2.Main Content
Training
Oscar-winners Jim Taylor and Alexander Payne on writing Sideways
Photo: The Script Factory
Jim Taylor and Alexander Payne on stage for their Script Factory Masterclass
The Script Factory Masterclass with Jim Taylor & Alexander Payne
at the Gothenburg Film Festival 2005
Chaired by Tanya Seghatchian
3 February 2005
[The interview begins with Tanya and Jim alone on stage]
TS: I’d love to welcome Jim here today, particular as Sideways is one of my favourite films of the year and I’m so glad to have the opportunity to talk to him. Jim, may I start before Alexander arrives, by asking how you and Alexander met and how you started writing together?
JT: Yes, sure. Alexander and I were acquaintances in Los Angeles about 17 years ago and when I needed a room – as I had fallen on hard times – I became Alexander’s roommate. Then we started writing together. First we wrote shorts, and then our first feature.
TS: Is it true that one of your first commissions was for Playboy?
JT: [slightly embarrassed] Yes. We wrote a few shorts for Propaganda Films for the Playboy Channel.
TS: Were they successful?
JT: It depends on who you talked to. I don’t think the Channel liked them…
Haden Church & Giamatti in SidewaysTS: One of the things I note in the screenplays that the two of you have written together is a shared sense of absurdist humour and I wondered if that was one of the things that had bonded you two together in the first place, and whether it was one of the things that made you think you could use each other in the writing process?
JT: Alexander and I are best friends as well, and much of the enjoyment we get out of writing together is making each other laugh. One of the good things in writing collaboratively especially, with comedy, is that it helps you to know whether you are being funny. If someone is right there with you laughing, who you respect, it helps you to keep it on the page.
TS: Do you think that for producers who want to work with you, that they feel that they are left outside of the process, because you have a shorthand with Alexander that is so strong that it’s about what you create, and not what other people bring to the table?
JT: Well they shouldn’t feel left out of the process. It’s true that we don’t invite a lot of input. We don’t mind it, but it’s not what we are seeking from a producer.
TS: I mainly asked that because I know there are a lot of trainee producers in the audience who are looking to form a fruitful relationship with a writer and it would be great if you could elaborate on what you need from a producer, or what a good producer can bring to the relationship?
JT: The answer is: good material and some space for the writers. The support that we need is not a lot of notes. There is ‘support’ and there is ‘interference’. I think the big difference for me is that I write with a director; a lot of writers don’t have the protection of the director, or even the voice of the director in the room with them….and there he is! Alexander!
[applause as Alexander Payne takes the stage]
JT: So hopefully we’ll be a little bit more amusing now…this is very serious! [laughs]. I was just saying that it is nice as a writer that I write with the director because often in development situations if you are just a writer, you are handing the material over to a director or a producer who you have never met. Whereas, we can go through the whole process together and protect what we have written.
AP: It’s also nice for a director to be working with a writer! [laughs]
TS: Are you protecting each other from each other as well? Do you know each other’s strengths and flaws? How do you get the best out of each other?
[they look at each other unsure who should answer]
AP: Not me - I just woke up!! [laughs]
JT: Oh, OK. I think one of the real joys of our collaboration is that we are sort of able to be egoless together and take criticism without it being personal or offensive to the other person. We are also able to support each other with ideas that might otherwise never stay on the page when you get so consumed with self-loathing that you think everything you are doing is shit.
AP: It helps you to overcome a lack of confidence in writing, and I think that is the real issue, rather that protecting each other from our worst instincts. It’s about confidence.
TS: Presumably it also speeds up the writing process because if you have an idea and the other person says that’s not going to work, you can move on?
AP: Well, actually what is great is to be able to think of the ‘form’ of a joke without the right content of the joke. I can explain to him the moment with a bad example…
JT: …a guy walks into a bar…
AP: …and he’ll get the form of the joke even though I am not explaining it clearly.
TS: Do you share influences?
JT: There are certain points at which we both connect? Czech Cinema of the late 60s; we both like Milos Forman’s early movies.
AP: Kurosawa we both agree on, but he likes Jacques Tati and I don’t. I like Westerns and he doesn’t.
