He may be obsessed with middle-aged men in crisis but Alexander Payne has nothing to worry about – his latest film just got five Oscar nominations. He talks to DONALD CLARKE
ALEXANDER PAYNE has a hangover. I know this because he tells me so. After a successful screening of The Descendants,his latest serious comedy, the director joined the cast for a slap-up dinner in London's West End and now he is suffering. He makes puffing noises. He pats his forehead delicately. But he doesn't come across like a man who's just been dragged from the gutter.
Having passed 50 with the same silver grace as George Clooney, his latest leading man, Payne looks every inch the cultured, Ivy League intellectual. His shirt is immaculate. His brown skin is smoother than crème fraiche. Confidence oozes from every well-maintained pore.
Why wouldn't it? Over the past decade and a half, Payne has emerged as Hollywood's most respected director of easily digestible – but impressively nuanced – mid-to-late-life crisis movies. Matthew Broderick broke down in Election. Jack Nicholson crumbled in About Schmidt. Paul Giamatti twitched in Sideways. Now, in The Descendants, Clooney, playing a middle-class Hawaiian, confronts demons while facing up to the imminent death of his wife. Recipient of five Oscar nominations, The Descendantsseems to be the only film that has any chance of beating The Artistto the best picture prize.
One can't help but wonder why such a successful, such an apparently ordered man is so obsessed with tortured individuals coping badly with advancing years. After all, he was still in his 30s when he made Election.
"Yeah I know," he says. "Even the TV pilot I did – for a show called Hung– was a little bit like that. I guess Chaplin always had the tramp character. I think I like the archetypal nature of that comic scenario. My comic alter ego is the guy who has the rug pulled out from him at a certain point in life. He's the guy who suddenly has to question who he is. Maybe, it really is time to do something different. Maybe, it is time to move on."
There has been a long wait between Payne pictures. Sideways emerged eight long years ago. In the interim, sightings of Payne have been rare and occasionally discombobulating. He was credited as a writer on the wretched Adam Sandler project I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. He produced Tamara Jenkins's The Savages, a film that looked eerily like one of his own directorial projects.
He divorced Sandra Oh, one of those actors who seem to grace every American indie – and Grey's Anatomy, of course. What else has been going on?
"Well, you must remember that I was promoting Sidewaysuntil March of 2005. Then I got divorced. Then I had knee surgery. I got stuck writing a screenplay which I haven't made yet. I designed a condominium. 'Life stuff' just got in the way. But I was also hit by a Vietnam of films that didn't get made. Thing's will change now. I'm 50 now and, as a result, I think I just want to move from film to film."
Payne, of Greek descent, was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. He began shooting home movies with his dad’s 16mm camera, but denies that he was one of those movie brats who ate, drank and breathed cinema. His father, a restaurateur, was, understandably enough, impressed when the boy secured a place in Stanford University to study Spanish and history. Following graduation, having rediscovered that taste for film-making, he drifted towards the film school at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“People in Omaha are funny,” he says. “They really are. When I go to Greece I am always struck by how funny the people are there too. That was in my background.” Are the people in Greece still funny? We Irish have some understanding of the position in which that country finds itself.
“Oh sure. They’re still funny. But I know what you mean. I was in Dublin recently and I was talking to a Nigerian cab driver. He said he’d been there for 12 years, but he was now thinking of going back to Nigeria to find a job. Imagine that.”
I can’t imagine that his dad was delighted when his son decided to become a film-maker. The world is full of college graduates who, having embraced such ambitions, spend their lives eating baked beans and working in photocopy shops. “Well he’s fine now,” Payne laughs. “But in my 30s my father was still offering to send me to law school. He used to say: ‘I didn’t send you to Stanford to become a waiter’. But that’s all changed. Now, of course, it’s ‘my son, the director’.”
Payne's graduation film from UCLA caused a bit of noise in Hollywood. He was offered all kinds of unlikely projects, but it was not until 1996 that he managed to direct his first proper feature. Citizen Ruth, a didactic drama on the abortion debate, received good reviews, but did not much trouble the mainstream.
Released in 1999, Election, featuring Broderick as a high-school teacher led astray by a fiercely ambitious female student, gradually achieved cult status. Then, with About Schmidt, he found himself touted as the latest great American auteur.
He was still a fairly young man. It must have been intimidating to arrive on set and encounter Jack Nicholson.
