How John Sayles transformed ‘Jamie MacGillivray’ into an epic historical novel

Writer-director John Sayles is best known for movies he’s made, such as “Passion Fish” and “Lone Star,” both of which earned him Oscar nominations for his original screenplays.

But Sayles, 72, didn’t start his career with filmmaking in mind. By the time of his movie debut with “Return of the Secaucus 7” in 1980, Sayles already had written a pair of acclaimed novels, including “Union Dues,” a finalist for the 1978 National Book Award.

“There’s two big differences,” Sayles says of the challenges that a blank page presents at the start of a screenplay or novel. “One is that when you’re writing a movie, you have to deal with time.

“In a feature, you always have to think: ‘Am I 10 minutes into this? Am I an hour into this? What should people know by now? What do they think is going to happen next?’” he says.

“Whereas, when you’re writing a novel, nobody’s going to sit and read a 700-page novel in one sitting,” Sayles says. “So you have time to walk around in the story a little bit more. You can have chapters that are telling you more about the world that the people are in but don’t necessarily advance the plot. And you can have more points of view.”

His new work, “Jamie MacGillivray,” was intended to be a film before the vagaries of independent filmmaking left Sayles’ screenplay gathering dust for two decades.

Sayles never doubted that the story had good bones. Its fictional protagonist, Jamie MacGillivray, is a young Highland Scot whose clan backed the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, which sought to overthrow King George II and restore the Stuart monarchy to the British throne.

When that uprising was crushed at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, MacGillivray escapes the noose for banishment to the American colonies, where his story moves from indentured servitude to life with a Native American tribe and fighting the English in the French and Indian War.

“I just felt like it’s such a good story I should do something with it,” Sayles says of the decision to rework it into a historical novel. “It was a kind of interesting and nice process to be able to go deeper into the history and into the characters.

“Now, I would say it’s much more like a miniseries that lasts a couple of years instead of a feature.”

Scouting expeditions

The story behind the novel began more than 20 years ago when Sayles answered the phone to find Scottish actor Robert Carlyle, then not long removed from his successes in “Trainspotting” and “The Full Monty,” on the line.

Carlyle had been recommended to Sayles as a screenwriter who might be interested in a story he wanted to develop – the story of Jamie MacGillivray, whose imagined adventures reflect the real lives of ordinary historical figures.

“I liked the idea so much I wrote a screenplay on spec,” Sayles says, using the technical term for writing a screenplay without pay or a contract lined up. “Then Robert Carlyle and Maggie (Renzi), who I live with and was the producer on it, and I scouted the Highlands of Scotland with Robert, and then came back and scouted a bunch of locations that show up in the book here in the states and in Canada.

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“And we just were never able to raise the money to make it, which is kind of the story of our lives as independent filmmakers,” he says.

Two decades later, not long before COVID-19 hit, Sayles dusted off the screenplay to see if it might work as a novel.

“In that process, of course, all those stops in between (in the script) became more stops and more characters,” he says. A young Scottish woman who briefly encounters Jamie as the book begins was chief among the characters whose stories grew as the novel expanded to 696 pages.

“Jenny was originally a very minor character who showed up only at the beginning and at the very end of the story,” Sayles says. “And doing the novel, I was able to follow her: How did she get to the New World? What was her path and how was it different than Jamie’s?”

History lessened

Sayles was raised in Schenectady, New York, a region over which the French, English and Native Americans fought before, during and after the time period of the novel.

“I kind of grew up with the official story,” he says of the French and Indian War in particular, and the early settlement of North America in general. “Which was interesting, but not the complete story, you know, or not the complex story that when you really jump into the history you realize.

“It was much more complicated than that,” Sayles says. “It was still being taught as these rough but civilized people coming over from Europe and encountering these savages. And when the two superpowers, the French and the English, got involved with each other, it became a dirty war because they had to enlist Native allies who murdered and scalped people.

