Sideways

[Ghostboy]

I didn't think the trailer was all that bad (mainly due to those last three shots before the title), but other than that, I agree completely with cowboy curtis and his assesment of the film. It's a really wonderful movie, satisfying on all counts. Thomas Hayden Church should get an Oscar nod for his performance.

[modage]

Alexander Payne Talks About Sideways
Source: Edward Douglas October 20, 2004

Filmmaker Alexander Payne has come a long way from his Nebraska roots. His last two films have received high praise, and many well-deserved awards and nominations, making him one of those rare indie directors with mainstream credibility in Hollywood. The quality and unique feel of his previous movies, dealing with topics like abortion (Citizen Ruth), teacher-student relationships (Election) and aging (About Schmidt), have made Payne the director that every actor wants to work with. His latest movie Sideways, based on Rex Pickett's novel of the same name, is about two close friends who take a trip through California wine country. To play Miles the wine snob and his boisterous pal Jack, Payne could have chosen from the cream of the crop, but instead, he went with two popular character actors, Paul Giamatti, best known for his stint as Harvey Pekar in American Splendor and "Wings" star Thomas Haden Church. The tone of their trip is changed by two women played by Virginia Madsen and Payne's wife, Sandra Oh, best known as Rita on the HBO sitcom, Arliss. With this unconventional quartet, Payne went on location to California, ending up with a very special movie that is as funny as it is touching.

ComingSoon.net talked to Payne about his new movie, which closed the recently concluded New York Film Festival. (Note: long time writing partner Jim Taylor jumped in to help answer the last question, as well.)

CS!: Your new movie is an adaptation of a book by Rex Pickett. How did you discover it, what made you want to adapt it and how hard was it to adapt?
Alexander Payne: Michael London sent it to me in 1999. He knew Rex, who was then unpublished. The novel wasn't published until May this year, and they thought I'd be the right guy for it. I like the humanity of the characters and the comic set pieces and the wine aspect because I like wine, and those gals, and it seemed like it would be a lot of fun to make. Another big reason is that it didn't seem like the adaptation would be very hard because Rex's book was an amazing template to work from and it was pretty much laid out. Jim and my adaptation was very faithful. You always have to spend a lot of time on it to shape it into a movie, but I thought that it wouldn't be a terribly difficult adaptation. Of course, it's always hard once you start writing and have to change things. Of the two or three adaptations we've done, this was by far the most faithful one we've done. Typically our scripts take six months for a first draft. This one was four. That's a savings of two months - nothing to sneeze at.

CS!: Can you talk a bit about the casting process for the movie?
Payne: Michael London, the producer, and I had been optioning the rights to the novel ourselves, and then Jim and I wrote the screenplay on spec, and then Michael and I together paid for casting. Got an office and paid my casting director, hung out a shingle and started meeting actors. The important key to this is that there was no studio involved, so it was just us auditioning actors for a couple of months. Finally, I found the four actors who I thought would be great in the movie, and then we went to studios. It was nice eliminating the name game with studios. It was really just how I want to work, which is go out, meet and audition as many actors as I can that I think are in the right ball park and then pick the ones that I think will be good.

CS!: Since there are only four principle parts, let's talk about each specific actor and what you saw in them? Let's start with Paul, who was great in American Splendor. Is that what convinced you to cast him?
Payne: I hadn't seen that. You know, I really just go off of auditions. I'm pretty old fashioned that way. I spent a week in New York auditioning folks here then I went back but I really wanted to cast Giamatti. I had to see some other people, so I couldn't announce my decision yet, and then during that week or two, there was a screening of American Splendor. I went to it, and he was great in the movie, but it didn't affect my decision.


CS!: How about Thomas Haden Church?
Payne: I had never seen him act. I still haven't seen him act in anything else, although since shooting, I've seen about fifteen minutes of Wings when I was surfing by. I had auditioned him already for Election and About Schmidt. My then-casting director, Lisa Beech, had always loved him. He makes a big impression, he's always kind of on, he's an actor guy, but with a really big personality. I always thought of him, and here I thought he might be right. I was always hoping to cast him one day. I'll audition people and obviously I can't cast them all, but I remember them and sometimes I write it down too, and Tom's someone who always stuck in my mind. Also, he is a veteran of a couple of TV series and had relinquished to a certain segment of his career and was working on his ranch in Texas. That fit really well with the character of Jack, and I always like that kind of mirroring.

