Will Acad give 'Sideways' more than a glance? by Martin A. Grove / THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER / January 28, 2005 With five Oscar nominations, including best picture and director, Fox Searchlight's "Sideways" is a top contender in what's clearly a wide open Academy race. While it swept the critics groups awards and won Golden Globes and Critics Choice best picture honors, "Sideways" faces an unusual challenge in its Oscar campaign because it's regarded as a comedy and comedy usually isn't king with the Academy. Directed by Alexander Payne, it was produced by Michael London. Its screenplay by Payne & Jim Taylor is based on the novel by Rex Pickett. Starring are Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh. In a conversation Tuesday afternoon with London about "Sideways" as it enters the Oscar race, we focused on how the Academy regards comedy and whether it gives comedy the respect it deserves. When I suggested that many Oscar watchers believe comedies are at a disadvantage in the Oscars, London replied, "I think it's hard to disagree with that if you look at the data. We all know just from our own experiences that the sort of Oscar year-end movies tend to be big important dramas. For some reason -- it's a strange thing -- but comedy definitely gets short shrift with that particular body of people. I never really understood it. I think it's changing and I think it will change. "I think one of the interesting things about 'Sideways' in that context is that although it's a comedy, the comedy comes from an incredibly real place. Most comedy comes from pain. But I think Alexander, in particular, finds a lot of humor in very real issues and moments and behavior. We get the comedy label because it's a movie that makes people laugh, but if you turn the globe around and look at it from the other side it's a movie about people and problems and difficult experiences and finding themselves. And those things are the stuff of more traditional Oscar movies. So it's certainly unusual to be in the mix (of best picture nominees) as a comedy and we're obviously the only comedy this year. But I think it's worth looking at the fact that the comedy in the movie and the humor in the movie comes from some pretty deep dark places." That's a point Searchlight's hammering home in its ads for "Sideways" that cite five now classic comedies that all were best picture winners -- "Shakespeare in Love" (1998), "Forrest Gump" (1994), "Driving Miss Daisy" (1989), "Annie Hall" (1977) and "The Apartment" (1960). In linking "Sideways" to those five Oscar winners, Searchlight is reminding Academy members, "Rarely does a comedy come along that deserves to be taken seriously." I told London that when I first saw the film in early October I wasn't entirely sure it should be classified as a comedy. "I remember one of the challenges when we were working with the script was that financiers didn't know what to make of it," London replied. "It was very, very funny in one moment and then it was terrifyingly real and sad and heartbreaking in the next moment. And that was true, by the way, of Rex Pickett's original novel. It was one of the things that I think attracted Alexander and certainly that attracted me because real life tends to be like that. Really funny things happen to you and then in the next moment the most painful thing happens to you. And sometimes they get mixed up with each other. So it is a hard movie to classify, but that's also part of it's appeal. "I think it probably is easier classified as a comedy than a drama because we have those big funny set pieces. That was the thing that people didn't quite know what to make of when we started out. We had a movie about characters who were going through very real dramatic situations, but then you have an extended set piece near the end of the movie about a large naked man running down the street chasing the heroes of the movie that's played purely for laughs. And it's fabulous that you switch (this) with an audience and ask them to go from very real moments of pathos to really outrageous comedy." After an awards season in which "Sideways" achieved an avalanche of critical praise and a ton of awards from critics groups and other organizations, the film is competing now in a best picture Oscar race that looks more wide open than we've seen since 1999 when "Shakespeare in Love" won the Oscar battle and "Saving Private Ryan" lost the war. "I think that's the way people perceive it," London said of this year's up-for-grabs Oscars. "I went through it a little bit last year on the fringe because I produced '13' and 'House of Sand and Fog,' which were sort of minor players in the awards drama last year. This year we're obviously much more in the center of it. I have to say as a newcomer to this, the amount of effort people put into predictions and analysis of what's going to happen is really overwhelming and definitely wants you to kind of raise your hand at a certain point and wonder whether we're all not looking into our crystal balls almost too incessantly. "I'm an ex-journalist (for the Los Angeles Times in the 1980's) and know you have to do that. But I've been trying to take a step back because it becomes really maniacal how you get caught up in the kind of day to day shifts in psychology and momentum. The truth is, I think, that what happens is a bunch of pictures