Alexander Payne SCREENWRITER MAGAZINE / 2004 Alexander Payne graduated from Stanford University where he received degrees in history and Spanish literature. He then earned an M.F.A. from the prestigious University of California, Los Angeles Film School. Payne's thesis film, The Passion of Martin, screened at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival and won numerous awards and the attention of Hollywood. He was offered a number of directing jobs by the major studios, but passed on them dissatisfied with the quality of the scripts he was offered. Payne needed material to direct so he took the next logical step: he learned screenwriting. Through his collaboration with then roommate, Jim Taylor, CITIZEN RUTH became his feature directorial debut. Starring Laura Dern, the film received a great deal of critical acclaim and won numerous festival awards. As a result of the success of CITIZEN RUTH, Payne re-teamed with Taylor to adapt Tom Perrotta's novel, ELECTION, for Paramount and MTV Films. The film stars Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick. NYS: Your characters in Election and Citizen Ruth were very difficult to like, but one finds themselves at the end of the story rooting for them. AP: I just want them to be real and human. I think because we write comedies, even if you don't like the people that much, there's truth and humor to them. Even if the characters aren't so sympathetic the film will be sympathetic because of its point of view toward the characters. Who do you really like in The Godfather? Who do you really like in A Clockwork Orange? There's a big difference between liking characters as people, as human beings, and liking them as characters. Who gives a shit about Othello? We like Iago. He's delicious. We don't like him personally, we wouldn't want to hang out with him, but as a character he's the lead. I'm more interested in movies where you as an audience member feel implicated in what's going on. Maybe you've met people like that or seen people like that. I love many different types of movies, but the one's that I'm interested in making are much more about people recognizing themselves or people they know. Cinema at the same time has become much more unreal as compared to how it was in the 60s and certainly the 70s. I find very few people in mainstream American cinema who have much connection to anyone I know. NYS: What is it about Omaha, Nebraska that made it your location for two features? AP: Because I'm from there. You wouldn't ask Spike Lee, ‘Well, what is it about New York…' It's just where he's from. Also, I haven't seen the mid-west represented all that much on screen. It's just a milieu I understand. NYS: Do you follow a plot outline when writing? AP: One of the reasons our movies are like you can't really tell what's going to happen next is because we don't outline. Everyday we show up to write together, it's ‘What was the last thing we wrote yesterday? What can we do today?' Your possibilities are infinite. We try to surprise ourselves. We know what the ending is going to be, but getting there is the fun and the journey and maybe that's why it takes us a long time. NYS: In the case of Election when you're adapting a book— AP: In this case we had a safety net. The movie is both really different from the book but quite similar at the same time. NYS: When you were writing Citizen Ruth, you weren't on either side of the abortion issue. Was that something you did intentionally? AP: We didn't set out to make a message film. It's so weird how we were assailed by some liberal critics about copping out or being cowards because we didn't make a clearer pro-choice statement. I think it's such a stupid comment for the film and it really was based on their agenda and their expectations. [Citizen Ruth] used that as a backdrop. They didn't give us, the filmmakers, credit for maybe going for something else, like maybe a larger human point of view, that we just hate everyone. [Laughter]. The other day I was watching a documentary on [Akira] Kurosawa and in an interview—if it's well translated—Kurosawa says about films, ‘Messages are superficial, style is very difficult indeed.' I think style in a good way, not in the way that we say, ‘style over substance.' But really rigorous film style. NYS: It's all about the story you're telling. AP: It's trust that the story you tell is going to reflect you simply because you're telling it. You're writing it and also you're directing and you're just on it and you do what you feel is truthful. And seek not to manipulate but to be honest and it will reveal you.