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Alexander Payne steps Sideways
Alexander Payne in the heart of Sideways
Tue, 12 Apr 2005
On a whistlestop European tour at the end of 2004, Alexander Payne called into give a Script Factory Masterclass about his hotly-tipped new feature Sideways at London's Screen on the Green.
This was the first of two recent Script Factory encounters with Alexander, and proved to be a hugely entertaining conversation with producer Tanya Seghatchian.
Tanya Seghatchian: Welcome Alexander! I wonder if you could begin by talking about the nature of friendship and the nature of the relationship between Miles and Jack, and also about the similarities with Bruce Robinson’s film [Withnail & I] which is something that most of the audience here will probably know.
Alexander Payne: Hello! I really don’t think the film has that much in common with Withnail and I. The novel [Sideways] was inspired by that film, but I don’t think there is that much of direct connection or influence over the two guys in my film. I think it was fairly superficial. The other buddy films I went back and looked at were Zorba the Greek and Il Sorpasso/ Easy Life by Dino Risi and Y Tu Mama Tambien, and The Scarecrow, Jerry Shatzberg’s film. I think what this film has in common with a couple of those is that one of the two guys is a sensualist extrovert and the other is more withdrawn and introverted. It’s really about two sides of a male soul talking in dialogue with each other.
TS: It’s interesting that you say that because I found the scene where Miles tells Jack that the books been rejected very touching. Obviously he is speaking out of his own sense of fame and it was very optimistic. Jack says, ‘It doesn’t matter. Publish it yourself’. There is an almost naïve optimism. There is an intimacy between the two men in that scene that I found very touching.
AP: Well, and there is even a homoerotism there – which is kind of a joke for me – but because they can’t actually screw each other, when they both have sex with women, it’s their way of being able to have sex with each other. That’s why I staged the scene where Miles comes back from having sex with Maya, and he comes back and Jack hugs him and actually jumps on top of him in bed. That’s when their union, their coupling is complete. Earlier in the film at this little restaurant he says ‘it’s something we should share!’.
TS: So how do you share with Jim Taylor your co-writer?
AP: Next question…! [Laughter]
TS: Well, let’s talk a little about collaboration in writing with partners. How do you bounce the comedy off each other?
AP: First of all, in general, there is something about screenwriting as opposed to other forms of writing that lends itself to collaboration, and I don’t really know why. Why not in playwriting? Why not in the novel? Yet Antonioni, Fellini films…Sergio Leone films have more than five co-writers. Maybe it’s the spectacle of film inviting more ideas, or that film always has a sense of the audience, perhaps? You can just reflect in collaboration, perhaps? I had never envisioned having a co-writer in film. In film school, I’d always imagined writing alone, if I could write at all. Film School for me was a time of discovery of whether I had any talent and whether I liked working in films. I had always been a film buff, but I had to go to film school to find out if I could be a practitioner. Jim Taylor and I fortunately wound up as roommates and our friendship grew out of that and our collaboration grew out of that. So it’s been a very organic thing. He lives in NY and I live in LA now, so we have to plan our time. We always write together. Sometimes, writers do a ‘divide and conquer’ thing. They plan an outline and then one takes the first half and the other takes the second half. Sometimes one is better at structure, the other better at dialogue. In the case of Jim and me, we both do it all. This is our third adaptation in a row, but we still approach them as if they were original scripts. Typically we’ll read the novel two or three times and then we’ll throw the novel away. Based on our memory of the book, we’ll write.
TS: How faithful is this to the book?
Alex Payne instructs his Sideways stars
AP: This one is actually very faithful. The novelist is also a screenwriter, Rex Pickett. I think when he went to write the novel, it actually has a sort of Film Treatment feel to it, which is a prose explanation of what they say and what they do, even though the film is written from the first person point of view from Miles. It’s that same linear structure day by day, so it’s the novel that we were most faithful to.
TS: What was it that essentially attracted you when you first read it?
