Although I had gone to interview him, writer/director Alexander Payne asked me the first question.
“Can I offer you something to drink?”
“A glass of ice water would be great.”
“Sure you don’t want something else? A Coke or a beer?”
“Not unless you want to open a bottle of wine …”
Payne’s eyes widened a little, considering the possibility. The wine cooler in his Hollywood home was filled with different wine bottles, and his newest film, “Sideways,” takes place mostly in the nearby Santa Barbara wine country.
It seemed the perfect time to show off his collection, but if you open a bottle of wine, you may end up finishing it.
“I shouldn’t,” Payne said, and we began to talk.
The 43-year-old filmmaker has plenty to say. Since graduating from the School of Theater, Film, Television and Digital Media graduate film program in 1990, Payne has directed four feature films, including “About Schmidt” (2002), “Election” (1999) and “Citizen Ruth” (1996). They’ve all been critically acclaimed, but none more than “Sideways,” which opened on limited national release on Oct. 20 and will expand to cities across the country in coming weeks.
Based on a then-unpublished novel, “Sideways” follows college buddies Miles (Paul Giamatti) and Jack (Thomas Haden Church) as they travel Santa Barbara County from winery to winery before Jack’s coming wedding.
It’s part road trip movie, part buddy comedy and part sweet romance, but more than anything else, it’s all human, which seems to be Payne’s overriding concern. In fact, he and co-screenwriter Jim Taylor, with whom Payne has written all four of his films, changed the ending of the novel because it sounded too much like a movie.
Payne’s concern with humanism in an era dominated by blockbusters may set him apart as a sort of rebel, but where many “independent” filmmakers like Payne might shun Hollywood, he’s embraced it. In fact, Payne has found a few reasons to believe it might be changing for the better.
“We need movies now which serve as a mirror for our society because that’s a function of art,” Payne said. “Film now has to serve its artistic function, which is to give people context, clues and a mirror of who we are and how we lost our way.”
More concerned with the presence of an authorial voice in “independent” film than the actual source of financing, Payne points to the recent successes of both big-budget and smaller films in explaining why the auteur may be ready for a comeback.
Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man 2″ and Joshua Marston’s “Maria Full of Grace,” although very different movies, both put their directors’ visions clearly on display and have a defined sense of authorship, according to Payne, and both are “independent” films, regardless of budget or source of funding.
“Martin Scorsese makes $100 million studio independent films, and then you’ve got films at Sundance that cost $500,000, and the only message is, “˜Hire me. I want to sell out,'” Payne said. “It’s really about artistic authorial voice.”
Payne frequently referred to Scorsese when describing the ideal role of the “independent” filmmaker within the Hollywood studio system, which compliments himself as much as it does Scorsese.
In 2000, Esquire Magazine ran a feature called “The Next Scorsese,” which highlighted Payne’s work, along with that of Kevin Smith, David O. Russell, Paul Thomas Anderson, the Wachowksi brothers and Wes Anderson.
And while Payne admits that he’s not a big fan of Smith’s work (he watched half of “Dogma” and didn’t like it), he’s proud to be on the short list of what he calls “really talented directors.”
The release of “Sideways” should only enhance his status on that list. After receiving a best adapted screenplay Oscar nomination for “Election” and directing Jack Nicholson and Kathy Bates to garner the best actor and best supporting actress Oscar nominations for “About Schmidt,” “Sideways” already has the buzz that could lead Payne, his cast and his crew to a plethora of nominations next year. But that’s not what Payne’s most excited about.
“The response is the biggest I’ve ever had for a film of mine,” he said. “And it’s not me being egotistical or hyping it. It’s just being quite realistic. I’ve never had a response like this. And for the first time, critics are talking about a through-line for my films, like the beginnings of a body of work.”
Before “Sideways,” it would seem like his body, heart and soul lived in Omaha, Neb., Payne’s hometown and the setting for his first three films.
Feeling most comfortable shooting there, he even went so far as to change the settings of the novels on which “Election” and “About Schmidt” were based; “Election” was originally set in New Jersey and “About Schmidt” in New York, although to be fair, Payne’s “About Schmidt” is really the combination of the novel and an Omaha-set screenplay he had written called “The Coward.”
It’s a strategy that has worked before. Federico Fellini shot his second solo directorial effort, “I Vitelloni” (1953), in his hometown in Italy, and the film’s semi-autobiographical, personal nature helped launch the rest of his career.
“I could make those stories more personal if I shot them in Omaha,” Payne said. “I couldn’t move on until I had captured something about it. “˜About Schmidt’ begins to get it.”
Even though “Sideways” leaves the Midwest for Payne’s new home on the West Coast, he seems to have found a way to consolidate life between the two. It’s a transition he’s familiar with by now, since he left Omaha to attend Stanford as an undergraduate and UCLA as a graduate student, only to return frequently to film his movies.
He constantly lives between the two worlds. His Hollywood home is a two-story, green and red painted wooden house built in 1910, the kind of place that could be transported to a farm without much notice. His cat, named Lulu, can roam the creaky wooden floors. Meanwhile, there are palm trees in his back yard.
Payne himself is a sort of compromise between the two settings. When I met with him, he wore a cadet blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the top two buttons open, white corduroy pants and black Mossimo sandals. His shirt especially made him seem like a Hollywood guy, but the grass stain on the right knee of his pants and his unconsciously open fly served as a reminder of otherwise.
When he walked me out, he did so with the dual intention of taking out the trash. Throughout our interview, Payne took time-outs to deal with phone calls (no less than six of them), some related to meetings and future plans, and some related to the release schedule of “Sideways” in Omaha. Payne had specific theaters picked out in which he wanted the film to play during various weeks of its release, cementing the notion that just because Omaha has left his films, his films haven’t necessarily left Omaha.
But traveling is important to Payne, so his eventual departure from Omaha was inevitable. If he hadn’t gone into filmmaking, he wanted to be a foreign correspondent journalist because it would let him use his two loves, traveling and languages, on an everyday basis. As it is, he partly attributes his interest in journalism to his filmmaking style.
“When people keep saying, “˜Your films are so real,’ I think it’s related to my documentary urge,” he said. “Maybe I’m a better documentarian in a way.”
Payne thinks journalism and film are closely related, as they’re both about “looking at the world and reporting on it to others.”
Both would allow him to travel, and as journalism reports through a written language that must be learned, film too has its own language to figure out. In the same way writers’ souls come out through the language of their written works, a filmmaker’s soul can be expressed through the language of film, using shots and montages as metaphoric substitutes for words and paragraphs.
The idea of the language of film is a new one to Payne, but also an appealing one because every filmmaker can speak it differently in the same way that every writer writes with an individual and personal voice.
“People are seeing an advance in (“Sideways”) in film technique over my previous three films,” Payne said. “It’s more fluid. It’s not as deliberate somehow. I think it’s because I’m learning to speak the language better. That’s really important. For some reason I’m really opening up here, but that may be it. I hope that continues, to be speaking it better. I hope that’s true. I’m just thinking that for the first time right now.”
The end of our conversation fittingly turned to endings. Like “About Schmidt,” the end of “Sideways” is beautiful in its simplicity, careful to provide enough closure to conclude the story without implying the characters are set for a life of happily ever after, or even any sort of life at all.
“How do you end?”
“It’s hard. Endings are hard. Usually I find some inspiration for the ending at the beginning.”
“Do any of your movies have alternate endings?”
“If you read “˜Citizen Ruth,’ it keeps going. She gets on a bus, and there’s a close-up on her. She looks right at the camera and says, “˜What are you looking at?'”