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Jim Taylor and Alexander Payne, winners Best Screenplay for Sideways
Get your copy of the new "Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film" @ July 21 event
Get your copy of the new "Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film" @ July 21 event
Very pleased to announce the new edition of my book "Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film" releases September 1. You have an early bird opportunity to buy the book and get it signed by me at a film program I am moderating that features Oscar-winning cinematographer Mauro Fiore on Thursday, July 21 at 7 p.m. at KANEKO.
See details below or link to more info, at–
Strong praise for"Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film"–
"This is without question the single best study of Alexander Payne's films, as well as the filmmaker himself and his filmmaking process. In charting the first two decades of Payne's remarkable career, Leo Adam Biga pieces together an indelible portrait of an independent American artist, and one that's conveyed largely in the filmmaker's own words. This is an invaluable contribution to film history and criticism – and a sheer pleasure to read as well." –Thomas Schatz, Film scholar and author ("The Genius of the System")
"Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film" charts the Oscar-winning filmmaker's rise to the elite ranks of world cinema. Articles and essays take you deep inside the artist's creative process. It is the most comprehensive look at Payne and his work to be found anywhere. This new edition features significant new content related to "Nebraska" and "Downsizing." We have also added a Discussion Guide with Index for you film buffs and students. The book is also a great resource for more casual film fans who want a handy Payne primer and trivia goldmine. The book releases September 1 from River Junction Press.
The book sales for $25.95.
For inquiries and pre-orders, contact: email@example.com.
Follow my work at–
leaoadambiga.com and www.facebook.com/LeoAdamBiga.
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Mauro Fiore: Writing with Light
Thursday, July 21 @ 7 p.m.
KANEKO, 1111 Jones St.
Tickets $10 General Admission. FREE for KANEKO Members
KANEKO hosts Academy Award winning director of photography Mauro Fiore for an audio-visual presentation exploring his career. Fiore's filmography as a DP includes "Training Day," "The A-Team,""Avatar" – for which he won the Oscar for Best Cinematography – and more recently "Real Steel," "The Equalizer,""The Kingdom" and "Southpaw." The Hollywood veteran is recognized for his skill with stylized light and realism. He's collaborated with such major directors as Joe Carnahan, Michael Bay, James Cameron, Peter Berg and Antoine Fuqua. He and Fuqua have teamed on five features, the latest of which is the soon to release remake of "The Magnificent Seven."
Fiore very much sees himself as a storyteller working in light and image to fulfill the vision of the writer and director.
The July 21 discussion will be moderated by yours truly. As an author-journalist-blogger I bring years of experience writing and reporting about film to the moderator's chair.
Mauro Fiore: Writing with Light is a part of the Storytelling season at KANEKO June 3 – August 27. Learn more about the Storytelling exhibitions and programs at–
Hope to see you there.
FROM THE ARCHIVES– Alexander Payne: Portrait of a Young Filmmaker
Alexander Payne's breakthrough satire Election is one of the entries in the Film Streams series Hollywood Does Politics. Election is also the film that began my association with Payne. As a film programmer in Omaha I had screened his student thesis film The Passion of Martin. His talent was obvious. I next encountered his work as a film consumer when I went to go see his feature debut Citizen Ruth at the Dundee Theatre. But the first time I came to him and his work as a journalist was with Election. I read that he was in pre-production on this comedy set at an Omaha high school and I contacted him and we arranged to meet for an interview. We had a very long conversation at McFoster's Natural Kind Cafe. At some point, I believe before we met for the interview, he also shared the screenplay for the film, which he was then getting ready to shoot. The screenplay by him and Jim Taylor was really smart and funny. Sharp observations throughout. A crazy mix of angst, pathos, crisis, obsession and mendacity that somehow totally worked as comedy. I ended up interviewing Matthew Broderick and missed an opportunity to interview Reese Witherspoon as well. That first long interview with Payne, plus my reading of the script and seeing the finished film became the basis for this first story I wrote about Payne. Also informing the story were my having seen Passion of Martin and Citizen Ruth. Here is that story. It is part of my book Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film. A new edition of that book releases September 1.
That first interview happened in the late summer or early fall of 1996 and that first story appeared at the start of 1998. Many more interviews and stories relating to Payne have followed. Too many to count. All the way up through and including his new film Downsizing. That body of work accrued over 20 years is the basis for my book.
If you've never seen Election do yourself a favor and go see it on the big screen at Film Streams. It's playing July 16, 18 and 20. For showtimes and tickets and for the complete series schedule, visit–
Alexander Payne: Portrait of a Young Filmmaker
©by Leo Adam Biga
Published in Jan. 22-28, 1998 issue of The Reader
Darryl Zanuck. Fred Astaire. Henry Fonda. Dorothy McGuire. Montgomery Clift. Marlon Brando. Sandy Dennis. Nick Nolte. Enduring film icons and Nebraskans all. Now add the name of writer-director Alexander Payne, thirty six, to this list of native sons and daughters who have made their mark in cinema. Born and raised in Omaha, Payne made an impressive feature debut with the funky 1996 abortion comedy, Citizen Ruth, and is sure to make waves again with his second feature, Election, which wrapped shooting in Omaha December 15 and is slated for a summer release.
The made-in-Omaha Citizen Ruth netted wide critical praise for its satiric take on the pro life-pro choice debate, revealing Payne to be a keen social observer with an ironic sensibility. Payne, who is single and lives in Los Angeles, is a gifted artist. He's smart, witty, confident, yet refreshingly grounded. He knows exactly what he's after and how to get it. He's also brash and passionate enough to make delightfully subversive films far outside the Hollywood mainstream. Those who know him admire his agile mind, him unmannered sincerity, his barbed humor.
He has the cachet to make films anywhere, but continues coming back here to shoot his quirky independent pictures. Indeed, he remains fiercely loyal to his hometown, whose currents reverberate deeply within him. "I feel so strongly about shooting in Omaha," he said. "In nursing and nudging Election along, I made it clear I wanted to shoot here, and the producers said, 'Well, you can shoot this anywhere.' But I don't want to fake it. It's not the same thing. There's an atmosphere I want to get and be faithful to – about how people are. I want it to be real, I want it be where I'm comfortable and where deep buttons in me are pressed."
Election co-producer Albert Berger feels Payne is well attuned to Omaha's Zeitgeist. "I had never been in Omaha before, but interestingly enough I sensed an attitude that was very much Alexander's," Berger said. "There's a sort of courteous, formal presentation or exterior of normality, with a bizarre, eccentric, biting humor just beneath it, and I saw that time and time again…so I'm not surprised Alexander came from Omaha and he's making the type of movies he is there. I feel he is very much of that place."
Payne agrees, but can't quite pinpoint the source of his sardonic streak other than to speculate: "Maybe historically, the fact the weather is so cruel on the Plains that for survival there's bred a sense of humor about it all." If nothing else, his humor is informed by Omaha's small town-bit city schizophrenia. "There's always this tight-assed conservative element here that's very irritating," he said. "That doesn't think anything is funny except Marmaduke and Family Circus. But then there's this whole other Omaha I grew up with of really smart, funny, caustic people."
His cutting humor has no shortage of targets. In Citizen Ruth he lampooned the hypocrisy of pro life-pro choice extremists. In Election he exposes the hollowness of School-Suburbia USA rituals.
The role of satirist seems to fit Payne well, but he feels his career is too young to assign him a signature style just yet: "I don't like to analyze it too closely," he said, "because so far this type of stuff is just what comes naturally to me. And I almost fear that analyzing it too much will make me too self-conscious or make me think there's no rules. You know? I'm still just figuring it out."
The Comedy of Imperfection
Election, which Payne and his Citizen Ruth writing collaborator, Jim Taylor, adapted from the soon-to-be-published novel of the same name by Boston writer Tom Perrotta, promises to be Payne's breakthrough film. Why? Because the material retains the mordant, mercurial sensibility of his debut feature, but is neither likely to be as difficult for its studio (Paramount) to market nor as hard for audiences to stomach as the earlier film was, with its raw-nerve subject matter. Plus, Election stars two young, appealing crossover actors in Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon who should attract the very demographic the film will surely target (ages eighteen to thirty four).
The film, like the book, revolves around a high school teacher, Jim McAllister (Broderick), who, in the midst of a mid-life crisis, acts rashly and rigs a student election, setting in motion a series of seriocomic events that change the lives of everyone involved. Broderick should have just the right innocent deadpan persona (like his idol Buster Keaton) for the part. Much of the script's sly humor stems from normally upstanding folks behaving badly under pressure. As Payne puts it, "All these horrible, pathetic things happen, but it's not as though any of the characters is bad, they're just doing it all for the first time. They just don't know any better."
For all its strengths, Citizen Ruth never quite fleshed-out the title character, Ruth Stoops. Payne and Taylor used her more as a siphon and symbol to comment on the absurd lengths pro life-pro choice activists go to, rather than develop her as a person with complex emotional shadings. Her escape at the end makes a strong statement, but tells us nothing we don't already know. While it's hard to believe anyone with a sense of humor could be offended by Citizen Ruth, the film surely put off some viewers who strongly identify with one side or the other of the abortion issue.
With Election, Payne isn't shying away from skewering more sacred cows, but is mining a richer vein of Americana than he attempted before. Where Citizen Ruth often settled for broad sketches, Election promises to probe more deeply into the lives of characters and the milieu they inhabit. And, at least as scripted, the new film allows room for its protagonists to grow somewhat through their ordeal.
