Frank talks about stars, sex, and lousy endings by Stephen Whitty / LAS VEGAS TRIBUNE / November 5, 2004 Alexander Payne is not a sentimental man. Ask the director about his recent marriage to actress Sandra Oh, and he refuses to wax romantic on demand. "It's fine," he says. "It has its ups and downs." Ask him about having Oh play a sex scene in his new movie "Sideways," and he shrugs. "I didn't see her as my wife," he says. "I saw her as just another of these pieces of meat I put in front of the camera." Ask him about the way his new comedy avoids Hollywood's usual pat, lovers-reunited resolution, and he blurts, "You're talking about `Garden State,' right? I mean, whose a-- did they pull that ending out of?" No, Alexander Payne is not prone to the warm and fuzzies. His saving grace, however, is that he's even harder on himself. And he is particularly adept at directing similarly frank comedies for adults, wickedly funny movies with complicated characters, dark stories and absolutely no parts for Ben Stiller. His first feature, "Citizen Ruth," lampooned the excesses of the abortion debate. The next, "Election," took on adultery, ambition and high, school politics. "About Schmidt" looked at middle-class retirement -- and found a purposeless man mired in self-delusion. "Surviving Christmas" they're not. "My stuff is not typically commercial," Payne admits over the course of a long interview in Manhattan. "It's not typically possessed of marketable elements. But as people in Hollywood know more what I do -- I won't say it gets easier, but it gets less hard." The films are getting a little more hopeful, too. The story for "Sideways" -- co-written with steady collaborator Jim Taylor -- actually ends on a note of hope, as its lonely hero finally reaches out. If Payne can see the possibility of happiness even for Paul Giamatti's schlubby wine snob, does that mean he's mellowing? "It could be true and maybe I'm not self-aware enough to know it," Payne admits haltingly. "We toyed with bleak endings for this, too. ... But it seems that if you're going to talk about a guy who's bottled up, what is interesting and honest and earned is seeing him uncork that bottle." Payne was bottled up himself for a while. He was 35 before he directed his first feature -- practically retirement age in youth-obsessed Hollywood. At 43, an age when Steven Spielberg and Spike Lee had each made more than 15 films, Payne has finished only four. And to hear him tell it, even that's a wonder. "I really consider myself an adult student who's being paid to learn," Payne says. "And the more I seem to learn, the more I know how much I don't know. ... Whenever I do think I'm kind of getting the hang of this, I figure I'm just deluded." More delusional, Payne's friends say, would be assuming this caustic, somewhat wolfish-looking director is as tough as he sounds. "Writing flawed characters who make mistakes and do bad things feels natural to us because that's what life is like, and that's what we're like," says Taylor. "But Alexander is the same person I met 15 years ago. He's warm, intelligent, funny, honest. A good cook, too." "He's a decent person," says Giamatti, "which really sets him apart from most human beings. He's very smart and seemingly relaxed, puts you at ease and trusts you entirely -- which is also very rare, at least in my experience with directors." Unlike many of his colleagues (typically raised in New York or California, shooting backyard horror films as soon as they could hold a camera), Payne grew up in Omaha, Neb., without any clear desire to direct. His father owned a restaurant (``We're Greek," Payne jokes, "it's the law.") His mother was a former professor. Both parents "placed a high value on education," Payne remembers, and encouraged a love of learning. Payne went to a rigorous Jesuit high school, and then applied to Stanford. When he arrived on campus, it was as a history and Spanish major. And it was a shock. "For the first time, I was around people who had been given these great privileges," he says. "Your roommate is, `Oh yes, I grew up in Rome and my father was a sculptor and then I dropped out of Oxford and worked as a longshoreman for a while ... ,' and you suddenly realize that there are these possibilities. And I started to think, `Well, what can I do?"' The answer he came up with didn't play well in Omaha. "I told my parents I wanted to be a director," Payne recalls. "To which my father said, `I didn't send you to Stanford to be a waiter.' They pressured me very hard, and although I applied to five film schools I also took the LSATs ... . Right up until I was 30, 32, my father was offering to pay for law school." But Payne got into the masters film program at UCLA, and made a short, "The Passion of Martin," which showed at Sundance in 1991. That got him a studio deal (which went nowhere) and the chance to write a screenplay (which was never made). Finally, though, in 1996, he made "Citizen Ruth." And after that, he says with a smile, "It was, `My son, the director."' Not that anything seemed assured at that point. Sold at Sundance, "Citizen Ruth" then sat on Miramax's shelves for a year, as if the studio didn't know what to do with it. After an abrupt and barely publicized release, the film faded away. "Well, you'd have to ask Harvey Weinstein (what happened)," Payne says. "And he would not give you a truthful answer anyway. But I'm never