TS: The Czech thing is really interesting to me because I think the humanism of your films is singularly Czech and peculiarly un-American.
AP: But, I haven’t seen a lot beyond the classics beyond Forman - so I can’t really speak voluminously.
TS: Do we have a first question from the audience?
AUDIENCE: I noticed there was a lot of situational comedy in the film, so I just thought about how carefully you must have thought about the casting. It’s so important to get the right people. If they don’t understand, it doesn’t work - there is no film if the actors don’t work.
AP: Well the script provides something… [laughs]
JT: It’s true that - especially with this film - the way Alexander cast the film, and with those particularly actors, it really elevated the script. We’ve always had great casting but in this particular one, I think that the script could have gone in a different direction with a different cast. It might not have had the depth that it does; it could have ended up more of a light comedy.
Alex Payne instructs his Sideways starsAP: I didn’t mean to make fun of your question. Casting is hugely important. We place equal importance on all cinematic components, but certainly first among equals are story and casting the actors. I spend a lot of time thinking about the actors. With this film, I was really glad that we are at a point in our careers where I was able to cast non-stars and still get finance for it. I was also open to casting stars but I didn’t find anybody who was as appropriate to the roles as these actors were. I think the actors are the primary holders of the tone of this film – along with how I shoot it and the script – but the actors really embody the tone.
TS: Going back to the writing…how developed are the set comic pieces? Take the example of going back to retrieve the wallet, how much was that improvised on set?
AP: It was fully scripted.
TS: So the Jacques Tati influence is obviously significant?
AP: It’s written, and my job is then to find a location that corresponds to it, and actors which embody what we have written in the screenplay: ‘He goes into the apartment and it’s a mess. On top of the bean bag chair he finds the pants. He hears a noise. He looks. POV shot down the hall. He sees a light down the hall. Reverse. He gets on his hands’. It’s not always, but it’s often very, very close to what we had imagined.
TS: Jim, when you are writing with Alexander’s direction in mind, do you contribute to the directorial influences there? Or is it always Alexander’s direction solely?
JT: We sort of write in ‘shots’ a lot – to the extent that we say this scene should open or close in a certain way. And we write transitions.
AP: I might embellish in the directorial process, but the screenplay is not just what they do and say, but it’s very much the written record of our imagining of that film. We don’t always have shots, but I don’t think you can write cinema without indicating shots because cinema is very much about the juxtaposition of images, and the order in which information is given.
TS: You have touched on two things, which I’d like to go back to a little. Given that Sideways was an adaptation of a book, how did you go about the original process of choosing what to retain and selecting scenes and working through the chronology of the book?
AP: As a general thought, the way we usually work on adaptations is to read the book twice and then work on what is essentially an original screenplay based on our memory of the novel. It is the case with Sideways, because the novel is so linear – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and so on – that we’ve produced our most faithful adaptation yet.
AUDIENCE: I had a question about the characters. I seems a classic ‘odd couple’…is that how you would classify this relationship?
AP: The best examples are Zorba the Greek and Il Sorpaso, of this odd couple or side-kick movie, but both are more ‘profound’ than Sideways, in that one of the characters is an introvert and the other is the sensualist. They are meant to represent two sides of one male soul together. Often in interviews, I get asked ‘how can these guys be friends since they are so different’, but it’s this very thing that brings them together.
TS: The choice of realising those characters on film is very interesting. You have a sympathy for Miles, but in the book he is an uglier character and his alcoholism is more profound. You are immediately more sympathetic that one would be in the book, and I wonder if that was part of the choice you made? To make him more sympathetic?
JT: We don’t really care about ensuring the sympathy of the characters. We really don’t think about it. We just think about what is interesting and what draws us to the characters. There was one thing we didn’t include in the film that is in the book – and that is that Maya is paid to have sex with Miles. It was more the internal logic [that convinced us not to include this]; that it just didn’t make sense. We didn’t believe it would be true of the Maya we had envisioned.
TS: All of your characters are quite disenchanted with their lives and are re-evaluating their lives in a way that, I think, seems quite brave for current American cinema.
JT: Well, perhaps. It just seems that this is the way that most people are . That phrase ‘most men lead lives of quiet desperation’ is a truth. That is how most people are.
