Alexander Payne: An exclusive interview by Leo Adam Biga / THE READER / October 2004 Even before Alexander Payne’s Sideways premiered September 13 to ecstatic reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival, where he soaked up the accolades, it was hailed as a refreshing change from an artist whose previous harsh satires (Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt) made you squirm as much as laugh. Sideways, whose national release launched on October 27, marks a departure for Payne in two ways. For the first time in his feature career, he left behind Nebraska’s familiar confines to cast his sardonic gaze elsewhere. Using as a starting point Rex Pickett’s unpublished novel of the same name, Payne and writing partner Jim Taylor found the book’s central California wine country the perfect setting and context for a story about love. Yes, love. Love of wine. Love of self. Platonic love. Brotherly love. Romantic love. Ah, love. It’s something in short supply in Payne’s earlier films, where emotions are savaged and relationships discarded. After Toronto came the New York Film Festival where Sideways was the official closing night selection on October 17. Payne said he was "very happy" with the prestigious NYFF closing night slot. A darling of the NYFF, where About Schmidt was accorded opening night honors in 2001, Payne is being feted like the star he is in the international film community. In a statement announcing the program, festival chairman and Film Society of Lincoln Center program director Richard Pena said: "Even with now just four films to his credit, Alexander Payne has established himself as a major voice in contemporary American cinema. I can’t think of another filmmaker working today who is able to create characters as complex, as contradictory and as richly human." The early warm reception for Sideways, a Fox Searchlight release, bodes well for its commercial potential. The Hollywood buzz says Oscar nods are in store for Payne and star Paul Giamatti. Payne thinks audiences and critics are responding to the evolutionary process he takes with his work. Having returned from the highs of Toronto and New York, he is now preparing to write a new project that promises to be "current and political." Humanism and Character-Driven Leading film industry trade reviewers Todd McCarthy of Variety and Kirk Honeycutt of the Hollywood Reporter see in Sideways something Payne has strived for — a return to the character-driven movies he cut his teeth on. McCarthy wrote, "Moving away from his native Nebraska for the first time onto what proves to be even more fertile soil ... Alexander Payne has single-handedly restored humanism as a force in American films." According to Honeycutt, Payne captures in his "hysterically funny yet melancholy comedy ... subtle undertones of the great character movies of the 1970s and a delicate though strong finish that fills one with hope for its most forlorn characters." "If it’s true, that’s a nice thing for someone to say," said Payne, whose intimate cinema explores the wreckage of ordinary people doing desperate things to reclaim their lost lives. His films are never just funny or dramatic. They are, like life, a mix. "I aspire to a certain humanism in my films in that they’re films just about people," he said. "I don’t need to see a gun. I don’t need to have a chase. I don’t need highly contrived situations. I just want to have situations, which will bare open, in a humorous way but also in a dramatic way, what’s going on in the hearts and souls of people. And they’re comedies. This one get huge laughs. I think, too, people like the emotion in it and the hopeful note at the end. Yet, there’s nothing sentimentalized. If feels earned and felt. "Also what I hear is that the film is intelligent. Like hopefully my other films, too, it doesn’t talk down to the viewer. It respects the viewer. I mean, I always think an audience is smarter than I am, not dumber. So often, at least in recent American filmmaking, there’s a pressure — however spoken or unspoken — to dilute the intelligence or the sophisticated references or the quality of the jokes or something for a more general audience, and I just don’t like to do that." Payne’s comedic sensibilities and instincts have never been sharper. Three scenes in particular stand out, and all involve Giamatti as the lovably neurotic wine junkie Miles. In one, some bad news sends Miles careening for the nearest bottle, which he grabs like a suicide weapon and proceeds to drain while stumbling down a hill side. In another, the idiocy of winery etiquette sets him off and he loses it in a fit sure to join Jack Nicholson's famous diner rant in Five Easy Pieces. Finally, to help his buddy Jack out of a jam, Miles retrieves some valuables left behind in a house, and nearly gets killed for his trouble. A Lighter Touch, Loosening Up and Love Unlike the acclaimed Schmidt, which played cold and dour for some viewers, Sideways displays, even in its despair and dysfunction, what he calls a lighter touch. "Schmidt didn’t turn out, to all viewers, as entertaining as I thought it would have. It’s a little slow and I guess people took those depressing scenes a little more seriously then I ever imagined. I just thought I was making a comedy," Payne said. "With Sideways, I wanted it to be a really entertaining