Alexander Payne is at the Locarno Film Festival to receive the Pardo d’Onore, but what he really wants to do is watch old movies.
“This university course on post-war British cinema is unbelievable,” he says, referring to the festival’s retrospective Great Expectations. “I couldn’t be less interested in the new films. I’m only interested in the old ones. The star so far is ‘Hell Is a City’ from 1960. That’s an awesome film!”
Talking with Variety, the director of “The Holdovers” and “Election” and two-time Oscar winner for best adapted screenplay for “The Descendants” and “Sideways,” is sanguine about his award. “You’re supposed to say: ‘It’s a huge honor. Thank you so much.’ Although I feel too young for a lifetime achievement, I’ll take this as an encouragement for the rest of my career.”
Here’s the interview in full.
So how do you feel?
What I think about is you never know where your career is going to go. When I graduated from film school in 1990 the first time I showed a film outside of the States was not in Switzerland, but Italy, at an international film Student Congress in Monte Cassino.
It was very hot that summer, and I made friends I still have now: one works here as an interpreter in Locarno. It feels like a minute ago. So it’s poignant for me to return, exactly 35 years later, during another hot summer in an Italian-speaking area, to receive an award like this.
What do you like about the old films?
They’re much better made, more literate, more economical, more efficient, more interested in just telling a story and not being pretentious. I really appreciate narrative economy.
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You’ve won several awards for your screenplays. Nowadays there’s a whole industry of screenwriting manuals. How do you see writing in film?
I’ve evolved in my thinking about that kind of stuff. When I got out of film school in the 1990s, I left film school. I was against Syd Field and Robert McKee. I defecate on those tenets of screenwriting. Who’s to say act one stops at page 30? We were coming out of the 70s, which had beautiful exploration and artistic films. I graduated from high school in 1979 so those are the films that taught me what an American commercial movie is. And then you got into the 80s, and things started to go really downhill, certainly in American cinema. And my snobby film school friends and I would accuse those books of turning everything into a formula. Now I’m 64 years old, and I see so many films which are three or four hours long, and without very good reason. And I sit in a lot of modern films and I say, “Cut, cut. I get it. Cut.” There are a lot of films which will only play at film festivals. Cinema in general is a miracle, and any movie (well, except some) … they’re all small miracles. But even at its most avant-garde, cinema is still a popular medium. This is a long-winded answer as to why I prefer old films.
You’re planning on making a Western as a possible future project.
I’m moving to Denmark in the Fall. I’m going to make a proper European art film. I got European citizenship about four years ago. I’m Greek. I don’t care that much about Greek citizenship, per se, but I got it with a very practical goal in mind, which was to make films in Europe and qualify for state funding, and the Film Gods brought me this project in Danish [“Somewhere Out There”]. Renate Reinsve is going to be in it. When I finish that, then I’m going to start work on a sequel to my film “Election,” that I made 25 years ago, and then I’ll get to the Western. The one I’m really most interested in doing. And I’m about 30 or 40 bad pages into it.
Is it based on something, or is it an original story?
Original.
Looking through your filmography, they’re all very political films, without appearing to be very political films.
Thanks for recognizing that. They are, on some level, political films, but when I’m making them, I consider them human films. “Election,” for example, is ostensibly a political metaphor of high school for what happens in the larger world. It was that metaphor for the novelist. But for Jim Taylor, my co-writer and me, it was a human story. I have to direct the Human Comedy. I can’t direct the politics of it.
Will the “Election” sequel be close to the novel?
It won’t be. Tom Perrotta, the novelist, wrote a really fine novel (“Tracy Flick Can’t Win”) that whetted everyone’s appetite for it, but it takes place again in a high school and I just can’t make another high school movie. I’m done with that. So Jim Taylor and I have altered the concept of it.
Now that democracy has become…
…a hobby?
How does what is going on in the States affect the new film?
TBD, to be determined. In general, I would say Jim and I, as writers, are not so interested in doing things ripped from the headlines, because by the time your film is ready things will have changed. But that’s not the reason why. We’re just not interested in that. We’re interested in comedy. But if you have a career in the arts, and you’re open, the winds of culture and the winds of politics are blowing through you at the time that you’re working. So it shows up.
Something’s gonna get caught in the branches.
Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s even more beautiful if those winds get caught in the branches, as you say, in ways unconscious to you. So you’re just focused on the story and the characters and the jokes and the music, and then later you look at it and go: wow, what was going on?
But politics and being human seem to be inextricably linked.
With “Citizen Ruth,” our first film in 1996, we weren’t interested in making a political statement, but in how people’s individual psychodramas play out in a public arena, and that’s how I have to direct and write. But then if you place it in a public arena, automatically, you’re making kind of a political film.
I wanted to ask you about the film writer and teacher Jeanine Basinger, who I believe you’re making a documentary about.
I was not her student, but I’m friends with some alumni of hers. We go up to her home in South Dakota and spend three or four days talking film and watching films with her. She has one of the finest minds I’ve ever been privileged to see. If she had applied herself to any other discipline, she also would have excelled. It’s just lucky for us, she chose film.
And the documentary?
We are working on it, you bet. It’ll be ready hopefully in about a year. We’re fashioning it though as a New York Times op doc, those short half-hour documentaries. I think more people would see it. We’re going to start there, presenting her to the world, so that she is not lost to the ages, and then we’ll see from there if it expands into a feature.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
From Variety US