Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/760821
54 DGA QUARTERLY PHOTOS: (LEFT) PHOTOFEST; (OPPOSITE) EVERETT our fellow directors expect a certain sort of adult sensibility from your movies—a sense of humor that's grounded in reality. I'm 55 years old; I was a teenager in the '70s where the protagonists of films were more like normal people. Suddenly the standard was how much does our cinema approximate real life, as opposed to provide an antidote to it somehow. So those were always the films I wanted to make. My films aspire to have some sense of realism, at times natural- ism, within the commercial American vernacular. I watched a documentary the other day about Sidney Lumet called By Sidney Lumet. Very lovely. He could make Murder on the Orient Ex- press in one way. But then when he made Dog Day Afternoon, he said he aspired not to realism, as he had done in so many of his fine films, but naturalism. He even told his production designer and costume designer, "no color palette. Don't think about designing this film at all; it all has to be accidental—exactly like the real life of the real story. So have all the actors and all extras wear their own clothes; we're not go- ing to paint any of the walls. Nothing. We're just going to go out and make it." And that's a lovely direction to give his creative team. Can real life—in all of its spontaneous beauty, and wit, and messi- ness, and large and small moments, and the richness you get out of living it—be done justice in a narrative feature? One nice thing about being a narrative filmmaker is that with expe- rience and trying to remain connected, one can increasingly discern less difference between real life and the life you're re-creating on screen. What's beautiful about being a filmmaker is that our clay is actual human behavior. What was very beautiful about '70s movies was that the life on film was more than ever reflecting life as lived by the citizens of the coun- try. The quality of the films was judged by the proximity to real life, not the distance from real life. I'd like to address your first feature, Citizen Ruth. Talk about a risky project. I mean, you've got a protagonist who sniffs every- thing from glue to brake fluid, has abandoned her kids and she's pregnant on top of all that… Yes, it was a comedy. Was it tough selling that story? The lesson is that when you meet with financiers about the screenplay and they say, "Your protagonist is so unsympathetic," the response is, "We haven't cast it yet." It's really up to the actor. You want an unsym- pathetic character? Try Alex in A Clockwork Orange. What was the most important element of moving Citizen Ruth forward? Two things: It was Laura Dern's involvement. She helped bring the financing and was extremely enthusiastic about the screenplay and wanting to play that part. That's more good advice for filmmakers In her review of About Schmidt, then Los Angeles Times critic Manohla Dargis, who now writes for The New York Times, called Payne "the most gifted social satirist to hit our movies since Preston Sturges." The Omaha-born, two-time Oscar winner's films are populated not with glam characters in fantasy jobs who live in idealized apart- ments or Town & Country homes but everyman protago- nists whose ordinary lives are spiraling out of control. The beauty is often in the details: the scowl of a janitor bent on revenge for a minor slight in Election; a bickering couple who disagree about having people over in The Descendants; a living room full of Midwesterners with their eyes glued to the television in Nebraska. And although his upcoming feature, Downsizing•with its sci-fi premise and reliance on special effects•at least on the surface marks a depar- ture from his inimitable brand of dark comedy grounded in real life, Payne assures it's still his "sense of humor and sensibilities." Payne spoke to DGA Quarterly while in the midst of cutting the film in an office on the corner of Melrose and Larchmont in Los Angeles, a stone's throw from Paramount Pictures, which is distributing the film at Christmastime in 2017. The following is an edited, condensed version of our conversations. (Above) Alexander Payne says star Laura Dern's enthusiasm for the material and aid in securing financing helped get his first feature, Citizen Ruth, made. For Sideways, far right, he insisted that stars Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church spend a couple of weeks together prior to the shoot to add credibility to their friendship. Y