AP: I liked the fact that it began and ended as a human comedy. Too often they began that way and then I just brace myself for the moment when the contrivance begins and then in becomes something I’ve seen a hundred times. Thank god this didn’t; it remained something that was humane, sincere and felt. Rex really is like Miles, this frustrated, depressed, Xanex-popping Oedipal type with an unpublished novel. In fact, his latest unpublished novel was Sideways, until the moment when it was finally published when it was known that it was being made into a movie.
TS: I’m interested in how you deal with failure in your films. You seem incredibly attracted to it, and the characters sort of continue to fail but seem so strangely remorseless about their failings. It’s like you elucidate the sins, but don’t condone the sinners.
AP: Yes, sure. [laughs] Well the other thing about why I was attracted to this book, was that it didn’t disappoint on a human level and it had comic set pieces that I thought would work…and it had wine. I hadn’t seen this film before. I know there are similarities with some of the themes in my other films, but I think this is different, and I just thought it would be fun to make. It was a blast and my most fun to make.
TS: …you know what they say about films that were fun to make…
AP: …crap…if you had fun on the set then the movie isn’t any good. It’s an old wives tale.
TS: Before I open to the audience, I want to ask about the importance of films and filmmakers as tapping into a national identity and how you see yourself as an American filmmaker, and the importance of that?
AP: Say a little bit more…
TS: To what extent do you think the best films are made by filmmakers who are somehow commenting on their own national identity?
AP: Well, you are talking about the problem with world cinema right now and that there are no national cinemas, and how the emergence of commercial American popular cinema has crushed national cinemas - Italian, Japanese, whatever. Wherever you go in the world right now, 13 out of 15 screens have really bad American films showing. What is not often discussed is that we in the US are also suffering from the same thing. We don’t see ourselves reflected on screen. We are also being crushed by this capitalist machine of consumption that cheapens a really important artform. It’s the great dream of humanity, the way cinema is an exact replication of life in an artform. I mean exactly. It’s very sad to me that at such a young stage in its development that cinema has been so cheapened. It’s very important to me as an American filmmaker to be a humanist filmmaker. I increasingly resent being asked, ‘now that you’ve had Jack Nicholson and that success, are you now going to start making your BIG American films?’ What is that question about?!
TS: One of the things about this film that is interesting is that none of the actors are immediately recognisable in that way like Jack Nicholson, and I wondered if that made it an easier, or more liberating, or a more challenging experience for you as a director?
AP: Just on a practical level, not having MOVIE stars around, the actual shooting is a lot more fun. Not that Jack Nicholson or Kathy Bates pulled any diva bullshit with me, but what’s a drag is the way the crew behaved towards them…really reverentially. What was nice about this is that the actors really felt like part of the cooperative. We would block the scene and then send them off while we did the lighting, but often they would hang around and tell jokes and talk with everyone. It really felt like a team, and it taught me a lot about how I want to work again when I work with stars. I want to keep that in mind and encourage my crew not to treat them with particular reverence. I have to say though that I have been really lucky working with Reese Witherspoon, Matthew Broderick, Laura Dern, Jack Nicholson…stars who helped me get finance for those films, but who were also appropriate for those roles. On the other hand I am also inspired by what De Sica used to say; we have three billion people and every face tells a story and I have to stick with the same 30 faces? I don’t want to be limited in that way. I really want this film to be successful and make money, yes for my career, but also so I can continue to cast in this way and so that other filmmakers can work in this way too.
TS: It’s also exciting to see interesting casting of people in middle age. Thomas Haden Church was a revelation.
AP: I had never seen him in anything. He auditioned for both Election and About Schmidt, and he has that larger than life quality. That kind of hilarity that he has in the film he has in real life as well. He makes a big impression. Also, I suffer from typecasting and the fact that he was indeed a veteran of a couple of TV series, and that his career had slowed down and that he was doing commercials now…I rather liked that. Cast the guy! I like to cast actors who really have a lot in common with the character they play.
TS: Let’s let the audience ask some questions.
AUDIENCE: What is involved in your casting sessions?
