

>> Yes.

>> BOWEN: How did that occur to you, to render Shakespeare as you did?

>> Well, I was, I was asked by, by the scholar, and friend, Michael Witmore, who is now the director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, who was familiar with my work, if we couldn't do something together on Shakespeare.

And I said, "Oh, come on, go away."

One day I found a mercury glass bottle in an antique store.

And I thought, "Now this is... this is sort of like a moving stream.

This is like something that will never be fixed.

But you can fix it with a camera very quickly, if you have the depth of field and so forth.

So maybe you could catch something in it that was both distorted but readable, and it could read as if it were Caliban, as if it were King Lear, as if it was a... you know, Ophelia.

Different characters from Shakespeare would show up in a sort of amorphous and warped way that you couldn't possibly get on stage with a real camera.

>> BOWEN: What is it to, to look back at the span of your career in this exhibition?

>> Well, it's sort of amazing.

Taking a photograph can constitute a page in, in a permanent book of memories.

That is, I can look at a photograph and remember the circumstances or things surrounding it-- how I had to push the curtain up in order to get the light; how I had to argue, you know, about removing the card from a, from a specimen; who was there, who was helping, what they said.

And that is sort of... it is really... it really does trigger, for me anyway, what was actually going on.

Maybe that's because I went into collections... with my own... hope of what would happen if I was let alone.

>> BOWEN: Well, thank you so much for this conversation.

♪ ♪ Misty Copeland, who made history as the first Black female principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre has just been awarded the 2023 Jacob's Pillow Dance Award.

It's presented each year to an artist of exceptional vision and achievement.

To take stock of her groundbreaking career, we're returning to a conversation we had in 2017 talking about her book Ballerina Body.

Misty Copeland, thank you so much for joining us.

>> Thank you!

>> BOWEN: So you wrote this book-- is it because you had, you finally got this conception of what the body is?

Because it took you a long time to figure out what your body is.

>> Yeah, it's been... it's been a long process, and I feel like it's not something that ever ends.

Like, we're, as people, as humans, we are just constantly working on ourselves, and especially as an artist, you know, our moods, our bodies, everything changes from day to day.

I'm sharing, you know, words of advice that have helped me to stay strong, and support that have gotten me to where I am.

>> BOWEN: Well, when you were told you didn't have the right body, what did that mean?

Because, I mean, you made your body your own, essentially, to be the dancer that you are.

>> It took me a long time, I think, to understand that the body that I have now is not the body of the 13-year-old girl who was called a prodigy.

This is the body I'm in now, and I can make it its healthiest self, but it's going to look different.

And I have to be able to love and accept that.

Being an African-American woman in the classical ballet world, a lot of that vocabulary, to me, is kind of hidden messaging, and an acceptable way in the classical dance world to tell minorities or African-American dancers that they're... they don't have the right skin color, by telling them they don't have the right body.

So, for me, it was really deciphering that, understanding it, and talking about it.

>> BOWEN: Can that happen now?

I was thinking about that, in terms of the "Oscars so white" campaign.

More so, I think, that could even apply to dance and the ballet world, in 2017.

>> It's really insane, that we are where we are in the classical dance world.

But it's even easier, I think, to kind of sneak by when we're not seen on such a big platform.

And a lot of people, you know, in America especially, don't know a lot about the classical ballet world.

So they kind of live in our little bubble and gotten away with, you know, ABT, you know, 77 years now in existence, and I'm the first Black woman to reach this position of principal dancer.

I feel like my mission has been just kind of bringing that to light, bringing that to the forefront of, you know, pop culture and beyond the ballet world.

Because I feel like so many young people could benefit from being a part of an art form like this if they could only see themselves represented.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: Is it even beginning to change, do you think?

>> Right now, we're seeing such a shift in terms of, young dancers of color, or young children of color, that are looking at me and seeing an opportunity.

And so they want to be a part of this.

