Basically, if you could get a good trailer out of the script, Roger had no objection to you making a really good movie. He liked it if you did. He liked the more cleverness and ingenuity you could bring to it. He just wasn't going to give you any more money.

He used the money to partially fund the fantasy The Brother from Another Planet a film about a black three-toed slave who escapes from another planet and finds himself at home among the people of Harlem. [citation needed] Sayles gets the rest of his funding by working as a script doctor; he did rewrites for Apollo 13 and Mimic. In 1983 after the films Baby It's You (starring Rosanna Arquette) and Lianna (a story in which a married woman becomes discontented with her marriage and falls in love with another woman) Sayles received a MacArthur Fellowship.

John Thomas Sayles (born September 28 1950) is an American independent film director screenwriter and author.