wind up being nominated and then, I hope, people just sit down and kind of experience the movie and figure out which one excited them the most and moved them the most and feels the most original and then vote for it. But it does feel this year like there's more legitimate competitors for that honor than in past years. There's not one obvious front-runner." I brought up the fact that this year's five best picture nominees had all done very well in such traditional bellwether competitions as the Golden Globes, Broadcast Film Critics Association's Critics Choice Awards, Producers Guild of America awards and Screen Actors Guild's ensemble cast nominations. "I think there's a kind of nice consensus this year about that small group of pictures that are best picture candidates," he said. "I think what there isn't maybe as much of a consensus on is which of those movies is most likely to move on (to win). It's so hard. When you're in the middle of it with a movie I think the healthiest thing to do is to try to not get caught up in the guessing because you can make yourself absolutely nuts. "The other thing is that I feel like we're in a slightly different place from some of these other pictures. We're a comedy. We're not a drama. We're a $16 million film. I think the least expensive movie amongst the others is almost twice what ours was. We are so fortunate and incredibly surprised from where we came from -- from the sort of small roots of this movie -- to be in this kind of little winners circle. I know people say this all the time -- that they're just sort of honored to kind of be in that club -- but from where this movie came from we really feel like we've kind of already accomplished something beyond what we ever imagined. The help we're going to get from our wide release this weekend from all of the kind of accumulation of different nice things that people have said about our movie is just extraordinary. We were a limited release movie when we started out from a specialized distributor and now we're going out into 1,700 screens this weekend and that's an amazing, amazing triumph and victory whatever happens in six weeks because we never thought that the movie would have a chance to get into that many theaters and that audiences in a broad mainstream sense would know about the movie. "We didn't start with movie stars. Alexander and I used to say for a long time that we fought really hard to get this movie made without movie stars. But now I think we kind of do have movie stars. So we're going to have to stop saying that because I hope that we've created one or two movie stars. But the truth is when Alexander cast these actors and when we were faced with the prospect of trying to get a financier to pay for the movie with that cast, it was really daunting and really difficult and if you had told us we would get into 500 theaters we probably would have taken that deal." Looking back now, London noted, "In December when the movie had been out there for six weeks and we were still in only a hundred theaters we were really frightened and it was a kind of panicky moment that if we don't get this movie out into more theaters now we may never pass this way again and may never have a chance to get a wide release for the movie. We didn't know what would happen with critics. We didn't know what would happen with the Golden Globes or nominations. I mean, all of this has happened so quickly and so recently. Four weeks ago Searchlight had a really difficult decision, which is do they continue on that slow roll out and hold the movie back, hold the movie back, hold the movie back. I was really concerned. I was really pushing (Searchlight president) Peter Rice really hard to think about taking the movie out into more theaters earlier in December and (was) frightened that if we didn't get the kind of attention that we've gotten that January or February would around and the release of the movie would be over and we would have never had a chance to go wide. "It was a really difficult decision and an expensive decision because when you hold a movie that long, keep it in the theaters and then go out wide later it costs a great deal more. He and (Fox Filmed Entertainment co-chairmen) Tom Rothman and Jim Gianopulos had such faith in it early on, more than we did in some ways. I mean, we had creative faith in it, but they had a business faith in it that we didn't have. They said, 'You know what? We're going to sit in this small number of theaters. We're going to let people continue to discover the movie and people are going to write about this movie and write about this movie. And by the time that nomination weekend comes around six weeks from now you guys are going to be sitting pretty and you're going to thank us for waiting.' It was an amazingly smart strategic move and we fought them pretty hard. It just seemed like a really dangerous strategy and the strategy worked and we get the benefits of that now, seeing the movie go out with a wide audience." Despite "Sideways" success with Oscar nominations -- it's up for best picture, director, adapted screenplay, supporting actor (Thomas Haden Church) and supporting actress (Virginia Madsen) -- it's not in one race that many observers thought it would definitely be in -- best actor. Paul Giamatti, who won numerous critics groups best actor awards all season and was a Golden Globe, Critics Choice and