Matewan tells the tale of the 1920 struggle between coal miners and private detectives intent on violently breaking up their strike in West Virginia – a microcosm of the many bloody confrontations between working people and industrial powers in an era before the legalization of organized labor. In addition to Cooper, the independent film’s cast includes renown actors like James Earl Jones, David Strathairn, Mary McDonnell, and a young Will Oldham – better known today as singer-songwriter Bonnie “Prince” Billy.
“Well, we never heard Will sing. He might sing in in one of the church scenes, sing along with everybody else. But he was listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen when we worked with him. I mean, he was a kid, he was like 14 years old or whatever, and quite a good actor. He had done a couple theater things with theaters in Louisville, Kentucky, where he's from," Sayles recalled of a young Oldham. “It was really interesting to think of [him as a singer] because he doesn't have a crooner's voice or anything like that. His first records, I think he sounds like Jimmy Stewart when he sings, but he was just an interesting guy, and that has continued in the lyrics of his songs and the feel of his songs.”
Matewan has been embraced as a vital depiction of America’s fraught labor history, and has been included in both the Criterion Collection and the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. Its impact is also apparent in other media, like the use of a sample from the film’s soundtrack by Mason Daring on the 1997 album F♯ A♯ ∞ by Canadian post-rock legends Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
Sayles was not aware of the nod before this interview with WAMC.
“I’ll have to tell our composer," he said. "Some of the music that we wrote for it, people actually thought, 'oh, there's a great old mountain folk song,' and they got in touch with us – 'say, who did the original recording of that back in the day?' And we said, 'well, actually, we wrote it for the movie.'”
On July 25, the Schenectady, New York-born director – a Williams College graduate – will be part of a Matewan reunion held as a benefit for Images Cinema at the college’s ‘62 Center in Williamstown. Alongside Sayles and his life – and production – partner Maggie Renzi, a Berkshire County native and fellow Williams alum, will be cast members including the aforementioned Cooper, Oscar-nominee Strathairn, and Emmy-winner Gordon Clapp.
Sayles’ decision to make Matewan and re-examine the labor struggles of the 1920s in the mid-80s was a distinctly political one.
“It was a time when union membership had really fallen off quite a bit, and Ronald Reagan had just gotten to be president, and pretty much the first thing he did was to bust the air traffic controllers union, and almost everybody who worked for it, who had gone on strike, lost their job. And within a year, they'd all been replaced, and pretty much everything they asked for, because it was mostly about passenger safety, had been given," the director said. "So, it was really just kind of a public hanging.”
The shared goal of better working conditions and fair pay saw miners overcome the era’s sharp racial barriers to unite for a greater good.
“There's also in the movie this phenomenon of very diverse groups of people can get along especially well when they have a common enemy," said Sayles. "World War II is a good example of that, where there was this idea of, we're all in this together.”
A century later, in the American political landscape of 2026, Sayles is hard pressed to imagine that kind of unity prevailing.
“That goes away pretty quickly when that you know common enemy disappears, and so right now we have a very, very fractured country where people believe a lot of different things," he said. "It used to be there were three networks where you got your news. Now there's hundreds and hundreds of places all shouting their version of what's going on, so it's very, very hard to get that consensus again. And when people think of the enemy, they're often thinking about a different enemy from each other. So, there's nothing to rally around anymore.”
The movie unflinchingly depicts a time where political violence was intrinsic to the suppressed labor movement’s fight for basic human rights from their powerful employers. Sayles says the need for direct action against untenable conditions deserves a lot of thought.
“First of all, it's always just good to think about some history of what other people went through to get to where we are today," he told WAMC. "You watch the movie and you realize, oh, I get it. These guys were between a rock and a hard place and finally, even though it was dangerous and you went hungry and you didn't know how it was going to turn out, they felt like, the only thing we can do is resist. In that case, originally it was just to walk out, and eventually it was to resist with arms. But I think whether it's the same kind of situation, a union situation, or just somebody has way too much power and they really shouldn't have that much power, and the only way to get it away is to resist, and you're going to have to figure out a way to resist that's going to work. I think everybody needs that message.”