Payne feels Election, with its fuller palette of colors, should prove to be "a much stronger film" than his first feature. "Citizen Ruth is particular in it's having fun with stereotypes," he said. "It's funny and interesting, but this is a richer piece of material. It's got a more complex, nuanced human canvas. There's nothing schematic about it. I mean, once you figure out what's going on in Citizen Ruth you still might enjoy the film, but you kind of know where it's heading. This one, you don't really know what's going to happen next." Ask him what Election is all about and he sighs, wearily weighing your question with one of his own: "How to articulate it? I don't know…It's very human and it's very real, It's about life. It's like life – I can't sum it up. I hope always to make movies that can't be easily summed up."
Payne doesn't pander to audiences. His leading characters don't neatly conform to Post-Modern Hollywood's idea of winning protagonists. Instead, they're whimsically, tragically, unpredictably human. And because they're so authentic they engage us in ways "nice" characters often don't. Ruth Stoops is a pregnant inhalant addict who's made a mess of her life and is unrepentant about it. She's also street-smart and disarmingly honest. Jim McAllister is a philandering hypocrite who takes his hurt out on one of his students. He's also hard-working and surprisingly vulnerable.
Broderick wanted to do Election because it offered a chance to play "a complicated person, and not a terribly charming one," he said, adding: "I loved the script. For one thing, it was very literate. A lot of scripts are very hard to get through, but this was a very easy read. It was funny and sad. It made me want to know what was going to happen next. Alexander's very original, I think. He's a very careful, detailed director. He's very intelligent. He's funny, too." He also liked Payne's handling of the material, which in lesser hands could easily have been superficial: "He's sympathetic to the characters, even when they do stupid things. He doesn't look down on the characters from some kind of higher moral ground. They're all very human. He doesn't categorize people. People aren't either perfect or evil, smart or stupid, they're all a mix of things."
But as Payne well knows, some stodgier segments of Omaha don't appreciate his irreverent humor. Omaha Public School officials were wary enough to deny him the use of Burke High School for Election. The film's Neo-Peyton Place school scenes were eventually shot (during normal school hours) at Papillion-LaVista High School. Payne resists any suggestion his comic sensibility is vulgar: "I think, for example, that Citizen Ruth has an amoral protagonist, yet it's a very moral film. The same thing now with Election. There's a lot of irresponsible and immoral behavior in the film, but I believe strongly that it's a very responsible and moral film."
A Hollywood outsider despite still living in L.A. and getting his financing there (he plans moving to New York City by year's end), Payne dislikes much of today's nouveau hip American cinema. "Hollywood, in the last few years, has produced films which take the attitude, 'Oh, isn't this cool, we have amoral characters,'" he said. "But in completely unredeeming, nihilistic films that simply anticipate moments of violence, rather than being about people in complex ways, I don't get much out of nihilism." He finds most contemporary comedies wanting too. "I'm bored with most American comedies because they're about nothing. The attitude is, 'Oh, it's comedy, it's just fluff.' But, in fact, comedy should be about something. It's just another form of communication about experience and emotion."
Although Payne is generations removed from legendary filmmaker Billy Wilder, with whom he's been compared, he greatly admires the writer-director's acerbic, irony-laced style. In preparation for Citizen Ruth Payne screened Wilder's Ace in the Hole (about an unscrupulous reporter exploiting a human tragedy). One of his favorite Wilder films is the 1960 Best Picture Oscar winner, The Apartment, whose story of deceit in the bedrooms and boardrooms of middle-class America echoes that of Election, only Payne is substituting schoolrooms for boardrooms. "I think The Apartment is sooooo good," he said. "People remember it as a cute film about a guy (Jack Lemmon) giving his apartment to his bosses for their afternoon liaisons, but you see it again and you have to take a shower afterwards. It's genuinely depressing. People see Billy Wilder's work as cynical and dark and all that, but it's really at the same time loving and playful with people."
It's precisely the same balance Payne tries striking. In Jim McAllister, Payne gives us an Everyman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A man mired in a rut and desperate for a change. Payne describes him this way: "He's a very American protagonist, somehow. Optimistic. Boyish. Idealistic. Naive. And tragic, because he's in denial about real things going on in his life and how he really feels about things, and it kind of leads to his downfall."
He could be describing Jack Lemmon's character in The Apartment, so alike are the two figures. How appropriate then that Broderick, who shares Lemmon's intuitive grasp of tragic-comic roles, and Payne, who shares Wilder's penchant for subversive satire, should collaborate on a film resonating so strongly with the Lemmon-Wilder canon.
Payne, along with Taylor, found a kindred spirit in Perrotta as well. "We found in his novel a starting place, a springboard for what we do best as writers together. It's very, very close to us. And also there's a certain sadness about the novel, and Jim and I like to extract comedy from sadness and pain," Payne said, laughing devilishly. "What I also liked about the novel, and I think this was maybe true of Citizen Ruth too, is that people compromise themselves through really, really good intentions. They all think they're doing the right thing, and they end up getting very. very compromised morally. One other thing it has in common thematically with Citizen Ruth…is that idea of people's personal-psycho-sexual situations being worked out in a public arena, especially a political arena."
He said one of the ways the movie differs from the book is its humor. "It's a lot funnier than the novel. The novel has a lot of humor in it, but it's kind of more ruminative. Jim and I always go for the laughs." In adapting the book, he and Taylor, who lives in New York City, ended up "dramatizing things Perrotta only mentioned in passing. We ended up writing a ton of new stuff. We changed his characters' names. We took a lot of liberties. When you go to adapt a novel you have to forget the novel. You owe nothing to the novel, yet you remain entirely faithful to it somehow in spirit," Payne said.
Perrotta, whose book is due out in March from Putnam Publishing, said of the adaptation, "I think they translated my work into this other medium in just a brilliant way." Of Payne, whom he had a chance to observe on the set during a late November visit to Omaha, he said, "He's incredibly smart. He seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of literature and film that he carries around quite gracefully. He's so focused and sharp. I think he's one of these people who really knows what he wants."
Election, while still in manuscript form, was brought to Payne and Taylor in 1996 by Berger and his producing partner Ron Yerxa. Berger had had his eye on Payne since seeing the filmmaker's 1991 UCLA thesis film, The Passion of Martin. After agreeing to adapt Election, Payne said he and Taylor read the book several more times, noting lines, characters and incidents they wanted to keep or expand. The pair worked on the script throughout '96 and completed their final draft last spring.
"By the end, as we're doing more and more rewrites," Payne said, "the novel didn't even exist for us anymore because it (the story) became ours. We can't even remember anymore what's in the novel and what we made up." An important structural element Payne and Taylor kept is the book's multiple first-person narration (It's worth noting Wilder used narration to great effect in his films). Much of the film is told from the shifting perspective of four characters (aided by diabolically funny voice-overs), each of whom has a different take on their interwoven imbroglios. Perrotta is delighted the multiple narrative survived the novel-to-screen adaptation: "I was pretty sure when the book got optioned that that particular quality would get lost. But amazingly these guys were able to do this very daring screenplay where they have the voice-overs of different characters that in a way mimics the structure of the book. I think they pulled off a pretty amazing technical feat…and were deeply faithful to the book."
For Payne, co-opting the novel's narrative motif "offered a very interesting and fun challenge." He adds, "The film is covered with voice-over (recorded at Omaha recording studio Pisaurus Productions). I love voice-over in films, and there's kind of a stigma against it." That stigma is an artificial one imposed by film executives and by "script experts" like Syd Field. Payne disdains the Syd Field cookie-cutter school of screenwriting: "He's an idiot. I'm still waiting for that first blockbuster Syd Field film script."
Making it Real
Ever one to follow his own drummer, Payne dismisses the notion films must look or sound a certain way. It's why he insisted on making his first two features far away from La-La Land. For Election, he wanted a high school as it really looks, not as Hollywood envisions it.
"The high school movies I've seen have all been shot in California. They have Venetian blinds on the windows and really beautiful rays of sunlight coming and all the teachers have really good haircuts and all the students are bright, cheery-faced and look like actors out of Central Casting, and it's hideous. It's just fake. In Election all the extras are real students and teachers, even some of the leads. The classrooms, unlike ones in those California-filmed movies, are windowless foundation-blocks with fluorescent light overhead. That's what schools are and that's what I wanted to capture – the real thing." Berger said, "Alexander was sort of relentless in his desire for a truthful, accurate portrayal of high school and of people, with no Hollywood Beverly Hills 90210 bullshit. And he definitely got what he wanted."
Election production designer Jane Stewart (she also designed Citizen Ruth) said Payne was equally exacting in creating visual cues for each character. To express McAllister's stuck-in-neutral life, she said, a Dundee-area house was turned into his home. "We tried to reflect older values and an oppressive feeling through things like colors and objects."
Payne's search for verisimilitude informs his filmmaking. It's why he doesn't adhere to trends.
"I take cues from reality, from observation," he said, "and not from other movies, even though I watch a lot of movies and I'm a film buff and all that. You have to feel inspired about what you write and what you want to commit to film. When it comes to shoot, all your ideas and what you're trying to capture has to come from observation. And it becomes a little bit like a fun reportage in that way."
On Election he immersed himself in the rhythms of Papillion-LaVista High School (Carver High in the film). "After the initial couple of weeks, the teachers and students felt very comfortable seeing us around and we felt very comfortable being there," he said.
A Journey to Cinema
He loves how filmmaking permits him to explore other realities. "What's fun about that is that you become like a spy and a witness to all sorts of worlds. Suddenly, you have this excuse to visit a place, but really visit it and really hear people talk about what they do. And if you're curious about the world and about people, it's just the greatest job to have."
