An interview with Alexander Payne

The below ori­gin­ally appeared a couple of weeks back in the now-defunct Wide Screen, an online pub­lic­a­tion from Nomad Editions. It turned out pretty well, I thought, so I figured I might reprint it here before it went down the vir­tu­al rab­bit hole. I have an only slightly dated Michael Fassbender inter­view from that pub­lic­a­tion I might want to post here in time for A Dangerous Method and/or Shame; let me know in com­ments if, as Francis Bacon once said to Kingsley Amis in a very dif­fer­ent con­text, this sort of thing interests you. 

The writer and dir­ect­or Alexander Payne has a quietly eleg­ant pres­ence that’s a com­fort­able match for his pen­et­rat­ing intel­li­gence, an intel­li­gence that’s a spark­ling fea­ture of his con­ver­sa­tion and, of course, a cru­cial com­pon­ent of his films. With pro­du­cer and fre­quent co-writer Jim Taylor, Payne has made five fea­ture films (and one not­able short, in the omni­bus pic­ture Paris, Je T’Aime) that are search­ing and some­times sar­don­ic stud­ies of unique but nev­er­the­less rep­res­ent­at­ive American char­ac­ters in unique American set­tings. The social-activism satire Citizen Ruth, the high-school-as-metaphor-for-cursed-life com­edy Election, the dying-of-the-light road pic­ture About Schmidt, and the wine-dark story of love for pos­sible losers, Sideways, have all made their mark in both the crit­ic­al and com­mer­cial realms. And now Payne deliv­ers his most accom­plished, and mov­ing, film yet, The Descendants. Based on a nov­el by Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants begins with a lyr­ic­al image of a woman enjoy­ing some power boat time in the blue, blue Hawaiian waters. But all is not well for long. The moment we see is dir­ectly before a dis­aster that puts the woman, Elizabeth, into a coma, and sends her hus­band, afflu­ent law­yer Matt King, into a frenzy of emo­tion­al tur­moil as he tries to deal with his two young, troubled daugh­ters; the sale of a large par­cel of land owned by his fam­ily, and the vari­ous pres­sures con­cern­ing that sale that his less-prosperous kin are bring­ing to bear on him; and finally, the know­ledge that his wife had been con­duct­ing an affair. Funny, wise, deeply sad and deeply com­pas­sion­ate, The Descendants may just be the film of the year. Wide Screen talked to Payne about its themes and cre­ation as the film was premier­ing at the New York Film Festival in early October.

GK: I have a couple of ques­tions to start with, to which the short answers would invari­ably be “It’s called act­ing, stu­pid.” But I’m hop­ing you’ll indulge me with longer answers. To begin with, I’m just blown away by the way that George Clooney and Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller, who play his daugh­ters, achieved this dynam­ic that is so seem­ingly nat­ur­al and so present. Despite, say, that Clooney him­self is not a dad, and so on. So I’m won­der­ing how you were able to lead the per­formers through the cre­ation of that par­tic­u­lar dynamic.

ALEXANDER PAYNE: Part of the answer is “it’s what I do,” and part of the answer is “it’s what Iobserve.” My oth­er exper­i­ence in doing this sort of thing was in Sideways, when I had to have those two guys, Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church, appear as though they had been friends for years, even though they had only met two weeks before shoot­ing. Because in that case, if you didn’t believe their friend­ship, there was no film. So I had them come out to Santa Barbara County two or three weeks before shoot­ing, not just to have rehears­als with me but so they could spend time togeth­er and go play golf and see movies. They were as eager to forge a rela­tion­ship as I was, because they wanted the movie to be good. So the same thing applied for this film. I brought all those play­ers out about two weeks before shoot­ing and we got togeth­er at the house I was stay­ing at in Hawaii, and on loc­a­tions. It’s always import­ant to take act­ors to loc­a­tions before you shoot. And we just hung out. And then they just hung out. And then it star­ted to show up on screen. The pro­cess of mak­ing a film is so long that each day is a bit of rehears­al for the whole rest of the shoot. And the only com­pli­ment I really pay myself in film­mak­ing is that I cast well. And I think that, a), they were well-selected, and b), I thank the film gods that those par­tic­u­lar act­ors reached me because for none of those three parts — Clooney, Shailene or Amara — was there an also-ran for the role. It was really them, those three spe­cific­ally. It’s as if, for example, well, who else is going to play you?

And then, of course, there’s film’s remark­able capa­city to lie. [Laughs.]