AP: Most people live with some degree of illusion or delusion. There is a great discrepancy between who we think we are or what we could be, and what our reality is.
ElectionTS: Can we go back to your first film, Election, which gives us the benefit of looking at several different characters with voiceovers and insights into their personalities? I wonder if you could talk about that – how you decided who was the protagonist, who was the antagonist and also how you approached voice over?
JT: Well, we didn’t use those terms: ‘antagonist’ and ‘protagonist’. That particular book is written in a similar format to To Die For, with each chapter written from a particular character’s point of view and with those chapters titled after the character. Election actually had about 12 of them, but we decided to cut it down to 4, in order to preserve the first person point of views with voice over. Luckily the studio supported us in this decision.
AP: Did we even test that with them?
JT: Yes, we did.
AUDIENCE: When you are writing, do you ever argue, because obviously you can’t always agree. If so, how do you resolve the problems?
JT: We often disagree. It’s just the degree to which we disagree. Somehow we always manage to convince the other one – I think that it goes back to what I was saying before about your own ego versus what is good for the story. I also think it’s about just trying to be reasonable people. I do think that a lot of collaborations break up over this.
AP: It’s also that the two of us have a sufficient lack of confidence in the quality of our own ideas. Rather than fight for our own ideas, the moment one of us says, ‘no that isn’t going to work’, the other one just says ‘no, no, of course not’…[laughs]
TS: Who decides which projects you will do?
AP: We both have to agree.
JT: Well, it happened that Election, and Sideways …and About Schmidt, actually, they all came to Alexander originally because he is the director and people often submit material to him for consideration.
TS: Has he ever wanted to do something that you just didn’t get?
JT: Initially About Schmidt, actually. Then what happened is that we came around to not really using the book, but using a script of his that he had already written. That, I was more excited about.
TS: The Coward? That was something you wrote 10 years ago, wasn’t it? How much did it change from The Coward to About Schmidt?
AP: I had written The Coward years ago, intending for it to become my first feature, but it later became my third. The first 50 pages of About Schmidt is extremely similar to my original screenplay, but using the novel, we were able to solve narrative problems together which I had not been able to solve alone.
TS: What was it that you didn’t think would work about the book?
JT: I’m not really sure exactly…I think it was just that I didn’t engage with the characters, and it just didn’t feel like ‘our voice’ until the introduction of his screenplay. I always doubt everything until the very last minute when it is successful, and then I change my mind. [laughs]
TS: You used the term ‘voice’. Does it feel like a single voice that you guys have together?
AP: I think together we have a ‘voice’ which individually we do not have.
JT: But I think our individual voices are quite similar. I mean I made a short which is similar to our work, and you wrote that first About Schmidt screenplay.
AP: I envy your level of absurdity though. [laughter]
JT: and I envy your depth…[huge laughter]
AUDIENCE: You said you have come to the point in your careers where you can use lesser-known actors. I’m just wondering if you ever wished you could have used someone less well known than Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt?
AP: Do I as a young director wish I had turned down the chance to work with Jack Nicholson?!? No, I really learned a lot. He was great, and if people have trouble watching the film and forgetting that it is him – if his persona overcomes the film for the viewer – then in a way, that is not really the film’s problem, but rather the viewer’s.
Nicholson in About SchmidtJT: That project was developed with Jack in mind, because a friend of Jack’s brought it to Alexander. Actually, there was a time when it looked like Jack wasn’t going to be able to do it, and we had a hard time imagining anyone else who could have done it.
AP: Gene Hackman would have been good.
JT: ….hmmmm… [laughs]
AP: He’s great, just different. For that story, we could not have gotten financing without a star, and I’m very grateful to Jack for agreeing to be in that and for helping to make that depressing film a success. Now we do have more freedom.
TS: Do you write with actors in mind?
AP: Sometimes, we will write with dead actors in mind, [huge laughter] just so we can imagine how it might work.
JT: We are thinking about doing that with living actors next time. Then we kill them.
AUDIENCE: Are there any books that you have wanted to do that you haven’t been able to get a hold of, or which are unadaptable?