movie. It has some similar themes as Schmidt, like loneliness and depression, but it’s a better film. It has more laughs and it has a quicker pace. It also contains something new for me, which is a love story. "That’s what it ends on. It ends on the possibility of this guy being able finally to reopen himself to love ... to loving. I wasn’t even actually anticipating how much of a love story this film would be, but as it turned out that’s really equal to if not slightly greater an element in the movie as the buddy story." In keeping with the romantic vibe, Payne encouraged composer Rolfe Kent to concoct a jazz-infused score. Payne garnered inspiration from the jazz-tinged Italian comedies of the late 1950s, particularly Big Deal on Madonna Street. "Its jazz music kind of washes over whole scenes. It doesn’t really score or hit emotionally what’s going on. It’s just kind of there, and I thought that would be nice." That the film is more of a love story than he ever envisioned comes from his growing assurance in letting a film find its own mood rather than grafting one onto it. "I just think I’m a little bit more confident and loose with how I make a movie," he said. "I think a lot of my evolving craft is that I have something in mind about how a film should be or could be and when I encounter problems in getting it there, I’m less likely to be freaked out by those problems. I move more quickly in identifying those obstructions and knowing how to dissolve them. I find that in writing, too." It’s also a matter of trusting what his collaborators bring to the set and freeing himself to take advantage of those "happy accidents" filmmakers refer to. This journey of "discovery" has always been true of his work, Payne said, "Day by day, I don’t know exactly how the scene is going to be. I mean, I have a vague idea ... but in discovering what it is, it’s invariably better. I’ve got really smart actors and a really smart cinematographer and good locations suggested for the shot, and I just remain open to that. And, in a macro sense, I again have a vague idea of what the film could be, but then I remain open so that it can bloom as fully as maybe it wants to. Fellini used to say he never thought it appropriate to give a film a title until the film was done. You don’t want to limit what the film is by an idea you have." Payne has a flair for highlighting characters — often in sharply-angled shots — to comment on them within the context of scene and story. Certainly, Sideways builds on this approach and, in so doing, Payne displays a surer, more fluid cinematic style than his previous work. The montage is something Payne uses to great effect, and in Sideways he takes advantage of this short-cut technique to feature the California wine country and to advance the story within that setting. In two montage sequences he deftly uses a split screen to show the progress of our protagonists on the road and, later, their samplings of the grape at wineries. Finally Sideways may be Payne's most successful transition from script to screen, just as Giamatti's characterization of Miles may be the most fully realized of any Payne character. The highly lauded, much honored screenplays of Payne and Taylor have sometimes read better than the finished films, but with Sideways Payne fully extracts the most telling moments and nuances from the page then places them on film. For example, when Miles delivers a soliloquy about the fragile beauty of Pinot Noir, it's really a confession to the woman he secretly craves and moves. Payne simply and perfectly shoots this scene as an anguished private moment between two people trying to connect. The woman responds, hands are held, but Miles spoils the mood and the opportunity is lost. Instead of leaving his protagonist and audience hanging for satiric effect, as Payne sometimes does, we see Miles devolve to "the dark side" and then rally himself, which makes us both identify and root for him. Giamatti, whose intimate performance largely unfolds in close-up, never rings a false note among the richly-layered colors he plays. Whatever the project, Payne said, the finished film "turns out in some ways better and in some ways worse, but always "different" than what’s on the page. "I don’t have a rock solid expectation for what the film’s going to be other than I want to go make the best possible film I can out of this screenplay. Then, when it comes to casting, I make the best possible film I can with these actors. By the time it’s done, I can’t remember what film I had in mind originally. I just know Sideways would be a different film if I chose other actors or if I chose a different cinematographer." Men Behaving Badly In what is a combination buddy picture, road movie and romantic comedy, Sideways gives us two losers whose pairing is remindful of Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy. Like those bottom-feeding hustlers, Miles and Jack are on the make. The repressed Miles, an unhappy teacher and wannabe writer with a fetish for wine that numbs the pain of a failed marriage, just wants to feel again. The shallow Jack, played by Thomas Haden Church, is a former soap opera actor reduced to playing on his old fame to get laid. He wants to relive his youth again and again, without heeding any of the consequences. Alone, they’re sorry. Together, they’re a