SAG nominee, was missing from Oscar's short list of best actor noms. Asked what he makes of that, London replied, "It's disappointing. It makes me really sad personally. Paul is the heart and soul of this movie and so the inequity of getting nominations for something like best picture or even for director or other actors without him being recognized doesn't make any sense to me. It's arbitrary. But Paul is just not the kind of guy who takes anything for granted. He never expected this. He knew that the competition in that category was especially fierce and that there's a lot of big brand-name movie stars in that category. So it's wildly unfair, but sometimes life is unfair. And we've been really fortunate in other categories. And as far as I'm concerned, he shares every award that this movie got. Paul Giamatti is part of (them all and) most of all the best picture nomination. We're a very tight group in this movie. We worked really closely together. We've stayed really good friends, all of us, because the movie was such a kind of intimate thing to make. "Obviously, it's a frustrating and difficult thing, but he also takes a lot of pride in the success of the and in these other nominations. I don't think for a moment it makes up for not getting what he deserves, but it's what we have and we're fortunate to be nominated in the categories that we were nominated in. And you know what? He may be the best actor in America. He's going to keep making movies for a long, long time. He's a young man. When he finally gets his due it's going to be that much sweeter. And he will. He's not someone who lucked into one great performance and isn't going to have another opportunity like this. I know so many directors who have been so moved by his performance in 'Sideways' who want to find a way to work with him that there will be even more opportunities for Paul than there have been in the past to play roles that are leading man roles instead of supporting actor roles. So I think he's made that transition and the Academy will catch up with him in the future." On the other hand, one of the surprises during the early weeks of the awards season was that as much as the critics groups applauded "Sideways" they really weren't giving their best director nods to Payne. Looking back at how the critics votes went, of the key groups I tracked only the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the San Francisco Film Critics Circle and the Southeastern Film Critics Association named Payne best director. Payne was a Globe nominee, but lost to Clint Eastwood for "Million Dollar Baby." He was a Critics Choice Awards nominee, but lost to Martin Scorsese for "The Aviator." He's a DGA nominee and the much anticipated outcome of that race will be announced tomorrow night. "If you think about it in terms of (how) people like this movie a great deal and what they like about it is not the fact that it's about Armageddon or that it has some three giant movie stars in it, they love the fact that the movie makes them feel a lot," Payne observed. "It makes them laugh and it makes them feel closer to their own humanity. I think the movie's kind of about everyone's shared humanity and self-discovery. That's all stuff that a director creates, that a filmmaker creates. That's not created with special effects or music or editing. I mean, it is in part, but the movie only exists to the extent that Alexander created it. I mean, it's all him as opposed to a lot of movies that we see where the director is the king of the roost, but (many other factors are involved in making the film work). "People always talk about movies as a collaborative art. There's actually very little collaboration on a movie like this one and smaller more personal films and Alexander's movies, as well. It's all him. You know, everything comes from him. The performances come from him. His command of the medium and his kind of relaxed connection with his own craft is so complete that I couldn't imagine the movie being nominated and him not being nominated. I think they really go hand in hand and I think most people who see the movie know that. They're watching a filmmaker's movie. It's like the director speaks. Through 'Sideways' I think Alexander kind of gets to speak directly to audiences and that's what audiences react to. If they love it, they love it because they feel like the filmmaker's talking to them directly." On the supporting performance front, "Sideways" is well represented by both Virginia Madsen and Thomas Haden Church. "In the whole 'Sideways' experience the thing that's most remarkable is watching those two people having gotten a chance to show what they're capable of," London said. "For a director a producer, we're going to have other opportunities in our careers regardless of what happens with this movie. But I really feel for Thomas and Virginia that this was a turning point. Both of them were struggling to get opportunities to show people how talented they were. And in both cases they were starting to wonder whether it would ever happen. They weren't working a lot or they weren't working on the things that they wanted to work on and now because of this one movie you'll be able to look back at their careers and say that those careers were transformed by the work that they did in one movie. They're both great people. They're just really warm, devoted, talented actors who