Long before becoming a filmmaker, his curiosity led him to Stanford University, where his love for languages spurred an interest in Spanish literature and Latin American history. His studies took him to Spain and Colombia, He's since returned to Spain again and again. He still keeps in touch with friends he made there in the 1980s. After Election wrapped he vacationed with family in Florida before heading to Spain to "bum around."
Obsessed with cinema since childhood, Payne collected eight millimeter prints of old movies and shot several short films with a used Super 8 camera. He recalls One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as a seminal film in his teens and ironically notes it would probably be difficult to get that picture made today (It was, in fact, a difficult sell then too.) However, Payne didn't touch a camera again until he was at UCLA, which he attended after graduating from Stanford in 1984. Despite harboring a dream to pursue filmmaking, he didn't take a single film class at Stanford because he looked upon his undergraduate years as a time "to get an education."
Once he decided to study film, he considered both UCLA and USC, the West Coast's two most prestigious film schools. The story of why, after visiting each campus, he chose UCLA is classic Payne:
"What I found was that USC was extremely Hollywood-oriented. It's a private institution and structured very much as a Hollywood feeder school. You have to compete for the privilege of making an advanced film. I saw a batch of those advanced films when I was down there, and they were extremely formulaic and banal. Extremely well-crafted and very watchable, like Hollywood films, but they were about nothing.
"I went to UCLA, and found it much more wild there. It's a public school. It seemed like a place to be freer and just explore and do what you want. Most of their student films are pretty experimental and unwatchable, but there's the attitude that it's one person, one film. At UCLA they popped a Super 8 camera in your hands and said, 'Go shoot something. We'll teach you technique later, but now, go fuck-up and just shoot from your gut.' And you work harder, of course, than you ever worked in your life, like you always do in films.
"They know there's many people like me who haven't had access to filmmaking before, and they just want you to come with ideas and experiences. That's the important thing. It's such a neat philosophy, but it's changed since then. Everything has gone to the right in our country, including film school."
There he came under the influence of top-flight editor Richard Marks (whose credits include the current James L. Brooks film As Good As It Gets).
"My editing teacher and in a large degree my film mentor was Richard Marks. He's someone who taught me a lot about filmmaking and with whom I still keep in contact."
Payne's intense fifty-minute UCLA thesis film, The Passion of Martin, played festivals and pegged him as a real "comer" in the industry. It led to a Universal development deal that eventually fizzled. Later, he teamed with Taylor and together they wrote short films for cable TV. Then they hit upon the idea for Citizen Ruth in '92 and, after surviving one dead-end producer, they finally saw the project to fruition. Election should once again prove Payne has delivered on his early promise.
Refining and Progressing
Payne is currently in L.A. working with editor Kevin Tent on Election. He's also supervising some fantasy sequences (involving pictures in a yearbook coming to life) being filmed by a West Coast animation firm.
MTV Films, which is co-producing Election with Berger and Yerxa's Bona Fide Films and independent producer Keith Samples, has been lobbying Payne with music suggestions. Payne is adamant about not bowing to MTV pressure. "I've been telling them, 'Wait till we get into the editing before you make any record deals. I have a lot of ideas. I don't want to just put hit songs in there. I don't want this film to be a commercial for hit tunes. I think that's really terrible and actually dates the film."
Payne insists on creative control and has largely gotten it thus far. He feels the reason he's escaped studio meddling is because film executives consider comedy somewhat mysterious – "that it has to be a certain way or there's some magic to it." Then too his budgets have been small enough so as to keep his films "under the radar" of prying producers. Although the Election budget (under ten million dollars) surpassed that of his first feature, Payne said, "My stuff is still considered risky enough that even though Citizen Ruth was a critical success, I'm still not at the point where I'm demanding anything approaching a big budget."
He's at an enviable place now in his career. But even as his reputation grows and his projects increase in scale, he remains close to his by-the-seat-of-his-pants roots.
"Every film I've made has been bigger than the one before," he said. "But I'm always surprised at how similar it (the process) is from film to film. You encounter the same basic filmmaker problems: How to get the actors to do what you want them to do. How to bring out their best with the camera. Hoping it doesn't rain. Hoping it does rain. Hoping it cuts together. Hoping the music works with it.
"I've taken a step-by-step progression and I feel a sense of apprenticeship to the craft. I'm learning little by little. And I think as a filmmaker it's important to somehow keep in mind that even with all those trucks and all those technicians and all that money being spent, that it's you with a Super 8 camera. And to keep always an intimate relationship between yourself and what you're shooting. Don't let any of that other stuff bother you. The moment before saying, 'Action,' look around the set, see where the camera is, and just ask yourself in a split second, Is this really, exactly what I want, even if I'm wrong? Yes. 'Action.'"
Cut. Print It. That's a wrap.
Jim Taylor, the Other Half of Hollywood's Top Screenwriting Team, Talks About His Work with Alexander Payne
No matter how Alexander Payne's in-progress film Downsizing is received when released next year, it will be remembered as his first foray into special effects, science fiction, big budget filmmaking and sprawling production extending across three nations. But the most important development it marks is the rejoining of Payne and his longtime screenwriting partner, Jim Taylor, whose contributions to the film's they've collaborated on often get overlooked even though he's shared an Oscar with Payne and has been nominated for others with him. In truth, Payne and Taylor never broke with each other. Payne did make both The Descendants and Nebraska without Taylor's writing contribution, but following their last collaboration, Sideways, and during much of the period when Payne was producing other people's films and then mounting and making the two films he directed following Sideways, these creative partners were busily at work on the Downsizing screenplay. It's been awhile since I last interviewed Taylor. I am sharing the resulting 2005 story here, It is included in my book Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film. A new edition of the book releases Sept. 1.
As my story makes clear, Payne and Taylor go farther back then Citizen Ruth, the first feature they wrote together and the first feature that Payne directed. Their bond goes all the way back to college and to scuffling along to try to break into features. After Citizen Ruth, they really made waves with their scripts for Election and About Schmidt. And then Sideways confirmed them as perhaps Hollywood's top screenwriting tandem. They also collaborated on for-hire rewrite jobs on scripts that others directed.
I will soon be doing a new interview with Taylor for my ongoing reporting about Payne and his work. Though Taylor is not a Nebraskan, his important collaboration with Payne makes him an exception to the rule of only focusing on natives for my in-development Nebraska Film Heritage Project. By the way, one of the films that Payne produced during his seven year hiatus from directing features was The Savages, whose writer-director, Tamara Jenkins, is Taylor's wife. That Payne and Taylor have kept their personal friendship and creative professional relationship intact over 25-plus years, including a production company they shared together, is a remarkable feat in today's ephemeral culture and society.
NOTE: For you film buffs out there, I will be interviewing Oscar-winning cinematographer Mauro Fiore and showing clips of his work at Kaneko in the Old Market, on Thursday, July 21. The event starts at 7 p.m. and will include a Q & A. For details and tickets, visit–
Link to my cover story about Mauro and more info about the event at–
Jim Taylor, the Other Half of Hollywood's Top Screenwriting Team, Talks About His Work with Alexander Payne
Published in a fall 2005 issue of The Reader
©by Leo Adam Biga
There's an alchemy to the virtuoso writing partnership of Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, Oscar winners for Sideways (2004) and previous nominees for Election (1999), that resists pat analysis. The artists themselves are unsure what makes their union work beyond compatibility, mutual regard and an abiding reverence for cinema art.
Together 15 years now, their professional marriage has been a steady ascent amid the starts and stops endemic to filmmaking. As their careers have evolved, they've emerged as perhaps the industry's most respected screenwriting tandem, often drawing comparisons to great pairings of the past. As the director of their scripts, Payne grabs the lion's share of attention, although their greatest triumph, Sideways, proved "a rite of passage" for each, Taylor said, by virtue of their Oscars.
Taylor doesn't mind that Payne, the auteur, has more fame. "He pays a price for that. I'm not envious of all the interviews he has to do and the fact his face is recognized more. Everywhere he goes people want something from him. That level of celebrity I'm not really interested in," he said by phone from the New York home he shares with filmmaker wife Tamara Jenkins (The Slums of Beverly Hills).
With the craziness of Sideways now subsided and Payne due to return soon from a month-long sojourn in Paris, where he shot a vignette for the I Love Paris omnibus film, he and Taylor will once again engage their joint muse. So far, they're being coy about what they've fixed as their next project. It may be the political, Altmanesque story they've hinted at. Or something entirely else. What is certain is that a much-anticipated new Payne-Taylor creation will be in genesis.
Taylor's an enigma in the public eye, but he is irreducibly, inescapably one half of a premier writing team that shows no signs of running dry or splitting up. His insights into how they approach the work offer a vital glimpse into their process, which is a kind of literary jam session, game of charades and excuse for hanging out all in one. They say by the time a script's finished, they're not even sure who's done what. That makes sense when you consider how they fashion a screenplay — throwing out ideas over days and weeks at a time in hours-long give-and-take riffs that sometimes have them sharing the same computer monitor hooked up to two keyboards.
Their usual M.O. finds them talking, on and on, about actions, conflicts, motivations and situations, acting out or channeling bits of dialogue and taking turns giving these elements form and life on paper.
"After we've talked about something, one of us will say, 'Let me take a crack at this,' and then he'll write a few pages. Looking at it, the other might say, 'Let me try this.' Sometimes, the person on the keyboard is not doing the creative work. They're almost inputting what the other person is saying. It's probably a lot like the way Alexander works with his editor (Kevin Tent), except we're switching back and forth being the editor."