But it's going to take a long time for them to get the training, get to a point where we start to see the effects in the top-tiered companies, where we see more dancers, more minorities being given opportunities to get into these companies.

>> BOWEN: And every performer is filled with-- or most performers, I think-- are filled with some sort of doubt, and you wrote about, a little bit about that in your book, as well.

But when you're... when you've gone into this company, and leading up to that, did you have more doubt because of your skin color, and looking around and not seeing yourself reflected in the rest of the company?

>> Absolutely.

Before I came to American Ballet Theatre, I didn't have any doubt.

You know, it was like, I'm good at this, I'm being told, you know, I am the ideal ballerina, and then I became a professional, and I looked around, yeah, and it was, like, wait, wait, I'm not-- I'm no longer the ideal in the bigger, broader picture of the classical ballet world.

And it was, you know, I felt defeated, for so many years where it was like, why am I doing this?

I'm working so hard, and I'm just kind of like digging myself deeper into this hole, and I'm never going to get the opportunities that I feel I deserve because of my talent.

And, and it was important for me to have people in my life that I could look at, even if they weren't classical dancers, but they were successful.

Especially Black women.

>> BOWEN: You write in the book, too, about how people are consistently surprised at how much you have to work still.

It's not as if you just, you get to be in the company and that's it.

But tell us about your work process throughout the day.

>> Yeah.

You know, it's about the journey, and if you don't love the journey, then it's not worth it.

And I feel like we need to approach the way we eat and exercise as a journey, not as this end goal that, you know, you're like running to get to.

But we spend so much time in the studio, so much more time than I think people realize.

You know, we're not just on stage performing all the time.

I'm in the rehearsal studio five days a week when I'm in a rehearsal season, preparing.

>> BOWEN: I was going to ask, how do you keep up the stamina?

You must be exhausted all the time.

>> Yeah.

(laughs) Well, when we're in a rehearsal or touring season, you have, you know, these lulls where you'll have a week off here and there, but when we're in performance season-- this is our biggest performance season, right now, that we're about to enter into, our spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House, and it goes for two months straight.

It's, I mean, there's no way around it.

>> BOWEN: That determination makes me think of that final look in the Under Armour commercial.

And you look at the camera-- tell me about what you're doing there, what you're thinking there.

>> I feel like I found a new, renewed sense of, like, power when I partnered with Under Armour.

And they've really just encouraged me to be okay with being strong and still feminine and being a woman.

>> BOWEN: Which, it feels so weird that you said that they have to be okay with that, that again that's still something you're contending with.

>> Yeah, people don't, you know, it's hard, I think, for people to view women-- you know, it's like you're one or the other, and I think that it's so feminine and beautiful to be powerful and be in control of yourself and be confident as a woman.

>> BOWEN: And finally, I just wanted to ask, I'm very privileged to, to be here with you at this moment when there are all these young girls here, and I've watched how excited they are to meet you.

What does that give you, when you have those encounters with people who legitimately-- and it's great that they're excited to see you, not necessarily a big movie star or somebody, but somebody who has worked on craft.

>> I love that you're acknowledging that, because I think about that a lot.

And, you know, and I always say this, but I don't feel like-- you know, it's like a movie star and they're like, oh I just need to get this selfie, so, you know, but it means something.

And I don't think it's because it's me.

It's because of what I represent.

They want to be a part of something that's bigger than them.

They want to be a part of something that's going to make them better, that makes them feel like they're included.

And that's an amazing thing.

>> BOWEN: All right, well, Misty Copeland, thank you so much for joining us.

>> Thank you.

Thank you so much.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: And that is all for this edition of Open Studio.

Next week, Boston Ballet and renowned choreographer Nanine Linning leap into a conversation about saving our oceans.

As always, you see us first on YouTube.com/GBHNews.

Follow us on Instagram and Twitter @OpenStudioGBH.

I'm @TheJaredBowen.

And you can visit us online at GBH.org/OpenStudio.

We hope to see you here next week.

Until then, I'm Jared Bowen, thanks for joining us.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