I figured, 'When is that ever going to happen again?'. So I basically set out the opposite way movies are made; I set out with a budget first. I said, 'What can I do well for $40,000?'.

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.