JT: No, not really…
AP: Jim, have you ever read The Master and Margarita?
JT: I actually know the guy who has the rights to that – Michael Lang, the man who produced the Woodstock music festival.
TS: Why, do you want to do it?
AP: Well, I’ve never read it, but ten people have said to me, ‘you should do something with that book’, but I just can’t get past the first 30 pages on the park bench with the devil. You keep thinking that one day we should attempt El Quixote?
JT: You should. I want nothing to do with it. [huge laughter]
AUDIENCE: I noticed you were roommates and so were the characters in the film. How much of your relationship was in the film?
JT: Alexander thinks less so than me, but I do think that because it is a buddy movie, that it helped that we are close friends. It’s not like ‘I’m Miles, he’s Jack.’ It’s really disturbing when people think I’m Miles. [laughter]
AUDIENCE: Why did you choose an Armenian ethnic family for the Bride in Sideways ?
Photo: The Script Factory
The crowd in Sweden comes face to face with Alexander & Jim
AP: That was really to make it local to Los Angeles, which has the largest Armenian population outside of Yerevan. It just makes it more interesting than a vanilla, white protestant American wedding. I happen to be Greek American, but we [Hollywood] had a big one of those weddings two years ago…[laughs]
AUDIENCE: What is your next project and will you continue adapting novels?
JT: We are talking about it. We are sort of committed to doing an original idea, but we love reading books and continue to do that. We actually have a tiny idea that we are trying to expand.
AUDIENCE: Are you interested in genre?
JT: At this point, we are trying to go in the opposite direction; not to do genre. I don’t think we’d ever really do that. I mean we do play around with the idea, like: ‘we should do science fiction!’. Actually, we have seriously talked about doing a western at some point. What we are talking about now is taking advantage of where we are to do something less conventional.
AP: Because of the success of Sideways, we realise that we have the opportunity to get something made that is not necessarily conventional – both in terms of content and of form. We intend to do that.
AUDIENCE: A man who is about to get married and basically goes on a ‘shag fest’. Did you ever have a problem with the credibility of that character? Did you have a problem with his actions?
AP: …MEN!
JT: We saw him as deluded. He rationalises everything. That’s one of my favourite bits in the movie, he thinks ‘I’m not married yet’ and that he is seriously doing it for her sake. He creates a rationalisation that allows him to do this, which is something that people do every day. But I also think that the reason you stick with him is because of Thomas Hayden Church’s performance and Alexander’s direction. It could have been someone on screen who repelled you immediately.
AUDIENCE: You became roommates when things weren’t going well, but now things are going well for you…what happened in between?
JT: Well, really just a lot of hard work. It’s interesting because here we are in front of this big group pf people and there are these awards, but really not much has changed. We still get together and work, and fortunately this [gestures to the room] has been the result of it.
AUDIENCE: I just wondered if you could tell us some of the things you did right, and maybe some you did wrong? Something you learned from?
JT: The most important thing I think we did right, was just to please ourselves and not anticipate what we thought other people wanted to see. Instead we thought ‘what do we want to see? What do we want to do? And so, we are happy with our work and I think that people have responded to this. We’ve never tried to anticipate what the market wants.
AP: We have really never compromised. People see us as these really successful screenwriters and director and they think ‘what a body of work’, but all I think is how hard it was and how much we had to fight to get these made the way we wanted to. Now it’s a little bit easier – finally after four films. Now is the first time we have the confidence to think that we can do, within reason, anything we want to do. But it has been the result of a really long, hard process. I was in film school 20 years ago, and made my first professional film 10 years ago. We have not had anything approaching ‘overnight’ success; it has been a lot of hard work. And, as Jim said, this has only been achieved by sticking to the idea of making films that we ourselves would want to see. I mean we do think about pleasing the audience, but it is an audience that includes us.
TS: When you find an idea that you want to do, does it come easily? Does the process of drafting and writing an idea come easily?
JT: No. It’s always basically the same. This particular script was a little bit faster, and I don’t know if that is because we have just gotten faster or because this was an easier book.
AP: I think it was a little of both.
AUDIENCE: Do you write a first draft that is very concrete, or do you re-write in your head?