For each writer, the litmus test of any scene is its authenticity. They abhor anything that rings false. Their constant rewrites are all about getting to the truth of what a given character would do next. Avoiding cliches and formulas and feel-good plot points, they serve up multi-shaded figures as unpredictable as real people, which means they're not always likable.
"I think it's true of all the characters we write that there's this mixture of things in people. Straight-ahead heroes are just really boring to us because they don't really exist," said Taylor, whose major influences include the humanist Czech films of the 1960s. "I think once we fall in love with the characters, then it's really just about the characters for us. We have the best time writing when the characters are leading us somewhere and we're not so much trying to write about some theme."
Sideways' uber scene, when Miles and Maya express their longing for each other via their passion for the grape, arose organically.
"We didn't labor any longer over that scene than others," he said. "What happened was, in our early drafts we had expanded on a speech Miles has in the book (Rex Pickett's novel) and in later drafts we realized Maya should have her own speech. At the time we wrote those speeches we had no idea how important they would turn out to be. It was instinctive choice to include them, not something calculated to fill a gap in a schematic design."
He said their scripts are in such "good shape" by the time cameras roll that little or no rewriting is done on set. "Usually we'll make some minor changes after the table reading that happens right before shooting." Taylor said Payne asks his advice on casting, locations, various cuts, music, et cetera.
Their process assumes new colors when hired for a script-doctor job (Meet the Parents, Jurassic Park III), the latest being I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.
"With those projects we're trying to accommodate the needs of a different director and we generally don't have much time, so we don't allow problems to linger as long as we would, which is good practice," said Taylor. "It's good for us to have to work fast. We'll power through stuff, where we might let it sit longer and just let ourselves be stuck."
Ego suppression explains in part how they avoid any big blow ups.
"I think it's because both of us are interested in making a good movie more than having our own ideas validated," Taylor said. "So we are able to, hopefully, set our egos aside when we're working and say, 'Oh, that's a good idea,' or, 'That's a better idea.' I think a lot of writing teams split up because they're too concerned about protecting what they did as opposed to remembering what's good for the script. We can work out disagreements without having any fallout from it. It's funny. I mean, sometimes we do act like a married couple. There's negotiations to be made. But mostly we just get along and enjoy working together."
As conjurers in the idiom of comedy, he said, "I think our shared sensibilities are similar enough that if I can make him laugh or he can make me laugh, then we feel like we're on the right track."
Collaboration is nothing new for Taylor, a Pomona College and New York University Tisch School of the Arts grad, who's directed a short as well as second unit work on Payne shoots (most of the 16 millimeter footage in Election) and is developing feature scripts for himself to direct.
"For me, I didn't set out to be a screenwriter, I set out to be a filmmaker," said Taylor, a former Cannon Films grunt and assistant to director Ivan Passer (Cutter's Way). So did Alexander. And we kind of think of it all as one process, along with editing…People say everything is writing. Editing is writing and in a strange way acting is writing, and all that. Filmmaking itself is a collaborative medium. People drawn to filmmaking are drawn to working with other people. Sure, a lot of screenwriters do hole up somewhere so they're not disturbed, but I'm not like that and Alexander's not like that. I don't like working on my own. I like to bounce ideas off people. Filmmaking demands it, as opposed to being a novelist or a painter, who work in forms that aren't necessarily collaborative."
Simpatico as they are, there's also a pragmatic reason for pairing up.
"We just don't like doing it alone and it's less productive, too. And we sort of have similar ideas, so why not do it together? Even beyond that, it's like a quantum leap in creativity. You're just sort of inspired more to come up with something than if you're just sitting there and hating what you're doing. At least there's somebody there going, 'Oh, that's good,' or, 'How do we do this?' And you sort of stick with the problem as opposed to going off and cleaning out a drawer or something."
Payne says scripting with someone else makes the writing process "less hideous." For Taylor, flying solo is something to be avoided at all costs.
"I hate it. I really hate it. I mean, I do it, but it's very slow and I don't think it's as good," he said. "I'm getting Alexander's input on something I've been working on for a long, long time on my own, a screenplay called The Lost Cause about a Civil War reenactor, and I expect it to became 50 percent better just because of working with him. We'll essentially do with it what we do on a production rewrite."
Lost Cause was part of a "blind deal" Taylor had with Paramount's Scott Rudin, now at Disney. The fate of Taylor's deal is unclear.
Writing with his other half, Taylor said, opens a script to new possibilities. "I'll see it through different eyes when I'm sitting next to Alexander and maybe have ideas I wouldn't otherwise."
The pair's operated like this since their first gig, co-writing short films for cable's Playboy Inside Out series. The friends and one time roommates have been linked ever since. "It's pretty hard to extract the friendship from the partnership or vice versa. It's all kind of parts of the same thing. We don't end up seeing each other that much because we live in separate cities, unless we're working together," Taylor said. "So our friendship is a little bit dependent on our work life at this point, which is too bad." However, he added there's an upside to not being together all the time in the intense way collaborators interact, "It's important to not get too overdosed on who you're working with."
He can't imagine them going their separate ways unless there's a serious falling out. "That would only happen of we had personal problems with each other. Sometimes, people naturally drift apart, and we're both working against that. We're trying to make sure that it doesn't just drift away, because that would be sad."
Keeping the alliance alive is complicated by living on opposite coasts and the demands of individual lives/careers. But when Taylor talks about going off one day to make his own movies, he means temporarily. He knows Payne has his back. "He's supportive of my wanting to direct. But I'm so happy working with him that if that were all my career was, I'd be a very lucky person."
Through a lens starkly: Alexander Payne films Nebraska
Through a lens starkly: Alexander Payne films Nebraska
New edition releases Sept. 1, 2016
©by Leo Adam Biga
Even though Alexander Payne demonstrates time and again that commercial considerations mean very little to him, following the breakaway success of The Descendants (2011) there was every reasonable expectation he might lean a bit more again in the direction of mainstream with his next film. I say again because I count The Descendants as a conventional, even mainstream work even though its protagonist rails against his comatose wife and sets out to wreck the life of the man she was cheating with, all the while trying not to lose it with his two grieving daughters in tow.
Payne soon quashed any notion of playing it safe when he announced the small, insular back roads comedy-drama Nebraska (2013) as his new feature project. It did not help its bottom line chances that the film is set in rural Nebraska, which for most filmgoers may as well be the dark side of the moon for its unfamiliarity, remoteness, and perceived barrenness. Indeed, if Nebraska conjures any image at all it is of endless cornfields, cows, and monotonously flat, uninspired scenery. When the story laid over such a setting features a confused, depressed old cuss alienated from family and friends and wandering around in a bleak wasteland made even bleaker by black and white photography and desolate late fall, post-harvest locations, it does not exactly engender excitement. The prospect of a dour, feel-bad experience devoid of life and color does not get tongues a-wagging to generate the all important buzz that sells tickets.
Of course, anyone who has seen Nebraska knows the film is not the downer it may appear to be from glimpsing a thirty second trailer or hearing a thirty second sound bite, but that it is ultimately a sweet, deeply affecting film filled with familiar truths amid its very Nebraskaesque yet also quite universal archetypes.
Payne's insistence on shooting in black and white was a completely legitimate aesthetic choice given the storyline and tone of this stark, autumnal mood piece about an old man having his last hurrah. But it also meant a definite disadvantage in appealing to average or general movie fans, many of whom automatically pass on any non-color film. Compounding the aversion that many moviegoers have with black and white is the fact that most studio executives, distributors, and theater bookers share this aversion, not on aesthetic grounds, but based on the long-held, much repeated argument that black and white films fare poorly at the box office. Of course, there is a self- fulfilling prophecy at work here that starts with studio resistance and reluctance to greenlight black and white features and even when a studio does approve the rare black and white entry executives seem to half-heartedly market and release these pics. It is almost as if the bean counters are out to perversely prove a point, even at the risk of injuring the chances of one of their own pictures at finding a sizable audience. Then when the picture lags, it gives the powerbrokers the platform to say, I told you so. No wonder then – and this is assuming the argument is true – most black and white flicks don't perform well compared with their color counterparts. Except, how does one arrive at anything like a fair comparison of films based on color versus black and white? Even if the films under review are of the same genre and released in the same period, each is individually, intrinsically its own experience and any comparison inevitably ends up being a futile apples and oranges debate. Besides, there are exceptions to the supposed rule that all black and white films struggle. From the 1970s on The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, Young Frankenstein, Manhattan, Raging Bull, Schindler's List, Ed Wood, and The Artist are among the black and white films to have found wide success. It is admittedly a short list but it does prove black and white need not be a death sentence.
To no one's surprise Paramount did what practically any studio would have done in the same situation, which was to fight Payne on the black and white decision. In no uncertain terms Payne wanted to make Nebraska in black and white and just as adamantly the studio wanted no part of it. He pushed and they pushed back. He would not compromise his vision because from the moment he first read Bob Nelson's screenplay he clearly saw in his mind's eye the world of this story play out in in shades of black and white. It just fit. It fit the characters and the settings and the emotions and as far as he was concerned that was that. No questions asked. No concessions made.
I do not claim to know all the details of this protracted dispute or should I say discussion but I do know from what Payne and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael have told me that the issue became a point of some contention. I do not know if it ever reached an impasse where Payne more or less indicated by word or action he was prepared to walk and take the project with him (his own Ad Hominem production company brought the property to Paramount). It certainly wouldn't surprise me that he let it be known, subtly or not, that he was willing to make the project with another studio if it came to that. It is a moot point now since Paramount eventually acceded to his wishes, though not insignificantly the studio did cut some of the picture's already small budget as a kind of hedge I suppose against the small business they expected the film to do. The smaller the budget, and in this case it was $12 million, the smaller the risk of not recouping its cost.
