"Sideways" might have Payne moving in new direction by Jake Coyle / ASSOCIATED PRESS / November 9, 2004 "What's funnier than real-life experience?" Alexander Payne asks. That question easily could serve as the motto for the director who set Election in a real high school with authentic real students and plopped an au naturel Kathy Bates into a hot tub for About Schmidt. But in Payne's Sideways, there's more tenderness. Like all of his films, it's carefully imbued with a sense of realism, but without his trademark biting satire. "Election, Citizen Ruth and About Schmidt are more 'let's examine a situation,'" Payne said in a recent interview. "We're kind of outside the world of the characters. This feels more like the story issuing from the inside of the characters." The movie focuses on two old friends who embark on a wine-tasting trip to California's Santa Ynez Valley. Miles (Paul Giamatti) feuds with Jack (Thomas Haden Church) over their divergent expectations for the vacation. Miles, a depressed divorcee and wine connoisseur, wants nothing but to sip fine pinot noir, while Jack's self-proclaimed "plight" is to sow the last of his oats before his impending marriage. As the two friends grapple with their middle-aged lives (one a teacher with a 700-page unpublished novel, the other an out-of-work actor) they careen between wineries, eventually returning home in a busted-up Saab. It's Payne's first foray into making a movie anywhere but his hometown of Omaha, Neb. The 43-year-old now lives in Los Angeles with wife (and Sideways co-star) Sandra Oh. "I love shooting in the Midwest, but I never want to be 'The Nebraska Guy,'" Payne explained. "I'm a filmmaker, so I'd like to shoot everywhere." That desire to set out with a camera may explain this being his second road movie in a row after About Schmidt, but it's just coincidence to Payne. "Election is a high school movie by a guy who couldn't have been less interested in making a high school movie, and About Schmidt and (Sideways) are road movies made by a guy who is not really interested in road movies. ... I hate shooting in cars." But the characters of Sideways made it worthwhile. "The book (by Rex Pickett) is really real in terms you felt. You live that pain of being broken up after a divorce, and writing a novel and not finding a publisher." Though this is only Payne's fourth film, he's already had considerable critical success. He and co-writer Jim Taylor (with whom he collaborates again here) were nominated for a screenwriting Oscar for Election and won a Golden Globe for their About Schmidt script. "I came out of film school from UCLA and I had no idea where I was going to get my financing from," Payne remembers. "Somehow, making the films I want to make, I've been able to get financing from studios. I write and direct my own films with studio money; I have final cut. "I have a European director's career in America. And if I can do it, then other people can." In this, Payne is similar to several other young auteurs like Wes Anderson (Rushmore), David O. Russell (Three Kings) and Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights). Able to make so-called "independent" cinema within the studios, they all straddle mainstream and art-house appeal. It's a balance not lost on Payne, who thinks movies are beginning to thaw after a period of corporate blandness -- that the film industry "will find it can feed itself by giving some back to the human." And there are few actors that epitomize the everyday, average human life more than Giamatti, who starred as comic writer Harvey Pekar in last year's American Splendor. The film set, Giamatti says, was very communal -- and the wine didn't hurt either. "Everyone was walking around with a glass of wine in their hand," he says. "At one point, I saw a grip holding a light in one hand and a glass in the other." The actor says Payne is "a control freak that lets you feel like you're in charge ... He's successfully satirical in an age when there's not much satire." Payne has much reverence for a time when satire and raw humanity was more prevalent: the fabled '70s of American cinema, memorable for films by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman and Hal Ashby, among others. That decade is significant, Payne says, for "what film language suddenly was, and we needed it then, given all the heavy (stuff) that was happening. I think we're entering a phase like that now. I think films might come off their fraudulent pedestal a little bit, and be more human again. We're certainly living in difficult political times."