AP: Typically, it’s really just reading pages, but I don’t look for ‘performance’. Really just reading those pages is a chance for us to come together and get a sense of those people. Especially if I have seen them in other things, because they are often different in real life. I tell the actors to be free, you don’t even have to prepare. I just like to see what those words are like coming out of their heads. If they do prepare something, I also say that an audition is like a sketch on a napkin and later we are going to create an oil painting and we might throw that sketch away. I often try to create the same freedom to allow them to create mistakes that I later try to bring to set. I just like to see how loose they are, and how they respond to that.
TS: Are you that loose as a director?
AP: I flew in from Athens this morning and did five hours of interviews, and one journalist said that Thomas Haden Church had referred to me as the ‘most relaxed megalomaniac he’d ever met’. I kind of liked that.
AUDIENCE: How much did you rehearse with the actors and how much did you let them choreograph their own parts?
AP: In previous films, I had never had more than a week of rehearsal and that was really basic, two or three hours a day. But in this case, none of the actors had never even met one another. It was very important to the film that we feel like these characters have some sense of history, so I asked them to come two weeks early, not just to rehearse but to play golf and go wine tasting together. They really hit it off as friends. Three or four days into it, Paul Giametti said, ‘yeah, he reminds me of my brother before he became a complete asshole’ [laughs] During the shoot, I’d often have to say ‘shut up’, because they would be laughing and cracking up together. But in terms of improv, it’s not encouraged…
TS: That’s the megalomaniac…
AP: Jim Taylor and I work a lot on the dialogue and things are there for a reason, so I like the dialogue to be done as written…but look natural [laughs]. The other thing is that a film is a minute a page and it was a 140-page script, but I didn’t want to make a 140 minute movie. I had to emphasise that they had to speak quickly. The big problem for me is always the slowness of actors. I’m always saying, ‘great, now faster’. Modern actors talk so slow, but if you look at comedies of the thirties and forties the actors are always like zoom! Zoom! Zoom! One thing I did to help them is set up two cameras, because when you do one camera set ups, dialogue overlapping is discouraged, so I set it up to film the shot reverse shot at the same time, so overlapping is not a problem. You actually get more naturalistic performance from this, but I shot a hell of a lot of film on this. I also like the Antonioni set up, which is that I come in with the actors, we figure out how they would move and then I make a documentary about that. I found that takes away panic. I’m always panicked…am I going to get everything I need? Are the actors going to discover that I don’t know what I am doing? Am I any good? Will I be discovered as a fraud? Really.
I certainly have an idea of how it should be shot, and I imagine it as I am writing it, but then the locations tell you how they want to be shot. And again, when I block it with the actors, if they have different ideas, that’s fine. I really don’t care about that too much. I hate it when I go to the theatre and see forced blocking, like two characters are sitting on a sofa talking and one of them gets up, goes behind the sofa to make a drink and leans over the sofa. I always think, they just made that up because they thought we were getting bored watching them on the sofa, but actually what they were saying was really quite interesting. So I was more distracted and as a result more bored by that imposed blocking.
TS: You cite a lot of European films as your philosophical and cinematic influences, but the sentiments in you films are a little like Hal Ashby films to me. I wonder if he was at all an influence on you?
AP: Yes, in fact he was. The look of the film photographically I wanted to be like an American film of the 70s, and a Hal Ashby film: Harold and Maude, Being There…He had been an editor, Norman Jewison’s editor and won the Academy Award for In the Heat of the Night. There is a real compassion for his characters which I admire, and he uses dissolves very beautifully and in a really original way.
AUDIENCE: Filmmakers like you and Wes Anderson and Spike Jones have managed to create very independently-minded films within the studio system. How do you do it?
AP: By independently-minded, you mean like personal cinema? Auteur or director-led cinema? It’s important to remember that this isn’t just Twentieth Century Fox, this is their speciality division. These things are getting increasingly popular now – thank god. They are divisions that are set up to make these cheaper films. It commonly down to economics, really - I keep my films cheap so I can remain free, or as free as possible because my movies have to make money. One dollar. I don’t care about having a hit but my movies have to make back what they cost, and what they cost to market, and then one dollar. Then I can keep making movies. That’s all I care about. Though, I think I’ve been lucky. Also I’ve worked hard and I have fought. On About Schmidt and this one I had final cut. On this one I had complete control on casting and everything. They didn’t say anything until editing. They have comments but were always offered very respectfully.