Given Payne's even temperament and gentility, I doubt if things reached the level of shouting or angry exchanges, though he undoubtedly expressed displeasure with their interference and pettiness. I have to think he wore the execs down with his patience and persistence to win the black and white battle but at the end of the day he was willing to give up a couple million dollars in exchange for realizing his vision. I know he said that losing a million dollars is a huge loss when it comes to small-budgeted films like this one and I understand that in order to get the film made within those constraints he and others worked for scale in return for some points on the back end.
Hampered as it was by the limited release, Nebraska still pulled in nearly $18 million domestically and I am sure when all the figures are added up from North America and overseas, where I predict the film will fare well, especially in Europe, its total gross will be in excess of $25 million. By the time all the home viewing rentals and purchases are taken into account a year from now, I wager the film will have done some $30 million in business, which would more than double its production costs. That is quite a return on a small film that did not get much studio support beyond the bare basics.
Payne could have made things easier for himself and the studio by filming in color and securing a superstar. Nebraska marked quite a departure from the lush, color-filled canvas of Hawaii he captured in The Descendants and the equally verdant California wine country he committed to celluloid in Sideways. Never mind the fact the stories of those earlier films, despite the radical differences of their physical locations, actually share much in common tonally and thematically with Nebraska. The dark comic tone and theme of Payne's films can threaten to be overshadowed when a star the magnitude of Jack Nicholson (About Schmidt) or George Clooney (The Descendants) attaches himself to one of his projects. But as anyone who is familiar with the subdued star turns of those two actors in those particular films will tell you, Nicholson departed far from his trademark insouciance and braggadocio to totally inhabit his repressed, depressive title character in Schmidt just as Clooney left behind much of his breezy, cocksure charm to essay his neurotic somewhat desperate character in Descendants. Each star was eager to shed his well-practiced, bigger- than-life persona in service of scripts and parts that called for them to play against type. Instead of their usual live-out-loud, testosterone-high roles, they play quiet, wounded, vulnerable men in trouble. For that matter, the men-children Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church play in Sideways are seemingly complete opposites but in actuality are emotionally-stunted, damaged souls using oblivion, alcohol, and sex to medicate their pain and avoid reality. The beauty of the California and Hawaii locales work as contrast and counterpoint to the chaotic lives of these lost figures careening toward catharsis. In Schmidt Omaha is the perfect washed-out backdrop for a man undergoing a full-scale identity and spiritual crisis once he retires and his domineering wife dies.
That brings us to Woody Grant, the crotchety so-and-so at the center of Nebraska. When we meet this reprobate he is near the end of a largely misspent life. Facing his inevitable and nearing mortality he doesn't much like what he sees when he reviews his life and where he has landed. He is dealing with many deficits in his old age. His body is falling apart. He walks stiffly, haltingly. His alcoholism has been unaddressed and it contributes to his foggy mind, mood swings, propensity to fall and hurt himself, and to utter hurtful things. He seems to derive no joy or satisfaction from his wife of many years and his two adult sons. He almost regards them as inconvenient reminders of his own failings as a husband and father. On top of all this, he is poor and in no position to leave his family anything like a tangible legacy.
This miserable wretch has seized upon what he believes to be his last chance at assuaging a deep well of shame, guilt, bitterness, and resentment. His mistaken belief there is a sweepstakes prize for him to redeem becomes a search for his own personal redemption or salvation. He desperately wants something, namely a truck, to leave his boys. The true meaning of the road trip he embarks on with his son David is only revealed to us and to his boy along the way and that gradual discovery adds layers of poignancy to the story.
When Woody arrives back in his hometown of Hawthorne, Nebraska word spreads he is on his way to collect a million dollars sweepstakes prize. For a few moments he becomes a person of substance in the eyes of his extended family and the town's other residents. Some family members and one old friend turn vultures and demand they get a share of his windfall as compensation for favors they did or loans they made that were never returned. But there is another side to that story. We find out Woody has a kind heart beneath his gruff exterior, so much so that he's been known to do favors and to give money away without ever expecting repayment. That has led him to be taken advantage of over the years. Then when the truth gets out Woody has not won anything but has misinterpreted a marketing piece for a confirmation letter of his supposed million in winnings, he is publicly humiliated and made out to be a fool.
For Nebraska Payne went one step further in distancing himself from commercial considerations by casting as his two leads Bruce Dern and Will Forte, who at first glance form an unlikely combination but in fact play wonderfully off each other. Dern's acclaimed performance as Woody Grant earned him a Best Actor prize at Cannes and nominations from the Golden Globes and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Saturday Night Live alumnus Forte is triumphant in his first dramatic role as the sympathetic son David. The next largest part belongs to June Squibb, who until this film was a somewhat familiar face if not a household name (she played Nicholson's wife in Schmidt). Her stellar work in a colorful role as Woody's piss-and- vinegar wife Kate has brought her the most attention she's received in a very long and productive career. Arguably, the biggest name in the picture belongs to Stacy Keach, a veteran of film, television, and stage who has little screen time in the picture but makes the most of it in a powerfully indelible turn as the story's heavy, Ed Pegram. As strong as these performances are Payne did not do his film any box office favors by choosing actors so far off the radar of moviegoers. That is not a criticism, it is simply a fact. At least a dozen more speaking parts are filled by no-name actors, nonprofessional actors, and nonactors, all of whom add great authenticity to the film but whose obscurity hurts rather than helps the marketing cause.
It may take a while, but I am quite confident Nebraska will eventually find the large audience it deserves. In my opinion it will be a much viewed and discussed stand-the-test-of-time film for its many cinema art merits. As good as Payne's earlier films have been I believe this to be his finest work to date because it is in my view the fullest expression of his filmmaking talents. Visually, it is a tone poem of the first order and on that basis alone it is a film to be reckoned with. Payne and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael have achieved an expressive black and white palette whose hues perfectly articulate the heavy heart of the story. But Payne also found unobtrusive ways to position the camera and, with editor Kevin Tent, to cut scenes so as to amplify its many moments of humor without ever detracting from its elegiac, soulful mood. Mark Orton's original music, plus the incidental music used here and there, add more nuances of mood. Payne artfully composed images for the wide screen format he shot in to glean added depth and meaning from the action. Within the same frame he intentionally juxtaposed characters with the stark landscapes, townscapes, and homes they inhabit. Many of these scenes emphasize sadness, stillness and desolation. Irony infuses it all. The result is an ongoing dialogue between people and their environments. Each informs the other and by consequence us.
The filmmaker's economy of style has never been more evident. He has reached the point of communicating so much with simple brush strokes. Take for instance the way Woody's harsh childhood experience is encapsulated when the old man and his family visit the abandoned farm house he grew up in. Payne has the camera fluidly glide over the detritus of this once proud home turned wreck and to peak into rooms that carry so much psychic-emotional pain for Woody, who was beaten as a boy. Payne clearly indicates this is a private, anguished, cathartic return for Woody, who has avoided this place and its memories for years.
Or consider that gathering of taciturn men in Woody's family at his brother's home in town. Payne arranges the uncles, brothers, sons, nephews, cousins in an American Gothic pose around the TV set, where the men engage in the almost wordless ritualistic viewing of a football game. It is at once a funny and powerful expression of their tribal, tight-lipped bond. A bond more about association by blood than affinity.
Then there are the almost incidental shots of boarded up buildings in town that symbolize and speak to the economic hard times to have befallen so many small towns like the fictional Hawthorne. In a short scene Payne conveys an important way in which the times have changed there and in towns like it when he has Woody visit the auto service station he used to own and he finds the new owners are Spanish- speaking Hispanics. Woody thus personally encounters a demographic shift that has altered the face of his hometown and much of rural Nebraska. No more is made of it then that simple reality and the brief exchange between Woody and the "newcomers," but it is enough to say that times have moved on and the Hawthorne he knew has evolved in some ways and remained unchanged in others.
Perhaps the best example of Payne distilling things down to their simplest, purest, most elemental form is the end sequence when David and Woody are in the truck David has purchased and registered in his father's name. David, who is at the wheel with Woody beside him, stops the truck on the edge of town and invites Woody to take the wheel and drive down main street in his new rig. What follows is one of the most moving denouements in contemporary American cinema. Woody is granted a rare gift when he accepts the invitation to take a celebratory ride down main street. As the truck slowly passes through town he wins more than any prize money could provide when four people from his past catch sight of him and look at him with a combination of awe, admiration, and surprise. It is a perfect moment in the sun vindication for a beleaguered, bedraggled man who suddenly brims with confidence and purpose. Woody leaves town on his own terms, his dignity and pride intact.
What makes that valedictory ride so special is that his sympathetic son David is there to grant him it and to bask in it with him. These two who began the road trip not really knowing each other and often at odds with each other have traveled a journey together that has brought them a measure of acceptance, healing, and peace. David has finally come to understand why his father is the way he is. His fondest desire is realized when he gives Woody that movie-movie opportunity to prove he is not the loser or fool this day. As Woody sits high in the cab of the truck, with David lovingly looking on from the floor, and drives past the artifacts of his past and the denizens of that town, he may as well be a cowboy sitting tall in the saddle of his horse riding into the sunset. He graciously accepts the congratulations of town chatterbox Bernie Bowen. He stares down his former friend Ed Pegram, who now looks the shamed fool. Woody's heart stirs again for old flame Peg Nagy, whose wistful expression wonders what might have been. As he heads out of town Woody said a fond goodbye to Albert, the Grant brother whose favorite pastime is siting beside the road waving at the occupants of passing cars.
