Some questions answered about Saints and Poets
I’m a writer and director who tries to make work that feels honest to how I see the world. I’ve never been particularly interested in measuring my life by choices that fall inside or outside what others consider the norm. For me, it comes down to relevance, integrity, and how we affect the people we touch, personally and professionally.
My first film, One Man’s Ceiling, screened in the jury competition for feature films at the inaugural Tribeca Film Festival in 2002. More than twenty years later, I still find myself drawn to the same questions: How does our past shape who we believe we are in the present? Can we become the person others think we are? And how much of the person we once were remains when time has changed everything around us?
Saints and Poets explores those questions through Don Porter, an aging author who is no longer certain he is the man who wrote Song of the Leafbird, the book that made him famous fifty years ago. The book has taken on a life of its own, while Don is left confronting what remains of the person who created it.
This film is about time, memory, mortality, legacy, and our increasingly complicated relationship with the world around us. It’s a road trip through one man’s struggle to understand what he has been, what he has become, and whether those two things can still be reconciled as he confronts his advancing Alzheimer’s, a public that has turned him into something of a legend, and the possibility that the legacy he is trying to escape may be the one thing that still connects him to the world.
-Richard LaPorta
Well, what’s the story? Or what’s it really about?
The story is about Don Porter, an aging, once-celebrated author who wrote one book fifty years ago, Song of the Leafbird. The book became a celebrated work, but Don has spent years living in isolation, and now his memory is beginning to fade.
He leaves Chicago and heads west to Portland, where he’s been pushed to attend a literary festival celebrating the 50th anniversary of the book that made him famous. He makes the journey in his old red Taurus, carrying the ashes of his beloved dog.
Along the way, a series of unexpected encounters pulls him back into the world and forces him to confront his past, his mortality, and the strange legacy of a book he’s no longer sure he really wrote.
But at its core, it’s about whether we can actually recognize the life we’re living while we’re living it, what happens when we realize we may have spent too much of it looking somewhere else, and our very human need to connect with one another.
Saints and Poets is about what it means to be human in an age of distraction.
Through Don Porter, an aging, once-celebrated author who has lived as a recluse by both circumstance and choice, the film explores our struggle to find meaning, connection, and purpose as time moves forward. Don is forced out of his isolation and into a world that has changed dramatically since the last time he truly participated in it.
I have lived through the onset of the Digital Age, and I both celebrate and question what it has brought us. The ability to instantly access information and communicate with one another has transformed our lives, but it has also created new forms of isolation. We are more connected than ever, yet increasingly removed from the experience of simply being present with another person.
That tension between the old and the new, between what we had and what we have, is at the center of Saints and Poets. The film isn’t an argument against technology. It is a question about what technology cannot give us.
Don’s journey ultimately becomes a confrontation with the things none of us can escape: aging, memory, mortality, loss, desire, and the need to feel that our lives have meaning. He is trying to understand what he has been, what he has become, and whether the two can still coexist.
At its heart, Saints and Poets asks a simple question: Are we actually experiencing our lives, or have we become distracted from living them?
Saints and Poets gets its title from Thornton Wilder’s classic American play Our Town. In the third act, Emily asks the Stage Manager, through her tears, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?” He answers, “No. The saints and poets maybe, they do some.”
That question is at the heart of Saints and Poets. Like Our Town, and like Don Porter’s novel Song of the Leafbird, it speaks to our inability to fully comprehend mortality while we are living through it. Both works have taken on a life beyond their creators, becoming something of a mythology.
There are three deliberate moments in the film when passages from Song of the Leafbird are heard in voiceover, each one unexpectedly echoing what Don is experiencing on his journey. The words that have seemingly helped a generation are now, almost unconsciously, coming to life for the reluctant author who never fully took ownership of having created them.
Don hasn’t lost his curiosity about life. It has shifted into isolation. He has a strong point of view, but following the deaths of people close to him, he has become adrift and uncertain of his purpose. As he travels west, he is led by the unusual people he encounters, some by chance and others by circumstance. Each of them seems to want or need something, and Don gradually begins to recognize desire as one of the fundamental conditions of being human: the desire to be something, do something, or have something.
That idea will be reflected visually as well as dramatically. Don is wrestling with aging, memory, and the feeling that the “something” he created belongs to a past he can no longer fully access. The conflict between what we believe gives our lives meaning and how we actually live them will be present throughout the film.
Saints and Poets will meander like a great novel. I want to allow moments to breathe, to let scenes play like an exhale rather than constantly pushing the story forward. The tone will be introspective and languid, with action driven less by plot mechanics than by chance encounters and the unexpected turns of life.
The journey moves west from Chicago through small towns and overlooked places: old barber shops, convenience stores, diners, tired motels, bookstores, and mechanic shops. These aren’t simply backdrops. They are places where people live, work, wait, and pass through, and they carry a kind of untampered wisdom.
Like Our Town, which stripped the stage of unnecessary sets and props, Saints and Poets will avoid anything that doesn’t belong in the frame. I want no superfluous objects or characters added simply to fill space. We will shoot in real locations and allow the places and people to reveal themselves naturally as Don moves west.
The camera, like Don, will be looking for meaning. Every object, encounter, and moment should have the potential to become part of that search, not because it has been forced into the story, but because meaning often comes from what we happen to notice along the way.
Every artist believes their work will transcend the boundaries that may limit its acceptance but every artist also tends to be divinely dissatisfied. The real work is to boldly speak one’s truth without fear of judgement.
I believe Saints and Poets will speak most directly to people who recognize the tension between the world we once knew and the one we inhabit now. I have lived through the onset of the Digital Age. I celebrate what our ability to instantly access information and communicate has given us, but I also recognize the isolation that can come with that same access. That tension between connection and isolation, between what we had and what we have, is central to the film.
I hope the audience leaves Saints and Poets asking a simple but difficult question: What do I actually value from day to day?
A younger viewer might see themselves in a couple sitting across from each other who, after watching the film, think twice before reaching for their phones and instead continue the conversation they were having. Someone older, perhaps entering the last chapter of their life, might recognize that it is never too late to seek adventure, reconnect with a forgotten passion, or simply become curious again.
But I don’t see the film as belonging to one generation. Don’s questions are ultimately human questions. Have I forgotten what matters? What have I done with the time I’ve been given? Am I still capable of changing? What does it mean to leave something behind?
If the film prompts someone to examine their own sense of purpose, or simply makes them look up from the world around them and engage more fully with another person, then I will consider it successful.
At its core, Saints and Poets is about a human need that technology cannot replace: the need to connect with another person, face the world as it is, and recognize that we are actually here while we are here.