GK: I think Clooney goes as deep as he’s ever gone. In part it’s because of the themes. Did you dis­cuss this before­hand, or did you just keep it spe­cific­ally related to the char­ac­ter and the narrative?

PAYNE: The latter. 

GK: Because he’s a smart guy. He doesn’t need you to lay that stuff out…

PAYNE: No, he gets it. He knows what’s going on. Then it’s just a mat­ter of what you get day by day on the set and take by take. Little sur­gic­al instruc­tions I might want him to find help­ful, like what I tell him between takes. And then decent editing.

GK: I wanted to ask you about the editing.

PAYNE: Thank you. I’m real proud of the edit­ing in this one. 

GK: I wanted to talk about how long it took, because you have this nar­rat­ive through line that’s incred­ibly strong and nev­er feels over-determined. You’ve got the engage­ment of the audi­ence at all times without ever over-emphasizing any one thing. How’s the pro­cess go for you and your edit­or, Kevin Tent?

PAYNE: Kevin and I typ­ic­ally edit for a long time. Election we edited over a year. I still think it’s my only film that’s not too long. Sideways and Descendants were each about 36, 37 weeks total. It’s not all just pic­ture cut­ting, it’s also sound and sound effects, music and stuff. But start to fin­ish, it was about 37 weeks, so just over 9 months, 10 months. And we screened a lot. Actually, we had a couple of those Hollywood screen­ings. I for­get what they call them – you know, recruited-focus-group-type screen­ings – we had two of those. But I screen con­stantly for friends and people who come into the cut­ting room, or rent a small screen­ing room, watch it, cause that’s really the only time when you know what you have or how it’s func­tion­ing. And then we just go on, con­tinu­ing to cal­ib­rate tone. And it takes a while.

GK: There’s a real looseness—

PAYNE: I just think many films today are under-edited.

GK: Well, you get the emo­tions to res­on­ate without ham­mer­ing them. 

PAYNE: Thank God. I can’t stand being hammered in a movie. I get it. I’m there. I want the view­ers to bring their part, their com­pon­ent, to the film-watching experience. 

GK: Right. You lead them through it and it feels loose, but I think there’s also a real metic­u­lous­ness to it and a real con­scious­ness of the way you’re using the devices and you have — this film has the con­fid­ence where it can start off with this voi­ceover nar­ra­tion and then just dis­pose of it.

PAYNE: Correct. 

GK: Nobody is going to ask, “Where did the nar­ra­tion go?” But that’s the sort of thing that some­body else might worry and say, well no, we need to bring that back at the end, to close the par­en­thes­is or what have you. Or we need to bring it back in the middle. But you —

PAYNE: You know, I thought of all that. But I’m 50 now, and I think I’m at a stage where I can use whatever film tech­niques I need at whatever time for whatever effic­acy. There’s only one wipe in the film. Typically you’d say, well, no, if you’re going to have a wipe, you need to have more than one wipe. But I didn’t need more than one wipe. The wipe worked well there, the one place I needed it. And you’re right about voi­ceover. It worked well to get us into the story and then I jet­tisoned it. I didn’t need it any­more. The film just uses what it needs.

GK: So you begin with Matt in voi­ceover giv­ing you a bit of a real­ity check as to what life in Hawaii  is like. It’s para­dise but it’s not para­dise. And then, it’s not as if you’re not aware of the land­scape, but there’s that one shot where the char­ac­ters look at the land they own, and it’s beautiful.

PAYNE: You can­not deny that there are jaw-dropping vis­tas out there. I think the land in that shot is, like, the land owned by Matt and his fam­ily, actu­ally in a trust, that will elapse at some point. It’s on Kaua‘i, I for­get the name of the fam­ily who owns it; a huge, huge ranch. They make money at that ranch by allow­ing ATV tours. These old estates have to resort to a lot of com­mer­cial tricks like that to keep afloat.

I did do a lot of research about Hawaii his­tory cause inas­much as a his­tory is even implied in the title of the film, but he’s from one of those fancy old fam­il­ies in Hawaii. I needed to know what I was deal­ing with. And then get a lar­ger sense of that com­plex and some­times intim­id­at­ing social fabric.