Outside of town the truck stops at the bottom of a hill and Woody and David once again exchange places. Doing this out of the view of onlookers preserves Woody's glorious farewell and signals Woody now accepts his limitations and David's love for him. With David back behind the wheel and Woody beside him father and son drive off to meet the future together. The fact that almost all of this sequence plays out wordlessly and still conveys so much meaning is a testament to the work of Payne and his collaborators in extracting the essence of these scenes through beautifully executed shots that give full weight to glances gestures, postures, and backdrops.
I had been anticipating the ending for a long while because it was some years ago Payne first shared the Nelson screenplay with me. The script had come to him way back around the time he was making Sideways (2004). He kept it in reserve all those years that passed between Sideways's production and release and his starting production on The Descendants. By the time he shared the Nebraska script with me Payne had already changed the ending (he always rewrites scripts he inherits) and I remember him being particularly proud of what he had achieved with the close of that story. I was completely taken by the entire script and especially that ending. In my book he really nailed it and came as close as one could to realizing what was on the page.
It is hard to find antecedents for the film. The closest I came up with are Frank Capra's Meet John Doe, Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels, Federico Felllini's La Strada, Jerry Schatzberg's Scarecrow, Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon, Paul Mazursky's Harry and Tonto, and David Lynch's The Straight Story. That is quite a range of work and it gives you an idea of the breadth of potential influences that can be found in it, though I am not suggesting Payne had any of those specific films or others in mind when he made Nebraska. There is at least a similar sense of alienation and a crazy intrepid spirit running through their restless storylines. They share a similar visual sensibility as well. Of course the most obvious thing they share in common is the road story template. While the protagonists are very different from each other, they are all running to or from something.
In terms of my coverage of Nebraska, I interviewed him twice before he began production, I visited the northeast Nebraska set for a couple days and witnessed a few scenes being shot, including one major exterior scene (outside the abandoned family farmhouse) and one major interior scene (at the home of Woody's brother in Hawthorne). I did followup interviews with Payne during and immediately after the shoot. Then I traveled to Los Angeles to sit in on five days of the final mixing process just before the film had its world premiere at Cannes. During my L.A. stay I got to see many fixes made to the film and watched a private run through of the entire film at a screening room on the Paramount Studios lot.
I got a second opportunity to watch the film ahead of its general release at a special Paramount screening put on by the Nebraska Coast Connection, an affiliation of Nebraskans working in the film and television industry. The organization hosts a monthly Hollywood Salon that features guest speakers and I attended the fall salon featuring Payne, who was interviewed by NCC founder and president Todd Nelson before a live audience at the Culver Hotel in Culver City. Much of that event focused on the making of Nebraska. I also attended the fall Film Streams Feature Event in Omaha that saw novelist and Studio 360 host Kurt Andersen interview Payne, co-stars Dern, Forte, and Squibb live on stage at the Holland Performing Arts Center. In addition to the earlier interviews I did with Payne, I had interviewed all of those actors, with the exception of Squibb. I also interviewed Keach, screenwriter Bob Nelson, producer Albert Berger, and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael.
All in all, I accumulated as much or more material about Nebraska than I did for any of Payne's previous films and more than enough to warrant this new edition.
Much of what is communicated in Nebraska has to do with dislocation and disconnection. The characters harbor potent, not always pleasant memories of their shared past. Woody is a man broken off from the people and places of his past and when he revisits them in pursuit of his phantom winnings he is flooded with mixed feelings he doesn't quite know what to do with. Woody's woundedness is bound up in the incidents of his childhood and young adulthood. Distancing himself from that past has only separated himself from himself. Thus, he is a broken man who has left pieces of himself scattered in his wake. The story is not so much about him picking up the pieces of his life and putting them back together, although some of that occurs to make him more whole again, as it is about his son David using those fragments as puzzle pieces to more fully appreciate who his father is and the path he's walked. Because the story is about people who don't have much to say to each other, at least emotionally speaking, the emotional life of the story is rooted as much in the subtext as it is in the context of scenes. Therefore, the film's power resides as much in what is left unsaid or in what is referred to as it is in what is actually said and shown. This nonliteral approach is unusual for American films. Indeed, the film's oblique style and deliberate rhythms are very much those of a European or a Latin American film.
A final note about Nebraska and its reception from Nebraskans is in order. As respected and admired a figure as Payne is among the home state set, his films made in Nebraska elicit strange reactions from a certain segment who bemoan the unflattering light they feel he presents the state and its residents in. This is a classic case of it-is- what-it-is. There is no doubt Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, and Nebraska, his quartet of films made almost entirely on his native turf, focus on mundane and malicious aspects of life that, though found everywhere, no one wants associated with their state. It can be a particularly sensitive subject in Nebraska. because this small population state already battles an image problem. That is to say greater Nebraska and its one true metropolitan center, Omaha, do not have a strong, readily identifiable or sexy profile and presence on the national-international stages. Nebraska simply blends in with that vast homogenized Midwest and Great Plains. Outsiders dismiss it as a place of no consequence with bland surroundings, unsophisticated inhabitants, and insignificant happenings and therefore the very antithesis of the coasts. Some of those same perceptions explain why Nebraska struggles to retain its best and brightest and rarely draws a major new employer.
Nebraskans upset by Payne's portrayals of their state refer to the dull, dingy, dysfunctional portraits he paints, forgetting that he is in service to the stories he tells. Some wonder why he doesn't make Nebraska look better, more colorful, more pleasant, more positive, like the way he portrayed California or Hawaii, once again forgetting that aside from the countryside and oceanside idylls briefly glimpsed in those pictures he mainly showed the seamy, messy undersides of people's personal travails.
What Payne-bashers largely don't get is that his "negative" depictions stand out because outside of the films he makes in Nebraska, virtually no other films made there get seen by anything approaching a mass audience. If there were five or ten other filmmakers giving their take on Nebraska then it would be a very different conversation because there would be multiple storylines, interpretations, inclinations, perspectives, not just his. New Yorkers don't complain that Woody Allen only concerns himself with the foibles of upper middle class and upper crust Manhattan. Los Angelenos don't take Quentin Tarantino to task for his focus on violent denizens of the L.A. underworld. Each of those filmmakers is one of many putting a lens on those cities and so the vision and voice of Allen and Tarantino become part of a much greater and diverse whole that contains many different visions and voices. It only follows then that there are many varied looks at New York and L.A. for the taking, some of which may conform to residents' own views and some of which may not. The point is, there is more than enough to go around for you to find something that speaks to you. Unless and until more features get made in Nebraska by more filmmakers, Payne's personal, idiosyncratic representations of the state will remain the predominant ones, if not the only ones. Don't expect him to change. He is only being true to his material and to himself. Hard to fault someone for that, especially when his films are heralded, and rightly so, for the fidelity of their vision. He doesn't pretend his Nebraska films are true to life portraits of all Nebraskans or of all Nebraska He is only being true to the characters and settings of his stories. That is the singular world he plays God over.
It would be good too for folks to consider that in Nebraska Payne and screenwriter Bob Nelson have delivered archetypal characters and settings that are true to Nebraska, yes, but to a whole universe of other places as well. The equivalents of Woody and his orbit of quirky family and friends can be found everywhere.
Nebraskans bent out of shape by the bad light they think Payne casts them, in should remember he is an artist unbound by marketing motivations. He has no desire, nor should he, to skew his work to reflect some fanciful postcard image of this or any other place to placate critics or to make insecure folks feel better about themselves. Besides, Payne gives far more back to the state than any potential "damage" his films do because were it not for him bringing his films there Nebraska would have no Hollywood production of any sustained size, much less any kind of frequency. Outside of his About Schmidt and Nebraska and apart from some micro-budgeted indies (under a million dollars) one would be hard pressed to name another Hollywood project that shot in state for more than a couple days in the last dozen years. His commitment to growing the film industry there is well-documented.
Oh, and by the way, using the state's name as the title for his acclaimed film is a gift that will keep on giving as long as the film endures and in my estimation the film will long outlast any silly quibbles or dissatisfaction from the nitwits who want him to make Nebraska look like everywhere else. Payne actually cares enough to show facets of Nebraska exactly as they are, without artificial adornments that become distortions of his overriding concern – the truth. He also cares enough to faithfully show his home land as it has never been seen before on the big screen. I dare say with Nebraska he has given most natives and residents a glimpse at their own state they have never beheld. That is more than most art and entertainment delivers. Indeed, by repeatedly bringing the industry to his home state through the films he makes and the cinema figures he hosts he does far more than what most of the people who purportedly have Nebraska's best interests at heart, i.e. state business leaders and elected officials, do. Outside of Warren Buffett he is the state's leading ambassador to the nation and to the world and the impact he and his work have in enhancing the state's name is incalculable. Should he never make another film in Nebraska again (in fact he immediately did, by shooting part of Downsizing there.) he will have endowed the state with four significant works that bear its imprint and inspiration and in the case of his latest work, its name. Although Sideways and The Descendants were made elsewhere they cannot be considered apart from his Nebraska quartet. The way Payne observes the human condition and the way he navigates the world in his personal and professional life is inextricably linked to his native experience. He carries it with him wherever he goes. His Nebraskan sensibility informs everything he does. That is why you can only separate his two features made outside Nebraska from his features made in Nebraska on the most superficial levels. Apart from the specific physical locations he must be true to and is, all his films, no matter where they are set and filmed, are cut from the same cloth emotionally and dramatically speaking. Thus, all his work bears a stamp of Nebraska on it. Besides, Nebraskans rightfully claim all his triumphs, regardless of where they were executed, as a part of their own. As a fellow Nebraskan myself, I certainly do. Payne's affinity for his home state is already one of the great documented love affairs an artist has had with his place of origin and with any luck at all he will only keep adding to this singular narrative.