CS!: What about Virginia Madsen made you think that she'd be perfect for the part?
Payne: I really haven't seen her that much either. There's something present in her eyes, even in her eight by ten photo. She looks at you and she listens and then she thinks and she speaks. Not a lot of people do that. Plus there was something where just looking at her, she communicates some life experience. I like that, because honestly cinema is often about the close-up, and if the face says something, that's a cinematic performance. That's why you have so many lousy actors as movie stars, because their faces have something. She's got that. Then she just nailed the audition. Right before casting her I had a coffee with her. I had to be sure that she wasn't going to be doing glamour puss stuff, make sure that she would be comfortable without any makeup and playing every bit of her age, because that's what the character is. She was totally cool about that, and she was such a pro and a trooper. In fact, she has a close friend who grew up with her in Chicago together, who said to me, "You're the first filmmaker to begin to capture the Virginia I've known all my life." That was nice.

CS!: And then of course, the fourth part of the equation is your wife, Sandra Oh. What was it like directing her, especially since she has a sex scene with Thomas?
Payne: It's fine. I don't think there's much difference between if we did not know each other. Well, other than that I was f**king her. (laughter) But no, she only worked like eight or nine days on the film, so it wasn't like a deep director-actress relationship.

CS!: Was there less pressure not working with an actor on the level of a Jack Nicholson?
Payne: The problem working with Jack Nicholson isn't Jack Nicholson. It's other people's attitudes towards Jack Nicholson. He was fine and cooperative with everything except that he can't shoot before 11 in the morning, and that was fine by us. As soon as he walks on the set, everyone is deferential and quiet, but he's just a guy. I noticed that difference on this film. Because there are no big movie stars, the actors are just hanging out and wouldn't freak out the crew, so filming was lighter and faster.

CS!: Besides the low-key cast, this also seems like a more personal film then your last few, more about the people and the place.
Payne: Could be. I grew up in the 70s when movies were about regular people and regular human stories. What we see in older films and what we see in foreign films is not the ridiculously contrived plots of Hollywood films. It's not about fighting terrorists or Road Trip or any of that bullsh*t. I'm fascinated by how fantastic regular life is, and I don't need these f**king contrived plots. The whole challenge, is to get uncontrived things, to somehow capture human experience on film. And that's hard. That's what I look for. That's why I try to have place as accurately presented as I can in films. Not just human emotions and people and a sense of my experience transported into the characters, but also place. I have a certain documentarian nature to my filmmaking, both to reporting on the human heart and the physical places I see.

CS!: Is that love for 70's movie why the movie seems to have a 70's feel?
Payne: I'm certainly not alone in admiring so many American films of the 70's, It's not so much the tone, it's the look of the film. I told the cinematographer that I wanted it to have those softer colors and more of that pastel feeling of the films of the early 70's. Actually, my idea was that it would be a combination of early 70's American film and a late 50's/early 60's Italian comedy. The idea of constant jazz going throughout the film, that's kind of scoring the film, but not really.

CS!: Speaking of capturing the place, this also was your first film not shot in your home state of Nebraska. Besides the obvious reason (that it was set in California wine country), was there any other reason you wanted to get out of Omaha?
Payne: I never really set out to be the Omaha guy. It occurred to me for my first three films to shoot in Omaha, but I want to shoot all over the place and it felt fine.


CS!: What would you consider to be the tone of the film. Is it a comedy or a drama?
Payne: Tone is hard to talk about, because tone is style and style is the filmmaker's. It's just who you are and what occurs to you as being funny and dramatic and meaningful. As a viewer, I recognize that it has those things in retrospect, but in terms of how we set out how to do it, it's really just what comes out. I guess we can just say that we're always trying to make comedies, but we're always thinking about what happens next, regardless of whether it's comic or dramatic or pathetic. It all comes from the same place and we certainly don't score for comedy or drama. In fact, often when the most comic or dramatic things happen, there's no music and you bring the music in later. Another thing about tone, for us, is making sure that the audience is participating in what's funny and dramatic, and never telling the audience how to think...like Spielberg might do. How music is used in those films is used completely opposite of how we'll use music.
Jim Taylor: It's also a real testament to the actors, being able to bridge that divide and to be able to be real. They can do this somewhat broad comedy, but keep enough basis in reality that when the next moment comes along that you're still with them as human being, as opposed to characters.