going to blame the failure of a picture on the studio, I'm always going to personalize it. I don't think the film's as ferocious as it could have been., I was just trying to get my first film made." On the strength of "Citizen Ruth," Payne and Taylor were hired to work on a studio project, the adaptation of the Tom Perrotta novel "Election." The filmmakers changed the setting from New Jersey to Nebraska -- "They have a certain frank and funny way of looking at things there," Payne says -- and got ready to cast. Now they realized what it really meant to work for a studio, as executives made them wait while the lead was offered -- improbably, and in vain -- to Tom Cruise. "You work with a studio, and you have to play the name game," Payne says of the search for inappropriate but bankable stars (the part eventually was played by Matthew Broderick). "They can impose changes. They can make you wait a year to start shooting. They can even not make it at all, and then you can't take it elsewhere because they own it. And if you complain they say, `Hey, we paid you, didn't we?' Who needs that?" Since then, Payne has tried to limit his work with studios, only bringing them aboard "at the last possible moment." He clearly, sincerely loves the movies (``I feel so lucky just to have been born in a century in which the movies exist.") But he hates what people do to them. He also has absolutely no compunction about giving examples. "Yes, well, sometimes that gets him into trouble," Taylor admits. "I think he regrets it afterward, seeing some of these things in print He's had to write a few notes." He may need to write some more tomorrow. Payne-Taylor films, for example, often require their lead actors to do unpleasant things -- from Laura Dern's drug use as a pregnant woman in "Citizen Ruth" to Paul Giamatti stealing cash from his retired mother in "Sideways." Has Payne ever had a performer balk? "No, but who'd want to work with an actor like that in the first place?" he asks. "Someone who says, `I don't want to do that because it makes my character unlikable?' That's pathetic. I understand that certain stars work like that. Tom Cruise. Tom Hanks -- I don't know if he's like that, maybe a little bit. Harrison Ford, I think. Again, this is all sort of based on gossipy news and maybe not accurate but ... " He grimaces, as if a bad smell has crept in. "I don't know, I just can't take people like that seriously," he says. "Now, Jack Nicholson is smart. Nicholson keeps fresh by doing `The Pledge,' or by working with young directors -- I'd only done two movies when he signed on for `About Schmidt.' But these other actors ... I mean, look at what James Stewart did back in the '50s for Anthony Mann, or Alfred Hitchcock. Think of Henry Fonda in `Once Upon a Time in the West,' or Lancaster in `The Leopard' or anyone who worked with Peckinpah. Those were actors." They were actors who worked with great directors and with stories that weren't afraid to end unhappily. "The trouble with so many Hollywood endings is that they take what's infinite, and make it finite, and uninteresting," Payne says, now on a roll. "`The Shawshank Redemption' -- people love that movie, and it has one of theworst endings in the world. The Christ figure and his disciple get together in Baja to go sailing? What kind of ending is that? What happened about ying for our sins, and giving hope to the world? Now `Cool Hand Luke' -- `Cool Hand Luke' has a beautiful ending." Despite his refusal to play Hollywood's polite games, Payne's career has clearly hit its stride. He and Taylor take occasional anonymous "polish" jobs on other people's scripts; Payne films their own screenplays with speed and economy. Their biggest picture, "About Schmidt," cost $32 million, he says, and "half of that was Nicholson"; "Sideways" cost a fraction of that, and even then, Payne says, "we finished a day early and gave $800,000 back to the studio." Payne believes in taking risks -- but not with other people's money. "I want to be able to keep doing what I'm doing," he says. "And as long as my films don't lose money -- as long as they at least make back their negative costs and their marketing costs, and bring in one dollar -- I can. "Yes, if I had big stars in this film I would have had more money, for everything ... . Things get easier. But I don't need that type of easy." Though his last three films have been adaptations, he and Taylor have a few ideas for originals. Payne has toyed with the idea of doing a Western. He'd like to do something political. Although most of his films have been set and shot in the Midwest, he can't wait to shoot in Europe. He also, he says seriously, can't wait to get good. "When someone praises `Election' or `About Schmidt,' I'm very happy, I say `Thank you,"' he says. "But I think they're minor films. They're fine and I'm happy you like them and I don't mean to take anything away from them or your enjoyment of them or the gift you're giving me in telling me that, but ... " His voice trails off. "I am glad that some people think this is my best film, because I aspire to keep getting better," he says after a moment. "But I have pretty high standards, and there's so much to know. I intend to keep learning. Guys like Antonioni and Billy Wilder and Bunuel didn't hit their stride until pretty late in life. So I'm hopeful. I'm hoping that maybe by the time I'm in my 50s I can make a good film."