Payne's Nebraska a blend of old and new as he brings Indiewood back to the state and reconnects with tried and true crew on his first black and white film
©by Leo Adam Biga
Published in a 2012 issue of The Reader
Coming home in black and white
Alexander Payne's decision to make Nebraska in his home state brought into sharp relief some realities with large implications for his own work and prospects for more studio films getting made here.
The state's favorite son had not shot a single frame here since About Schmidt in 2001. With Nebraska, whose principal photography went from October 15 through November, he continued a tradition of shooting here and surrounding himself with crew with whom he has a long history. Some key locals are part of his creative team, too, including one metro resident he calls "my secret weapon."
Aesthetically and technically speaking, Payne also stretched himself by lensing for the first time in black and white, wide screen and digital. He said abandoning celluloid marks a concession to the new digital norm and to the fact today's black and white film stock options are limited.
Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael said digital "allows us to work more with natural light and not have to carry a larger equipment package. We did specific black and white tests to choose the texture and quality in terms of contrast and film grain level we want for the picture. So we went into it knowing exactly where we want to be at."
Natural light and locations
Papamichael added, "Digital means needing less light, so we can do tighter interiors, which is important on this show because we're entirely a location picture. We don't have anything built. A lot of these interior spaces are very small and whatever space we can save in terms of lighting and camera equipment is helpful. Rather than having traditional bigger car rigs and following cars with camera cars we're able to just get in the car hand-held. Also, these newer cameras allow us to do good car work without lighting. It just helps the whole natural feel we're going for."
At the end of the day, said Payne, digital "doesn't matter to me because my process stays exactly the same." His process is all about arriving at the truth. Capturing the windswept plains and fall after-harvest season figured prominently in that this time. Papamichael and Payne sought ways to juxtapose characters with the prairie, the open road and small town life milieu. In a story of taciturn people rooted to the land and whose conversations consist of terse exchanges, context and subtext are everything. Therefore, the filmmakers extracted all the metaphor and atmosphere possible from actual locations, geography and weather.
Film as business
Payne doesn't belabor the point but he received pressure from various quarters to shoot the picture elsewhere. The suits pressed going to states with serious film tax credits. Many locales could approximate Nebraska while saving producers money. He finds himself in the awkward position of having lobbied long and hard to try and convince the governor and state legislators to support film incentives only to see his entreaties largely ignored. As much as he and his projects are embraced, his moviemaking forays in the state seem taken for granted. But the fact is he only ended up shooting here because he had the motivation and clout to do so.
If not for Nebraska there would have been no feature film activity of any significance here during 2012. Minus his Citizen Ruth, Election, and Schmidt, the state has precious little feature film activity of any size to show for it. Refusing to cheat the script's Nebraska settings, Payne brought Indiewood feature filmmaking of scale back home for the first time in a decade. Basing his production in Norfolk provided a boost to the northeast part of the state.
Norfolk director of economic development Courtney Klein-Faust said the total impact the project had on the local economy has yet to be tabulated but that just in lodging alone the production spent more than a half-million dollars accommodating its one hundred cast and crew members. She said the film bought local goods and services whenever possible. She feels the experience will serve as "a case study" for elected officials to assess the trickle down effect of mid-major features and will be used by supporters of tax credits to push for more film industry friendly measures.
AP's stock company's master of light Phedon Papamichael
Like many filmmakers who develop a track record of success Payne's cultivated around him a stock company of crew he works with from project to project. During a mid-November visit to the Nebraska set it was evident he enjoys the same easy rapport with and loyalty to crew he had before his two Oscar wins. The only time this visitor saw Payne betray even mild upset came after a principal actor was not in place when ready to roll and the filmmaker emphatically tapped his watch as if to say, "Time is money." He expressed mild frustration when cows drifted out of frame and it took awhile for production assistants to wrangle them back in position.
On Nebraska he collaborated for the third consecutive time with Papamichael, the director of photography for The Descendants and Sideways. Their relationship entered a new dimension as they devised a black and white and widescreen visual palette to accentuate Nebraska's stark characters and settings. That meant fixing on the right tools to capture that look.
"We did a bunch of testing and dialed in a look we'd like for our black and white because there are many different ways to go about black and white," said Papamichael. Some of the expressive light and shadow images extracted by Papamichael and Payne recall memorable black and white treatments from cinema past, including Shadow of a Doubt, Night of the Hunter, Touch of Evil and It's a Wonderful Life.
Seeking and getting the right look
"It's not really a film noir look, it's definitely a high con(trast) with natural lighting" Papamichael said. "We were very diligent in selecting our lens package, which is Panavision C Series anamorphic. That's from the '70s, so it has a little bit of a less defined, less sharp quality and that helps the look. We're adding quite a bit of actual film grain to it which will feel like you're watching a film projection. We're even talking about possibly adding some projector flicker imposed. So we're really going for a film look. And through a series of tests we've been able to achieve that."
A week into filming, Papamichael was pleased by what he and Payne cultivated. "There's an overall excitement the whole crew has. Everybody feels we're doing something very special and unique and the black and white has a lot to do with it. After you work with it for awhile it becomes the way you see things. In a way we're learning the power of black and white as we go. We're really coming to appreciate and love the poetic power of the black and white in combination with these landscapes and, of course, the landscapes are playing a huge role in this story – just scaling the human drama and comedy. The black and white is becoming a very powerful character in this film just in terms of setting the mood for this."
Grizzled Bruce Dern as the gone-to-seed protagonist Woody is a walking emblem of the forlorn but enduring fields and played out towns that form the story's backdrop. His tangle of white hair resembles shocks of frosted wheat. His drab working man clothes hang on him as if he's a scarecrow. His gait is halting and he lists to one side. His Woody is as worn and weathered as the abandoned farmhouse of the character's youth. But just like the artifacts of Woody's past, this physical-emotional derelict holds on from sheer cussedness.
Papamichael said part of the fun became "discovering Bruce Dern's great visual qualities – his face, the textures and everything that are emphasized through the black and white."
Sense of place
The film's full of Nebraskesque places and faces. There's that farmhouse a few minutes outside Plainview. There's the town of Plainview itself standing in for the fictional Hawthorne. There's an American Legion hall, some bars, farm implement dealerships and mottled fields full of lowing cows. There are earnest farmers, shopkeeps, housewives and barmaids, plain as the day is long.
"Alexander is very diligent about finding the exact right spot for everything," said Papamichael. The original screenplay is by Bob Nelson, whose parents grew up in the very northeast environs of the state the film's set in. He's also impressed by how rigorous Payne is in location scouting. Nelson said "I think he's done a great job of finding a combination of things around Norfolk. I've seen the location photos and it's pretty stunning to see it in black and white. You know it has that The Last Picture Show quality to it. It is funny to see these things that were in your mind, like the abandoned farmhouse, come to life. I don't know how they found it, it must have been a chore, but they came up with a good one. Almost everything I saw was spot-on perfect."
The locations are pregnant with memories and incidents, thus Payne and Papamichael chose ones most reflecting the characters and situations and they cast actors and nonactors alike who most represent these places and lifestyles. "For him it's not all about trying to capture something truthful and comedically grim about the American landscape but also something archetypal," said producer Albert Berger.
Completing the stock company
Whenever Payne works with Papamichael it means inheriting the camera and lighting crew the celebrated DP brings with him, including chief lighting technician Rafael Sanchez and key grip Ray Garcia.
Boom operator Jonathan Fuh is a regular on Payne sets as well as costume designer Wendy Chuck.
Then there's veteran Payne collaborator Jose Antonio Garcia, the sound mixer on the writer-director's last three films. George Parra goes back as far as Election in capacities ranging from assistant director to co-producer to production manager. He executive produced Nebraska.
Production designer Jane Ann Stewart had been on every Payne show since Citizen Ruth but J. Dennis Washington took over that job on Nebraska. Interestingly, a Hollywood art director who lives in Nebraska, Sandy Veneziano, joined the crew to mark her first Payne production. Omaha resident Jamie Vesay, a key assistant location manager, crewed along with other locals, including set medic Kevin O'Leary.
Screenwriter Nelson is a Nebraskan by proxy. His folks hailed from Hartington and growing up in the Pacific Northwest he visited relatives back here, several of whom were models for his characters. Woody is closely patterned after his father. Payne conferred with Nelson as he tweaked the writer's work. "Yeah, every time I'd do a pass on the script I'd send it to him and see what he thought, and he seemed to like it," Payne said. "Sometimes there were certain moments or a certain scene I'd want a little more information about. Like one scene I really like in the script is when the family visits the house where Woody grew up and it's now an abandoned farmhouse. And there Woody delivers a speech about having found the hail adjuster's knife in the field, and it's really the only time Woody speaks in the film, and I just remember asking Bob where that came from."
Nelson said that American Gothic scene when Woody tells his son David (WIll Forte) "a story about how the hell adjustor tried to screw them out of their insurance is actually a true story based on visiting an uncle near Wausa on his farm. That's almost verbatim." Payne said Nelson also helped inform some creative decisions. "He sent me some old photographs of his actual family from Hartington to serve as something of a reference for casting and costuming."
