The Comedy of Human Experience by Tim Wassberg / WGA MAGAZINE Alexander Payne understands the pathetic side of life. The human experience, for Payne and writing partner Jim Taylor, is about the more immediate moments of human existence. All of Payne's characters have a sense of the benign which reflects in their lives whether it be Matthew Broderick's Jim McAllister in Election or Jack Nicholson's Warren Schmidt in About Schmidt. With their latest co-written offering, Sideways, Payne focuses on another maligned character in the form of Paul Giamatti's Miles Raymond, who in taking a road trip with his soon-to-be-married best friend through the wine country of Central California, becomes astutely aware of his life and the essence of its shortcomings. Where does the paradox between comedy and drama exist for you? I think they are two sides of the same coin. I don't think you can have drama without comedy and vice versa. I mean you can. You can watch Peter Sellers in The Party and have a great time but that is a different type of comedy. The comedy that Jim Taylor and I do, we find specifically in the human experience, often the most painful and embarrassing and sometimes morally corrupt things. Where do you begin to perceive your characters and their insecurities? We really work instinctively. It's what comes out of us. I think Jim and I are lucky to have each other. We have shared interests in film and in a sense of experience, at least that pathetic side of life, and making humor out of it. What needs to motivate the characters for you to write them? [Sideways] is based on a novel [by Rex Pickett] and is my third adaptation in a row. What has interested me always is the characters I find in a novel. Jim and I are usually attracted to some painful or pathetic sense of experience out of which we could mine the comedy. And we are not alone. The books we are inheriting are very [much in that vein]. About Schmidt wasn't, but certainly Election and Sideways, already in the novels, had a real humor and a great sense of the melancholy. In many novels, there is the subject of nuance and internalization that can be a challenge translating to film. Exactly. The internal life which can be expressed in the novel [is key], which makes a novel for me very often a richer experience than film because it can cover more human thought. First, it is nice to know that the novel's there --- that it is acknowledged even if we don't find a cinematic equivalent for it. It can inform what we're doing and it gives us a greater foundation from which to build our characters. Second, it is a great challenge. I like to find a cinematic equivalent of literary technique in making cinema. An obvious example is voice-over. I love voice-over in film. And voice-over is much maligned in screenwriting classes and studio corridors for being lazy. But I feel the opposite. When well used, [voice-over] is a really exciting thing precisely because it is an instrument that gives you access to a character's internal life. It becomes cinematic especially when you are talking about a comedy where you have the so-called "unreliable narrator." What you see on film perhaps contradicts what the character is telling you. Your educational background is a mixture of linguistics and the art of the novel. In college I was a double major in history and literature. I considered both as appropriate preparations for a career in film. Both history and film are concerned with the human story: what people do and why they do it. For me it is about finding out why my characters do what they do in grand or immediate ways. That is the throughline between history and literature in film. How do you define absurdity within a character's sense of identity in any given script? I think Jim and I have a certain consciousness of the absurdity of our own existences so that feeling would certainly pervade our work and our sense of the goings on of our protagonists. What were the malleable aspects of the wine country in this film? This is the first of your movies not to be set in Nebraska. I never set out to be the Nebraska Guy. It just happens that the first three films I made were shot in Nebraska. There is no wine country in Nebraska. I want to make films all over the place. This one was set here. One thing though, that Sideways has in common with About Schmidt and Election, is the aspiration on my part to have a strong sense of the place contained within the film. I think there is that continuum.