 The book on which the film is based, a nov­el by Kaui HArt Hemmings  reached us, and by us I mean my pro­du­cing part­ners, Jim Burke and Jim Taylor, about four, five years ago. And Jim Taylor and I were in the midst of writ­ing some­thing else, which I haven’t shot yet. And so I eschewed it for the moment, even as I recog­nized its mer­its. And so Jim Burke went ahead and he hired a couple oth­er writers to just get the thing up on its feet. And then they lured anoth­er dir­ect­or who was involved for a while, Stephen Frears, who was very inter­ested in doing it. And the writers did a couple drafts for him. But any­way, finally, in ’09 I decided to do it after Stephen Frears dropped out. He had a con­flict with some­thing else. So then I did my own adapt­a­tion. And there we were.

GK: Did you like the idea of going to Hawaii?

PAYNE: Absolutely. I think more and more my film­mak­ing, not that I’ve made that many films, but each one takes a lot of effort and time. And I find myself now audi­tion­ing place as well as much of the story there. So yeah, recently — for example, recently, I’ve been flirt­ing with a book that would half take place in Dublin. I had nev­er been to Dublin, so I flew over to Dublin a few weeks ago, just to sniff around. And it was lovely, but I didn’t find it par­tic­u­larly inspir­ing to me on a super­fi­cial vis­it. So I don’t think I’m going to do it. But Hawaii was a place I had loved already. I’ve been there many times and had a sense of that com­plex cul­tur­al fab­ric. And not just Hawaii, the island itself. I was inter­ested in see­ing Honolulu, which is a real city. I had nev­er seen Honolulu in a film. 

GK: And you do get this really enga­ging sense of place, not unlike the sense of place you brought to bear on Sideways.

PAYNE: Which is a skill set I finally began to get a handle on in About Schmidt. And the short I did for the omni­bus film Paris, Je T’Aime was a kind of a rein­for­cing exer­cise for me about humans in fore­ground, place in back­ground. Even when I did a pilot for Hung…I didn’t go quite as deeply, but even that, I think, has a genu­ine redol­ence of Detroit, where it’s set and was shot. 

GK: People are going to ask why has it taken so long between this and Sideways. And obvi­ously you do oth­er things. But for a film­maker who does the kind of films that you do, is it just more dif­fi­cult to get things going?

PAYNE: No, I think it’s just … it’s always about mater­i­al. Everything is always about mater­i­al. The fact that it was essen­tially four years between when I was able to put Sideways to bed and picked up the pen on The Descendants — that was about, well, most of that time was spent writ­ing. Writing the script that Jim and I have yet to see shot. And for dough we script-doctored a couple of oth­er things. And I did the Hung pilot. Time just went by fast. But I rue that, because I am in this to make fea­tures. I like it! Fun.

GK: In terms of the cast­ing, how much were you aware of play­ing a little bit with icon­o­graphy rel­at­ive to George Clooney’s celebrity status and hav­ing him cuckolded?

PAYNE: Every once in a while I’d hear, and even maybe now you might — before someone’s seen the movie — “Well, who’s going to cheat on George?” Well, every­body cheats on everybody.

GK: Matthew Lillard, who plays the char­ac­ter with whom the wife had had an affair; it’s inter­est­ing because Matthew’s so often played a goof, and there’s a scene where he has to deliv­er one of the film’s more pro­found moment, when his char­ac­ter steps back and admits, in so many words, “I didn’t do it for this reas­on, it happened.”

PAYNE: Yeah. 

GK: It’s a beau­ti­ful moment, pain­ful and true.

PAYNE: He does a good job, that guy Lillard! See, though, I hadn’t seen him in any­thing else. I saw Scream a mil­lion years ago, but I didn’t remem­ber it. I’ve nev­er seen him. He just audi­tioned really well. 

GK: Patricia Hastie, who plays Elizabeth, the comatose wife — what was she like?

PAYNE: Thank you for ask­ing about her. I am so proud of her work. She was a loc­al hire in Hawaii. She was really, tech­nic­ally, a “fea­tured extra,” because she was a loc­al hire with no dia­logue. But I ended up bump­ing her up to giv­ing her front-end cred­it and full scale, or how­ever much she was paid. That woman took it very ser­i­ously. She lost a bunch of weight. She would stay up all night, come in to work the next day, go through hair and makeup, climb into bed, get hooked up to the IV’s, take a melaton­in and say, “Don’t wake me even for lunch.” She was out a lot of the time. And we’d have to re-adjust her body, because  they’ll get bed sores. She really showed up for work. There’s an old Latin phrase, Dum tacet clamat. “Although silent, she speaks.”