Stay tuned for more with the cast of Sideways, which opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday.

[MacGuffin]

Posting news and interviews, watching better horror movies...I see what you're trying to do, Mr. Mini-Thrindle's Boyfriend.

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anything to get out of this mess i'm in.  

[SHAFTR]

I'm excited.

[MacGuffin]

Director Payne Goes 'Sideways'



"What's funnier than real-life experience?" Alexander Payne asks. That question easily could serve as the motto for the director who set "Election" in a real high school with authentic real students and plopped an au naturel Kathy Bates into a hot tub for "About Schmidt."

But in Payne's "Sideways," there's more tenderness. Like all of his films, it's carefully imbued with a sense of realism, but without his trademark biting satire.

"`Election,' `Citizen Ruth' and `About Schmidt' are more `let's examine a situation,'" Payne said in a recent interview. "We're kind of outside the world of the characters. This feels more like the story issuing from the inside of the characters."

The movie focuses on two old friends who embark on a wine-tasting trip to California's Santa Ynez Valley. Miles (Paul Giamatti) feuds with Jack (Thomas Haden Church) over their divergent expectations for the vacation. Miles, a depressed divorcee and wine connoisseur, wants nothing but to sip fine pinot noir, while Jack's self-proclaimed "plight" is to sow the last of his oats before his impending marriage.

As the two friends grapple with their middle-aged lives (one a teacher with a 700-page unpublished novel, the other an out-of-work actor) they careen between wineries, eventually returning home in a busted-up Saab.

It's Payne's first foray into making a movie anywhere but his hometown of Omaha, Neb. The 43-year-old now lives in Los Angeles with wife (and "Sideways" co-star) Sandra Oh.

"I love shooting in the Midwest, but I never want to be `The Nebraska Guy,'" Payne explained. "I'm a filmmaker, so I'd like to shoot everywhere."

That desire to set out with a camera may explain this being his second road movie in a row after "About Schmidt," but it's just coincidence to Payne.

"`Election' is a high school movie by a guy who couldn't have been less interested in making a high school movie, and `About Schmidt' and (`Sideways') are road movies made by a guy who is not really interested in road movies. ... I hate shooting in cars."

But the characters of "Sideways" made it worthwhile.

"The book (by Rex Pickett) is really real in terms you felt. You live that pain of being broken up after a divorce, and writing a novel and not finding a publisher."

Though this is only Payne's fourth film, he's already had considerable critical success. He and co-writer Jim Taylor (with whom he collaborates again here) were nominated for a screenwriting Oscar for "Election" and won a Golden Globe for their "About Schmidt" script.

"I came out of film school from UCLA and I had no idea where I was going to get my financing from," Payne remembers. "Somehow, making the films I want to make, I've been able to get financing from studios. I write and direct my own films with studio money; I have final cut.

"I have a European director's career in America. And if I can do it, then other people can."

In this, Payne is similar to several other young auteurs like Wes Anderson ("Rushmore"), David O. Russell ("Three Kings") and Paul Thomas Anderson ("Boogie Nights"). Able to make so-called "independent" cinema within the studios, they all straddle mainstream and art-house appeal.

It's a balance not lost on Payne, who thinks movies are beginning to thaw after a period of corporate blandness that the film industry "will find it can feed itself by giving some back to the human."

And there are few actors that epitomize the everyday, average human life more than Giamatti, who starred as comic writer Harvey Pekar in last year's "American Splendor." The film set, Giamatti says, was very communal and the wine didn't hurt either.

"Everyone was walking around with a glass of wine in their hand," he says. "At one point, I saw a grip holding a light in one hand and a glass in the other."

The actor says Payne is "a control freak that lets you feel like you're in charge ... He's successfully satirical in an age when there's not much satire."

Payne has much reverence for a time when satire and raw humanity was more prevalent: the fabled '70s of American cinema, memorable for films by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman and Hal Ashby, among others.

That decade is significant, Payne says, for "what film language suddenly was, and we needed it then, given all the heavy (stuff) that was happening. I think we're entering a phase like that now. I think films might come off their fraudulent pedestal a little bit, and be more human again. We're certainly living in difficult political times."

[Slick Shoes]

I just saw this thing.

A little background: I love love love Election. About Schmidt is just okay.