co-dependent disaster. Yet, there’s also a genuine love they embrace but never quite verbalize. They are The Odd Couple for a new age. On the eve of Jack’s marriage, the boys go off on a wine tour. Each has his own agenda. For Miles, it’s an escape into fermented melancholia. For Jack, open season on every piece of ass he can get his hands on. Things change when they meet a couple of women. Miles falls for Maya, a beguiling waitress and potential soulmate played by Virginia Madsen. Jack has a fling with Stephanie, a frisky and titillating wine pourer played by Sandra Oh. While Jack’s caddish ways set off repercussions that scare him back into facing the music, Miles rediscovers the possibility of love. It’s with this romantic turn Payne shows a side of his oft-stated humanism unseen before. As Miles fumbles toward fledgling romance, there are mishaps Payne comically exploits at his protagonist’s expense, just as he did with Ruth Stoops, Jim McAllister-Tracy Flick and Warren Schmidt. But in Sideways there’s a more merciful, sympathetic look at the plight of its poor wretch. This more forgiving treatment, suggests Payne, who’s now a married man, is an expression of his own maturity. Perhaps it took getting away from Omaha, his hometown, before he could explore more colors. "It doesn’t matter Omaha-not Omaha," he said. "They’re all just films." But he’s clearly annoyed by questions like, ‘Wow, what was it like not to shoot in Omaha?" and yet he insists that it doesn’t have anything to do with his decision not to shoot here anymore, "or at least for awhile." New Projects and New Directions Until this summer Payne was coming back to shoot a Robert Nelson script titled Nebraska. Then, Payne fell in love with another story that he and Taylor are making their next project. "I don’t want to say too much, because it’s just in its early stages, but I will say we want to delve into our times," he said. "There’s a lot wrong going on right now and I think film has to be bold in addressing both the human and political arena." He’s eying a sprawling, nonlinear narrative. "I want to work on a little bigger scale and canvas. I don’t mean effects-wise. But I want a longer film — I’m thinking at least 2 1/2 hours long. And, structurally, not a straight-ahead three-act structure, but more like five or six sequences. I’ve been thinking a lot of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Robert Altman’s Nashville as a kind of inspiration." The genesis for this unnamed project arose when Tyler Bensinger, a friend from Payne’s UCLA film school days, suggested a concept that got Payne thinking. Payne expects he, Taylor and Bensinger, a writer and producer on Cold Case, will "hash out the ideas." As for Nebraska, the film Payne was to helm, he said, "I’m putting that on hold. That’s a wonderful screenplay I would like to make one day, but there are things more pressing right now in our world that we all kind of have to respond to." Another film on Payne’s mind these days is The Assassination of Richard Nixon, a Sean Penn starring vehicle Payne helped produce. Directed by another UCLA film school bud, Niels Mueller, who co-wrote it with Omaha native Kevin Kennedy, Assassination shot two days in Omaha last year. It played the Cannes and Toronto fests. "I’m always interested in helping my buddies get their films made," Payne said. "I used a few of my show biz connections to help get it to Cary Woods, who produced Citizen Ruth, and then we got Sean Penn involved. I also did some advocating for the film’s inclusion at Cannes this year. The filmmakers were nice enough to give me an executive producer credit on it. I’m happy for its success." Sideways’ success is no sure thing, but Payne seems confident he’s made his most accomplished film accessible. Getting it done on time for festivals and a fall release pushed he and editor Kevin Tent to the max. "Post got really tough. The hours were long. We worked basically from 9 to 8 every day," he said. "I got really sucked into this one and I’m just now starting to look up from it." A big reason the edit took 8 1/2 months was the personal record in footage he shot. He had an early reading on Sideways at informal screenings he held in the cutting room and at official test screenings Fox ran in theaters. "I make comedies, so I need to screen my films a lot," Payne said. "The first group to see my films is always my old UCLA film school friends, the collaborators from the film and some other friends. So, maybe a group of about 30. Then, I take them all out to dinner and we talk about it. The studio may offer input from their test screenings, but it’s always about "make it shorter.’ I listen, but I don’t necessarily make any changes based on what they say. I learn from it all. But the changes I do make are never about making it more commercial or palatable for the audience, other than what I want." In his early middle-age he’s reached a level of respect few other filmmakers enjoy. Now serving on the jury of the Thessaloniki Film Festival (November 19-28) in Greece, he's long been courted by Grecian officials to make a film in his ancestral homeland. All of which reminds the ironical Payne of a line from Chinatown. "Of course I'm respectable — I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they stick around long enough." Add filmmakers to the list.