Honesty is Payne's policy by Mary F. Pols / CONTRACOSTATIMES.com / October 28, 2004 Alexander Payne has a thing for the truth. In his movies, such as "Election," "About Schmidt" and now the much-anticipated "Sideways," it shows up in the way he captures the essential truths of character, personality and the way human beings relate to each other. That yearning for the truth, and a seeming incapacity for falseness, is just as evident when meeting the director in person as it is in his films. Take, for example, Payne's emphatic position on golf. In "Sideways," which opens Friday, his two main characters are middle-aged men having a weeklong bachelor party in the form of a wine-tasting tour through the Santa Ynez Valley. Their goals for the vacation include eating and drinking well, picking up women and, in between, playing some brotherly rounds of golf. Wine, Payne actually knew quite a bit about; his interest in the subject was what led him to adapt Rex Pickett's novel for the screen in the first place. Golf, on the other hand, was an entirely different matter. "I don't play golf," Payne said during a recent interview at a San Francisco hotel. "I hate golf." But the 43-year-old filmmaker's goal is to always "get stuff right," so he made a small sacrifice. If Miles (Paul Giamatti) and Jack (Thomas Haden Church) were going to play golf, so would Payne. "I played golf three times (in preparation) for the golf scene. Not 18 holes. I think the third time I only did about three holes and said, 'This is stupid, I'm leaving.'" Both Miles and Jack are typical of the characters Payne and his longtime collaborator, screenwriter Jim Taylor, are drawn to. In "Election," Matthew Broderick played a high school teacher who stooped to manipulating a school election because of his intense dislike of a goodie-goodie student (Reese Witherspoon). In "About Schmidt," Jack Nicholson was a curmudgeon who demonstrated a chronic lack of generosity, emotional and otherwise, to both his deceased wife and grown daughter. Flawed, but lovable The men in "Sideways" are just as much anti-heroes. Miles is a temperamental failed novelist who wears bitterness over his recent divorce not just on his sleeve, but over his entire being, like a three-piece suit of misery. He's capable of stealing a fat roll of hundred dollar bills from his own mother. Jack, a television actor whose career peaked in his soap opera days, fully intends to get married at the end of the week, but wants nothing more than to sleep with as many women as possible in the last days before the wedding. But Payne would rather not consider Miles and Jack "flawed." As he points out, they're simply real. "I get a lot of questions like, 'Oh, you have such dark characters, how do you make such characters sympathetic?'" he said. "I don't really know what they are talking about. I'm trying to get real people. I don't want to have characters you like despite their flaws, but rather characters you like because of their flaws." He and Taylor, who has been his co-writer since his 1996 film "Citizen Ruth," winnow away any traces of falseness, predictability or typical movie conventions -- which were present in Pickett's original novel -- in telling their stories. Pickett ends his novel far less ambiguously than Payne ends his tale, with Miles' new love interest, a lush, earthy waitress named Maya (played by Virginia Madsen in the movie), appearing at a crucial plot point to stand supportively by Miles' side, the female equivalent of a knight on a white horse. Payne makes his Miles go it alone. When asked about changing that particular scene, Payne cries out, "That would have been too much like a movie!" And he's right. "It all goes through a filter, it goes through Jim and me," he said. "And we have a pretty, at least what we think is, a believability filter that has been fairly inerrant so far." The book "Sideways" is what Payne terms "guy-ey," in other words, intensely masculine, filled with cigars, sports, guns, even a wild boar chase. In the movie, Jack still says "dude" a lot and he speaks as frankly -- and amusingly -- about sex as any male character in recent memory. But Pickett's guy-ey quality has been toned down, creating a more subtle portrait of friendship, one that transcends its essential maleness to become just as enlightening and appealing to women viewers as it is to men. Leaving Nebraska He may have dispensed with much of the book's guy-eyness, but Payne -- a wine lover who gave his actors $1,200 bottles of a 1961 Cheval Blanc featured in the movie when filming wrapped -- did little to tone down the wine talk. Miles may be a failure at marriage and at writing, but as a wine enthusiast, he's very successful. He gives a disinterested Jack many lectures about the shortcomings of California chardonnays and merlots, while spouting high praise for pinot noirs. Unless you really know wine, you're likely to leave the movie feeling undereducated. For some audiences, this will be inspiring, but for others, maybe a little intimidating. "Who cares about scaring the audience?" Payne said. "I can't think about that. I'm the audience. I think what seems right to me, 'Oh no, that's too much,' or 'That would be too arcane ... ' You have to really believe Miles' pedantry. ... You can't say he's an amateur wine enthusiast and not have wine talk in there. And I knew that a lot of my audience would be wine people and they need to have their knowledge stroked." "Sideways" marks the first time Payne has set a feature-length film outside his hometown of Omaha, Neb. He's been so entrenched in that city that "Citizen Ruth," "Election" and "About Schmidt" all feature one scene set on the exact same street corner. Because of that, you wonder, was it freeing to leave Nebraska, or disconcerting? "It was neither," Payne said. "I mean, it was fine. I never planned to be just the Omaha filmmaker. It just happened. My first three films I wanted to shoot there, but I want to shoot all over the world." Payne said he had an "exceptionally good time" making "Sideways." "I don't bring that up lightly. It was a really, really joyous time." All the good wine on set might have helped, or maybe the California sunshine. So too could have been the presence of Payne's new wife, actress Sandra Oh, who plays one of the women who falls prey to Jack's charms. (It's a marvelous breakthrough performance for Oh, a Korean-American actress who has typically been reduced to playing parts that her sharp-tongued husband refers to as "the non-white friend of whitey.") His transition to a new place was undoubtedly eased by the fact that he worked with virtually the same crew in California that he worked with on his first three films. The shorthand between collaborators, whether it be the props master or the costume designer, he says, just grows "shorter and sweeter" with each new film. And it wasn't just the team he brought with him from Nebraska. Anyone who has driven through Santa Barbara County's wine country, who has stopped in Solvang or Buellton, will recognize familiar landmarks: the Windmill Inn, the Hitching Post, wineries like Firestone and Fess Parker. The characters' emotional journeys happen on what feels genuinely like a road trip. Payne's all-important sense of truth extends, it seems, not just to character, but to place. "I do know that in making those Nebraska films, particularly 'Election' and 'About Schmidt,' I was so consciously trying to capture a sense of place that I feel equipped now to be able to do that to other places," he said. "I have a documentary urge to my filmmaking. It's not just telling a story which could be shot anywhere, or on a sound stage or whatever. I'm really trying to capture human reality."