Really though, I think it is a good time for American filmmakers who are getting more control. It’s not going to be a Golden Age like we had in the early seventies, but we might have the possibility of a Silver Age. Big movies like Catwoman and Van Helsing tank and die a hideous death, as they should because they aren’t good. Then you have movies like Spider Man 2 and Harry Potter 3, which have strong directors, and which do well. I think that’s good for everyone. Another thing is that Martin Scorsese talks about the American director as smuggler – that he or she works in a certain genre but then bends that genre to get across personal concerns. I sell my films to big studios because I make comedies. I would think that David O’Russell and Wes Anderson would say the same thing. That makes me think of something I read from Mel Brooks years ago: he said when you make comedies, they tend to leave you alone a little bit. I have a good feeling that we are looking forward to the next few years. Plus we re-elected Bush, which is a bad thing for the world and for America, but a good thing for film because we have to fight back. There is going to be an increasing demand for intelligent films, and films with political content to address the heaviness. Always in times of darkness, it’s the arts that offer a source of light. Also in the states, there is this culture of lies in which we live and films, because they are consumerist in nature, participate in this culture. Anyway, I think some larger percentage of films is going to have to come back to earth so that we have films which aren’t just about escaping, but which are also about discovering the world, which I what I prefer cinema to do.
AUDIENCE: How much did it cost? And any future projects?
AP: Just under $16 million. Well, Jim and I are working on an original script which will have something about the times we live in, and it will be more of an ensemble piece which juggles a lot of different stories. That’s basically all I know at this point.
AUDIENCE: Well, you are from Nebraska, I believe, and I wondered how when you are making a film like this with such a strong sense of place – of California’s wine valley – how do you approach it, not being from there?
AP: Well I think that’s because I made my first three movies in a place I was from, and it was only with About Schmidt that I felt I had captured a sense of place. I felt that gave me the confidence to be able to go to another place, and use these same tools to capture the setting. An almost documentary sense of place is very important to me. So I just spent time getting to know the place. I moved there in May of last year and spent four months getting to know it as well as possible.
AUDIENCE: How did you go about the pitching process and was it an easy one?
AP: Pitching is where you go in and tell them the story of the film and get them all excited, but I’ve never done that. Even with my first feature film, Citizen Ruth, I just wrote the script and that’s what you used to get finance to make the film. I have never, fortunately, had to do a proper ‘pitch’. That’s not to say I haven’t had to be a sales person. You always have to convince them about something – cast or whatever.
AUDIENCE: How involved are you with the composer?
AP: Rolfe Kent – he’s actually an English composer. We are very close and he’s done all of my movies. That’s something I always wanted when I was an aspiring filmmaker, because I’d always admired Italian filmmakers - Fellini with Nino Rota and Sergio Leone with Ennio Morricone. I thought, wouldn’t it be great to have a composer who would really have a strong voice in my films. Very early, in 1991 when we were doing low budget shorts for a tiny television station I thought, God, this guy is good because he has a gift for melody and I like constant melody in my films. I am very involved with him and my idea for this film was ‘jazz’ and my inspiration was Big Deal on Madonna Street, an Italian comedy, which has kind of constant jazz score. Rolfe and I ‘spot’ the film, then I go to his house about two times a week and sort of encourage or discourage – micromanage sometimes, to his frustration – but it’s a really lovely collaboration. Thanks for asking about it! We were really happy with the studio musicians too, who were proper musicians. They were a small combo, and the percussion player was Alex Acuña who used to play with Weather Report. I was all excited about that.
TS: We’re out of time, sadly – Alexander, thank you!
We caught up with Alexander again, together with co-writer Jim Taylor when we headed to the Festival at Gothenberg, Sweden in February 2005. You can read a transcript of their conversation by clicking here.
to read transcripts from other Script Factory events