“That was the official story for a long, long time, certainly in the mind of the public,” he says. “Doing the research for the screenplay gave me the basic historical structure that the novel is hung on. But doing it as a novel, I was able to get into much more of the real detail of what led to what, and just how complicated it was.”

From contemporary history, Sayles worked his way further and further back to the original documents of the times. He found the logs from sailing ships that transported convicts like Jamie and Jenny to America. He found records of an English convict ship seized by the French, its human cargo liberated and taken to the island of Martinique as happens in the novel.

There were court transcripts from the trial of Simon Fraser, the Scottish leader known as Lord Lovat, who backed the Jacobite rebellion and is a character in the book. Like Jamie, Lovat is taken to London and tried for treason, though his story ends not in the New World but on the executioner’s block.

Recent works by Native American scholars helped illuminate the history of the tribes who were squeezed between the French and English. “George Washington and the Indians,” a new history published around the time Sayles started work on the novel, provided fresh insights into the role played by the future Founding Father, who also appears as a character in the book.

Along with research, Sayles suggests that imagination can fill in the gaps if you’ve dug into the records enough.

“I always tell people, ‘Look, I adapted the novel ‘The Clan of the Cave Bear,’ where there’s like three skeletons that they’re basing everything on,” he says. “The 1740s and ’50s? That’s easy compared to that.”

Language lessons

One of the things that readers will notice throughout “Jamie MacGillivray” is Sayles’s use of dialect and other languages for the characters.

Jamie and his fellow Scots speak in the dialect of the Highlands, though Jamie himself also speaks English and French. When Jenny arrives in Martinique, she’s faced with a French-speaking populace. Later, in the colonies, Jamie realizes that to survive his time with the Lenape, or Delaware, Indians he will need to learn their language.

All of that can create a challenge for readers accustomed to standard English, no matter the period, people or place, but to Sayles it was an important way to get at the truth of the story.

“The main reason I went with it is because of Jamie and the other people who are kind of ripped out of the life that they thought that they were going to live,” he says. “They had to deal with new languages and people who didn’t speak their language. Even Highlanders would have had a hard time sometimes being understood in the Lowlands of Scotland.

“Jamie’s trying to survive, and if I don’t understand what they’re saying, I don’t know when to run away,” Sayles says. “I wanted the reader, the audience, to have to do some of that themselves.”

In a way, the verisimilitude of the dialogue helps Sayles deliver the feeling of truth that fiction can achieve and traditional history sometimes cannot.

“It’s one of the advantages,” he says of writing fiction that hews close to real events and serious research. “You can come at it from the inside out.”

A military history of the Battle of Culloden will provide the battalions and tactics and outcomes, Sayles says. The novelist’s imagination can fill in the thoughts and feelings of those who are there.

“You have a character who’s hoping to not get shot down and hoping to cover enough ground so that his side overruns the others,” Sayles says. “That character’s a warrior. He’s done this before. He knows what battle is.

“And you have a very personal experience of that battle.”

Searching for screentime

In the two decades since the story of Jamie MacGillivray began, cable networks and streaming services have expanded the landscape for limited series. For now, Sayles says there are no plans to adapt the novel.

He’s currently got a pair of movie projects he’d like to make if financing can be found. There’s a Western based on the 1926 novel “Pasó Por Aquí” – “I Passed This Way” – by the cowboy writer Eugene Manlove Rhodes. “Patronage,” an original screenplay, is set in a Chicago bar on the night that rioting broke out during the 1968 Democratic Convention.

And there’s also an almost-finished novel emerging from the bones of another unmade screenplay. “To Save the Man” is set at the Carlisle Indian School in the early 1890s.

“In an interesting way, I have to be much more visual when I’m writing a book than I do when writing a screenplay,” Sayles says, noting how his prose has to carry the descriptions that a camera might otherwise handle.

“You really have to provide much more visual detail,” he says. “On the other hand, if you want the sun to shine and you’re writing a book, the sun is shining. I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of times I wished I could do that as a director.”