“Well, I have this saying: he may be fillet, but he’s still a piece of meat. It was a tremendous gift. Of course, it’s intimidating. But the moment the clock is running and you’re shooting it feels like a luxury to be so intimidated. You have a job to do and so does he. He couldn’t have been lovelier. People ask, talking about Clooney, if it’s difficult to direct someone who has himself directed. It’s easier. They know the pressures. They know what a pain actors can be.”
Ah, George Clooney. That actor is, perhaps, the closest thing we have to an old-school movie star. He's on top form in The Descendants. As the film progresses, the protagonist discovers that his wife, injured in a coma following a boating accident, was having an affair with an apparently empty- headed estate agent. Clooney brings out all the character's angst and bewilderment, but one can't help but wonder if the actor's celebrity gets in the way. Just as Cary Grant was always "Cary Grant", George Clooney is always "George Clooney".
“I see him more as a star like Marcello Mastroianni. He’s a big movie star, but he can play anything. I don’t see him so much as Grant. Who doesn’t want to watch Mastroianni in anything? While shooting, I can’t think about the status of the star. I have a movie to make.” Please tell us he’s absolutely frightful to work with. Tell us he throws crockery and demands that the camera stays on his pretty side. We’re all sick of hearing how nice George is.
“I’ll say it again. He may be fillet, but he’s still a piece of meat. I’m afraid he’s a prince. That’s something that annoys me about him too. He’s so accomplished, but he’s also so agreeable.”
An odd paradox lurks around Payne's CV. While watching The Descendants, the viewer will quite reasonably reflect that the director has returned to his favourite story. Payne and Jim Taylor, his regular co-writer, have again elected to examine a troubled, middle-aged ordinary Joe. Yet their last four films have all been adapted from novels . The Descendantssprings from a book by Kaui Hart Hemmings.
“Well 11 of Stanley Kubrick’s films were adaptations and we’re the better for them,” he says.
“It is just a good story. I like the idea of it being in Hawaii. It’s got a great protagonist. I like first-person literature and I like first-person film-making. I like seeing a movie through the eyes of one person.”
Payne has played a canny game so far. He has produced an exemplary body of work, but he has achieved that feat without stretching budgets or straying too far from his familiar template. The studios know that he is unlikely to alarm the bank managers by sinking the Titanicor staging an inter-galactic conflict. Relations with the moguls are, I imagine, relatively harmonious.
“Yes, it’s no coincidence that my budgets are low. The lower I keep them the less pressure there is from the high-ups. We all benefit. The folks with the money benefit. I benefit. I want my films to be entertaining, but still have what I consider integrity.”
The mention of "integrity" encourages one to mention I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Seeing his name at the end of that picture – in which Adam Sandler pretends to marry Kevin James – was rather like encountering Jean Renoir's name at the close of a Three Stoogesshort. What on earth was going on?
“Jim Taylor and I stand by the script we wrote for that,” he says. “We wrote that long before Adam Sandler became involved. When he became involved he completely changed it. We retained screen credit because our structure remained. I lament that a lot of good stuff we put in didn’t make it onto the screen.” He pauses to lick his dehydrated lips and sip some water.
“But we still get residuals from it,” he smiles.
Old man Payne didn’t raise no fools.
5 Great mid-life crises
SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS(1942) In Preston Sturges's justly celebrated film, Joel McCrea plays a director of light comedies who, at the peak of his success, decides to make a searing movie about poverty entitled (Coen fans take note) O Brother, Where Art Thou? After seeing a Goofy film in the company of wretched convicts, he realises the worth of popular entertainment.
8 ½(1963) More tortured self-analysis from a great director. Federico Fellini's most avant garde movie finds Marcello Mastroianni playing a film-maker in the midst of a surreal, confusing professional meltdown. If, for some mad reason, you want a diluted, incoherent version of the same story check out Rob Marshall's useless Nine.
NETWORK(1976) To call Sidney Lumet's satirical drama prescient is to greatly understate the case. Peter Finch, playing the shabby Howard Beale, is driven to madness by the trivial condition of contemporaneous broadcasting. Lord knows what the poor loon would make of Fox News.
MANHATTAN(1979) Many Woody Allen films fit the bill – consider the poor hypochondriac in Crimes and Misdemeanours– but his problematic 1979 masterpiece offers the most complete picture of a neurotic's middle-aged slippage. At the close he realises that the answer really is to chase teenage girls. I beg your pardon?
LOST IN TRANSLATION(2003) Still Sofia Coppola's best film, this hypnotic, spooky reverie finds Bill Murray adrift in a version of Tokyo that seems to have rearranged itself to mirror his own internal crises. Unlike the hero of Manhattan, Bob Harris does eventually seem to realise that it would be as well to leave younger women unmolested.