AP: Again, I would say both. I think our first draft is the result of about three drafts. Within a first draft we will go through it once, as they say, ‘getting it on paper’. Then the second ‘first’ draft is about going back and getting ‘buds’ that haven’t quite opened, to open. Like if we had an instinct about a character, but the character doesn’t do anything in the first draft, we might go back and work on that character to get him in earlier. Or if we want something to happen in page 80, we might go back and put something on page 30 that allows that to happen. We aren’t afraid of over writing in that second draft. It might be very long but we can’t allow ourselves to get worried about that; it’s just to get the ideas down. The third draft, is a bit more clinical and critical and we clean all that up. Then we would have a ‘first draft’, at least within our process. Also we don’t plan or outline, so we approach each day of writing in a fresh and creative way. We are lucky if we can think of an ending immediately – rarely do we think of an ending before we start to write. Maybe we will stumble on one half way through the draft.
TS: And do you stick with your endings? Or have you found yourself changing? I know with Election it was a different ending, and I know you had to discuss it with the studio before you arrived at the one you ended up shooting.
AP: We may have re-written and re-shot the ending of Election anyway, but I do know that the only time in the writing and shooting of our four films that we had to deal with studio interference was with Election. It was the only time we had to re-write and re-shoot something.
TS: And were you happy with how it ended up?
AP: We are very happy with how it ended up. And again, we may have ended up there eventually anyway, but we had to listen to the studio a week before we started shooting, and we weren’t in the position in our careers to be able to say ‘fuck you’, which we could do now if we needed to. Maybe not in those words…
TS: You said you don’t outline, and that the first draft is the result of a three-stage process. Do you expose your work to other people or solicit opinions from friends and colleagues or does it all stay between you two. Are you each other’s judge?
JT: Sometimes we will ask a few people, but not really before we have that third first draft.
TS: Do you think it’s a good thing for writers to ask for help or opinions from other people?
AP:…Well I think a more complete answer to that question, is that early on in our careers, we would send our work out for reality checks from friends – both with showing a script and a film which you are still working on. I think a general rule is if many people say the same thing – if they have a problem with the same things – then you have to look at that. Not necessarily accept their solutions, because you have to arrive at your own solution. By the time we had arrived at our fourth film – and this is sort of our seventh script because we have done 3 script doctoring jobs – we were pretty confident in our ideas if both of us like them.
TS: Is the re-writing of other people’s scripts fun? Is it just for the money, or to practice craft, and which ones did you do?
AP: It’s both really. We did it for the money, but it is good practice. We did Meet the Parents and Jurassic Park 3, which we had a credit for – which was bizarre. We also did a third one, which hasn’t been made.
AUDIENCE: Have you worked with the same producers and financiers?
JT: No, we have worked with different producers each time, and ostensibly, it’s because they brought us the material. That’s usually how we work with particular producers.
AUDIENCE: Do you have an overall deal with a studio? Or would you accept one?
JT: We’ve thought about that and the only way will do that is if it’s an informal ‘first look’ relationship, with no strings attached.
AP: We’ve resisted it. Really, the reason that we haven’t done that yet is that, until recently, we hadn’t worked with a studio that we liked enough. I hate making obligations unless I really feel the obligation. We also don’t have a staff, or a company – which is very unusual for screenwriters at our level in Hollywood. For the moment, we continue alone.
TS: Did the nature of your lifestyles change as you were garnering more success?
AP: I continued living as a graduate student until About Schmidt …
JT: and I have continued living on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. I went to grad school and I’ve been paying off that, and I got married and have been paying off that …[laughter]
AP: We haven’t made ‘hits’ really. They’ve made back their money, but they haven’t made a lot of money – nor did they have big budgets by Hollywood standards. After Citizen Ruth, I had to borrow money from my parents to pay taxes. Basically we paid to make that film.
TS: Part of the voice that is so strong in your films seems to come from – as you say – not making any compromises. A lot of writers end up getting sucked into the system once they start to have success, so it’s really refreshing to see this approach paying off for you two.
AP: Billy Wilder said: ‘when you have the swimming pool, they have you.’ [laughter]
TS: One more craft question before I open it up again. Do you feel that the conversation about three acts, or five acts, or screenwriting guides is a useful one for young writers? Or that the screenwriting process should be a more instinctive one?