Sideways is brilliant. Probably his and Taylor's best work. I was moved.

[SHAFTR]

I just saw this thing.

A little background: I love love love Election. About Schmidt is just okay.

Sideways is brilliant. Probably his and Taylor's best work. I was moved.

This makes me very excited, since we have similiar tastes with Payne.

[samsong]

One of the most insightful, true-to-life, and poignant potrayals of the male psyche, the pain(s and joys) of existence, and the dynamics of friendship, all while being a poetic piece of Americana. Takes some bizarre (yet hysterical) and conventional (, but poignant) turns but it all works at the end of the day.  Without a doubt Payne's best film to date, which I can say with confidence without having seen Citizen Ruth.  Tonally, it's pitch perfect.   The acting is superb; Giamatti MUST be NOMINATED at the very least, since he was overlooked for American Splendor.  Thomas Haden Church gives the same performance that Dermot Mulroney gave in About Schmidt but is excellent nonetheless; again, I demand a nomination.

As I said, it's Paynes best film.  It's great seeing him develop as an artist through each of his films.  The drunk phone call sequence is so expertly crafted, as are a lot of things in the film but I especially like that one (that's hardly a spoiler but if one of you admins disagree...whatever).  Sideways captures the finer-things-in-life, this-is-the-stuff-of-life sentiments with such elegant and delicate beauty, a mature film that not only is a reason for hope for American cinema (Manhola Dargis wrote that in her review... I feel the need to give her credit) but a reason for hope in general.  Loved this movie.

P.S. Payne's use of sexuality is bold and is much appreciated, even though it hurts to watch...

[Ghostboy]

For being as ugly as she is, Sandra Oh exudes a very sexy confidence that I found very appealing.

What?!!!

Otherwise, in complete agreement. Although if only one person could be nominated, I'd go with Church.

[matt35mm]

For being as ugly as she is, Sandra Oh exudes a very sexy confidence that I found very appealing.

This probably isn't Payne's intention, since he's married to her and probably, y'know, doesn't think she's ugly.

[Ultrahip]

absolutely, perfectly exquiste and lovely, also funnier than anything this year, the golfing scene "did they hit into us?" oh boy...brilliant movie

samsong, how is thomas haden church's performance anything like dermot mulroneys in about schmidt? I see virtually no similarites, perhaps i'm blind, and if that is the case, please enlighten me.

[Slick Shoes]

I saw it again.  I'm just in love with this movie right now.

I anticipate a backlash: too many glowing reviews equals unreasonably high expectations.

I gotta admit I've already fantasized about the DVD.

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saw this tonite.  very good.  i prefer Schmidt and Election personally but i still had a good time here, as much as one can watching Paynes characters misery.   it was A LOT about wine, moreso than i had expected.  giamatti is good as usual, but nothing revelatory.  he's always good but its nice to see him as a 'leading man' instead of a quirky sidekick. church was good and likable througout his despicable actions, almost like a middle aged slightly mellowed vince vaughn.  the music was interesting, very jazzy through the whole beginning almost like vince guaraldi's peanuts score or something.  i dont know except that i 'noticed' it and it gave it a different feel than most films you watch.  interesting how guys like him (or DGG) seem to be looking to capture whats real, real people, real dirt, not false movie sentiment, but at the same time using split screen and noticable camera tricks to let you know you're watching a movie.  its an interesting paradox i suppose a lot of filmmakers face.  he seems to be also looking to perfect the saddest happy ending.  

there was an thing in the paper today with Payne where he mentioned the next project being a larger scale and said he had been thinking a lot about Nashville and La Dolce Vita.  sounds interesting....

[Weak2ndAct]

Went to a Q&A/discussion w/ Payne and Taylor tonight, which was quite fascinating (plus there was a wine tasting to boot!).  Payne is not the dick he seems to come off as in recent interviews, in fact, I found his words to be quite inspirational: here's a guy who's had bad-post-film-school times (he told budding writers to relish their despair), has stuck it out, and made a career for himself.  The whole night was especially odd b/c I had Sandra Oh sitting in the aisle next to me (she's a little crazy, kept muttering things to herself, and would divide her time between script reading and wine-drinking) and Howard Hessman behind me ('Head of the Class' flashbacks kept popping in).  All in all, an entertaining night.  If you ever have the opportunity to see these guys in person: do it.