just kind of want to do good work and so that's fantastic. That's like the biggest pleasure in the whole thing for me." In the adapted screenplay category "Sideways" writers Payne & Taylor did quite well throughout the awards season, winning votes by the National Board of Review, and critics groups in Los Angeles, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Chicago, the National Society of Film Critics, the Broadcast Film Critics Association and the Golden Globes. "Sideways" is also one of the adapted screenplay nominees competing in the Writers Guild of America race. "I think that everyone recognizes that the words in 'Sideways,' that the way the people talk and all the talk -- because it's a movie about talk, the things people say and the things they don't say -- that the screenplay was a pretty extraordinary jumping off point. "You know, the screenplay was linked very tightly with Rex Pickett's novel. Alexander and Jim always volunteer that of all of their adaptations this one was far and away the most faithful to the underlying material. They took great amounts of Rex's original novel and were able to kind of take it and protect it and use it." Looking ahead, what does "Sideways" need to do to win? "I don't know," he replied. "There's, you know, a way in which our movie very early on was sort of received as an underdog movie just coming out of nowhere. And then we got into this very odd place where people were talking about how critics loved our movie too much and maybe the movie didn't live up to the critics' aspirations for it. Now, thank God, that moment seems to have passed. Hopefully, we'll just find an equilibrium. The best thing we can do in terms of our own chances is what Searchlight is doing, which is getting the movie out in (as many as) 1,700 screens. I think it's really good for us to remind people how hard it is for a comedy to compete in this (best picture) category. I think it's important for everyone to know how tough it was to get this movie made and how much Alexander struggled to fight for a very specific group of actors and a very specific vision. And he never compromised. And we never gave in for a moment to any temptation to do anything but what was right for the movie. I think that's the reason why the movie works the way that it does for audiences -- because it really is uncompromising and it really is a true independent. "And there are other independents in the category this year. I think it's really encouraging to see the number of movies being recognized by the Academy that don't feel like traditional Oscar movies or traditional star vehicles. I mean, you can feel a little bit of a sea change in the movie culture with audiences and critics responding to movies that probably wouldn't have gotten made five or 10 years ago. They might have gotten made in the '60s or '70s. But they're more personal. They're smaller. I think they're dealing more with themes of like everyday human experience instead of always being geared to extraordinary situations and larger than life characters. And that's really exciting to see happening this year. And I hope to whatever extent we have success the next few weeks it's because people want to experience movies that are a little bit different from some of what they've been fed over the last decade or so in the kind of blockbuster era." As for the film's approach to campaigning, London observed, "We're sort of trying to run a non-campaign in that our movie is so different from everything else out there. I think if we tried to win a campaign we would fail. The only thing that we really have to offer is an experience that's a little different from what people usually get from movies and it's pretty honest and pretty genuine and pretty moving. So the way that we win is because people go have that experience, love the movie, tell other people to see it and we get a groundswell. I think that (Academy) voters are part of that audience. I don't think you can disconnect those voters from the experience that they had when they watched their DVD or when they watched the movie in a theater. All we can encourage people to do is to experience (the film). "It's a difficult process to try and out-maneuver and out-campaign other movies. I think we know what the assets of the film are and we know what we want to call attention to, but to really try and win a strategic battle, I think there's a lot of evidence in the last few years of people trying too hard to do that and of it backfiring. I think there's ways in which people can feel a little bit manipulated and spoon-fed. So what we have to do is just keep driving home the message that the movie is the thing that will, hopefully, put us over the top and hope that the Oscar voters, who are part of the moviegoing audience in the end, feel the same way. But Searchlight's going to make a ton of noise about us. We're not being quiet. I don't think we're being too polite. We're happy to let everyone know that we're proud of the attention that we've gotten so far." Moreover, he added, "Searchlight has certainly been pretty aggressive about getting that message out there. They're also supporting the movie really, really aggressively this week. There's a lot of television running. Television support is another thing you don't expect to get on an independent kind of specialized film. We're getting a huge amount of TV support."