JT: We definitely don’t advocate reading too many books, and especially, being guided by too many rules. For me, it’s always about writing from the inside out, rather that the outside in, and I find that too many rules just destroy the creative impulse.
AP: You said a great thing a few weeks ago: we don’t want a screenplay that looks like it was built by an erector set, but rather one that had grown like a tree.
[Jim looks embarrassed…]
JT: [in booming voice] This is a master class… [huge laughs]
AP: Yes, well the three-act structure has been so ingrained in us culturally that we really have to fight to come up with something different.
TS: Jim once described screenwriting as being like love-making to me…
AP: Can I ask what he said?
TS: He said that he didn’t want to be told when to come; that he wanted to feel it rather than do it fifteen minutes in! [huge laughs]
JT: I also talk about tantric screenwriting, which is I procrastinate and procrastinate…
AUDIENCE: Jim, have you ever wanted to direct and do you ever have feedback for Alexander about how he directs a scene if you have envisioned it differently?
Alexander Payne in the heart of Sideways JT: First of all, yes, I do want to direct. I always get a little embarrassed when that question comes up because both Alexander and I think of it all as filmmaking , whether it’s editing, writing or directing. I set out to be a filmmaker, which is what I do. As far as working with Alexander goes, he is very generous and open about showing me things and inviting my input, and I feel very much a part of that process. However, on the set, there is a director and I don’t understand co-directing, so he is the one that has the relationship with the actors and the cinematographer. He might ask my opinion, but ultimately, he is the one who has to make the movie.
TS: Would you write for Jim?
AP: Yes.
JT: Thank you Tanya! [laughs]
AUDIENCE: Do you participate on the set? I’ve actually heard from many directors that writers are not particular welcome on the set.
JT: That is because they are assholes… no, there are many different scenarios. It depends on personalities, but there isn’t that much for a writer to do on set. They have to let the director, direct the movie. In my case, I’m really lucky because we’ve talked about the movie from start to finish so many times, so it’s never like something completely different is happening on the set, which is what I think is happening on set for many writers. It is completely at odds from what they have imagined.
AUDIENCE: How do you work as a duo? Does one person start and the other one come in?
JT: We work always in the same room together; we never split up scenes. We might say, ‘here why don’t you take a stab at this’, but it would really only be for a few pages, and we are in the room together while this is happening. Then we will sit down and rewrite that together anyway. We need that ‘intercourse’ to happen; we can’t do it over the phone.
TS: Has the success of Sideways made that more difficult to move on to the next project? Presumably, your schedules must be very busy?
AP: Mine has been very busy because, as the director, the burden of responsibility falls more on you to promote the movie. Plus the period of promotion has been overlapped by all of the awards, so it has really been impossible to get any creative work done.
AUDIENCE: Any advice on where to send your script?
JT: That is a really tough question. People always want to know about getting agents or how to get the material read and unfortunately, there are no great answers to that. I was lucky because I hooked up with someone who had come out of film school and so people wanted to work with him, so I didn’t have that problem. Nor did he. So I never quite know what to say to that question, but I would say that it’s not a great use of energy to try to get an agent. They won’t be that interested until you have made something, so it’s better to just try to spend your energy making a movie and they will follow.
TS: In England, most agents won’t take you on until you have written at least three screenplays because they want to see that you are not just a ‘one-hit’ wonder, so the more you can write, they more useful it is.
AUDIENCE: Were you conscious of wanting to make a film with a more ‘upbeat’ or positive ending? About Schmidt was fairly downbeat ending…were you conscious of trying of turn that around?
AP: Not really. We are always interested in honest endings and ones we believe in. Actually, the ending of the book is far more ‘happy’ or suggests more closure than ours. We may be interested in a moving or poignant ending, but not in terms of it being ‘happy’ or ‘sad’.
Jim Taylor has the last word
JT: But in trying to come up with an ending we had some very un-cynical discussions – and I’m glad that this one doesn’t end with someone crying over a picture [as About Schmidt does]. It felt good to leave Miles with a chance of happiness this time.