Casting director John Jackson
The colleague Payne refers to as "my secret weapon," casting director John Jackson of Council Bluffs, is undoubtedly the most influential local in the filmmaker's close circle of collaborators. "We just have really similar tastes and in honing our working method since 1995 we just have developed a very similar aesthetic of what we want to see in a film, the type of reality we want," Payne said of Jackson. "And also I think the two of us have developed a pretty good eye for spotting acting talent in nonactors—talent they may not even know they have —and by talent I just mean the ability to be in front of a camera playing some version of themselves and saying dialogue believably and without getting freaked out."
"People can be cinematic just by being themselves and being appropriately placed where they need to be, people can be brilliant by just doing what they do, listening or talking or moving," said Jackson, who along with Payne is excited about several of their nonactor discoveries on Nebraska. "Glendora Stitt, the woman that plays Aunt Betty, what a find. Dennis McCoIg, who plays Uncle Cecil, is like Gary Cooper. Scott Goodman, the barista who served me at the Scooters drive-thru in Norfolk was hilarious without trying and I cast him in a tiny role. John "Jack" Reynolds, who plays Bernie Bowen, an old friend of Woody's, is right out of a Preston Sturges and Frank Capra movie. He's the face of the rolling plains and hilariously funny."
Jackson said he thinks of filling out the people who inhabit any movie, such as Woody's clan, "in terms of I've got to build the family, and then, 'Who are the next door neighbors? who are his friends? what do they do for a living?' I always have a back story for them. It's not like I sit down and make it up, the script tells me what it is by the things they say."
Kindred Spirits
"Obviously it's worked well," said Payne. "Together we cast Chris Klein, Nick D'Agosto going as far back as Election. In the traditional American filmmaking model for casting you have one casting director, typically out of New York or L.A. or Chicago with whom you cast the lead parts, maybe the top five or 10 or 15 speaking parts. And then if you're shooting on location you have a second casting person, a local casting person. That's what John Jackson was for me on the first three films. And then you have a third person who's in charge of extras. And I somehow thought that one person should be in charge of all of the flesh. There should be one vision guiding all of it. You can't get anyone in L.A. or New York to do that, so the person I want to do that is John Jackson." Jackson said his guide in casting is looking at "what does the script say," and then conferring with Payne. "We talk a lot about the characters in relationship to the text. I frequently find myself asking him questions like, 'At this point in the movie what do you want the audience to feel? what do you want them to think? what do you want them to say as they walk out of the theater?' One of the things I learned from him is to look at a moment in the story and to ask questions like, 'Who's funnier doing this? who's more believable doing that? who breaks my heart more?'
"I remember when we were doing Schmidt and it was between this woman in New York, June Squibb, and a woman in L.A. the studio was pushing and I said to him, 'Well, it has to be her,' meaning June Squibb, and he said, 'Why?' and I said, 'Because in that moment when she surprises him with the motor home and she's seated at the table and said, Isn't it going to be great? you know he's hating every minute of it. Somebody needs to break my heart, and June Squibb breaks my heart. At that moment I feel for her. I feel pain for him, but I really feel for her, so when she dies I'm going to hurt, whereas this other woman I don't feel anything.'" Squibb plays Woody's wife Kate in Nebraska.
Give and take
"Those are the kinds of conversations we have," Jackson said of he and Payne. "We never talk about, as other producers do, 'Well, you know, this person's presence in the film would be great because they're so huge in terms of DVD sales.' I never have those conversations with him. I've tried in the past and he'll just look at me like, 'What the fuck are you talking about? I don't want to hear it, I don't want to know.' So it's cleansed me."
Jackson said he's learned not to try and anticipate what Payne wants. "He constantly surprises me, he constantly challenges me. I wouldn't want it any other way. What he's looking for, I don't know, I don't know that he even knows, but I know one thing – when it's there he recognizes it. That's alchemy."
No two projects are alike, Jackson said. "Every single one of these films is a completely different organic living thing and the challenge is to honor that and to help that grow and evolve and become whatever it's going to become and Alexander is the guide to all of that."
Payne and longtime editor Kevin Tent will be cutting Nebraska through the spring and the film will likely start playing festivals in late summer-early fall in advance of a end of 2013 general release.
Alexander Payne's Nebraska comes home to roost
©by Leo Adam Biga
Published in a 2012 issue of The Reader
In 1968 Francis Ford Coppola led a small cinema caravan to Ogallala, Nebraska for the final weeks shooting on his independent road pic- ture The Rain People starring Shirley Knight. Joining them were future fellow film legends George Lucas, Bill Butler, Robert Duvall and James Caan.
Now a road pic of another kind, Nebraska, is underway here by native prodigal son Alexander Payne. For his first filming on his home turf since 2001 Payne's lit out into northeast Nebraska to make a fourth consecutive road movie after the wandering souls of his About Schmidt, Sideways and The Descendants. Nebraska began shooting October 15 around Norfolk, where the production's headquartered, and will complete thirty five days of principal photography by the end of November. A week of second unit work will run into early December. The project is by Payne, Jim Taylor and Jim Burke's Ad Hominem Enterprises in collaboration with Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa's Bona Fide Productions and Paramount Pictures.
On the road again
Despite proclamations he doesn't care for road movies, much less shooting in cars, Payne's once again attached himself to a story of lost and broken people careening to some revelation about themselves. Asked why he keeps returning to this theme or structure, he said, "I have no idea, I personally don't really like road movies all that much and it's all I seem to make. No, none of it's intentional, I'm a victim. Yeah, it just happened."
Characters hitting the road is a classic metaphorical device for any life-as-journey exploration and Payne's not so much reinvented this template as made it his own. "I think self-discovery is a big theme in his movies," said Berger. The protagonist of Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) goes in search of meaning via his mobile home after his life is knocked asunder. In Sideways buddies Miles (Paul Giamatti) and Jack (Thomas Haden Church) indulge in a debauched tour of California wine country that rekindles the love impulse in one and confirms the unreliability of the other. The by-car, boat and foot journey of The Descendants is propelled when Matt King (George Clooney) discovers his dying wife's infidelity and sets off to find her lover. What he really finds is closure for his pain and the father within him he'd forgotten.
The bickering father-son of Nebraska, Woody (Bruce Dern) and David (Will Forte), hold different agendas for their trek along the highways and byways of Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska. Woody, a unrepentant, alcoholic old coot estranged from everyone in his life, is hellbent on collecting a sweepstakes prize that doesn't exist. David, the good-hearted but exasperated son, decides
to placate his pops by promising to drive him from Billings. Montana to the prize company's home office in Lincoln, Nebraska by way of sev- eral detours. He's sure his father will come to his senses long before their destination.
This mismatched pair's road-less-traveled adventure in the son's Suzuki Forenza finds them passing through Woody's old haunts, including his hometown, the fictional Hawthorne, Nebraska, a composite of Hartington, Wausa, Bloomfield, Norfolk and other rural burgs. At nearly every stop they encounter the detritus from Woody's life, which like the broken down Ford pickup in his garage he can't get to run is a shambles of regret and recrimination. Woody's made the fool wherever he goes. A longtime nemesis, Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach), is a menacing presence. By story's end this father-son journey becomes a requiem. To salve his father's broken spirit David performs a simple act of grace that involves a valedictory cruise down main street that gives Woody the last laugh.
Coming to Nebraska-Nebraska
Producer partners Berger and Yerxa (Little Miss Sunshine), who shepherded Payne's Election in conjunction with Paramount and MTV Films (1999), brought Bob Nelson's original script for Nebraska to the filmmaker's attention a decade ago. Payne said, "Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa had gotten a hold of it, and asked me to read it, not thinking I would want to direct it myself. They wanted to know if there was some young up and coming Nebraska director I knew about who could make it for a very, very low sum, and I read it and I liked it and I said, 'How about me and for a sum not quite so low?' And so it was, and they've been kind enough to wait for me these eight or nine years since I first read it.
"I read it before making Sideways but I didn't want to follow up Sideways with another road trip. I was tired of shooting in cars. I didn't think it would take this long, I didn't think Downsizing (his comedy about miniaturization) would take so long to write in between. And then The Descendants came along and now I've circled back around to this austere Nebraska road trip story."
The story's essential appeal for Payne is its deceptive simplicity. "I liked its austerity, I liked its deadpan humor, I like how the writer clearly was writing about people he knew and representing them faithfully to a certain degree but also sardonically. And I've never seen a deadpan, almost Jim Jarmusch sort of comedy that takes place in rural Nebraska."
A black and white palette
The barren, existential landscape should find ample expressive possibilities in the black-and-white, wide-screen visuals Payne and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael (Sideways, The Descendants) plan capturing. Papamichael said the palette they've hit upon after much testing emphasizes natural lighting and texture. They're using a high contrast stock from the '70s that's less sharp or defined. Film grain is being added to it. "We're really coming to appreciate and love the poetic power of the black and white in combination with these landscapes," said Papamichael, "and of course the landscapes are playing a huge role in this story. It's scaling the human drama and comedy with this vast landscape. It's a road movie but it's also a very intimate, small personal story."
"Well, I certainly wanted to make one feature film in my career in black and white because black and white when well-done is just so beautiful," said Payne. "And I knew that whatever film I made in black and white couldn't have a huge budget, so this one seemed to lend itself to that that way. Then also in reading it I wanted the austerity of the characters and of their world represented also in a fairly austere way and I thought black and white in the fall could be very nice. By that I mean ideally after the trees have lost their leaves – to just get that look. Sometimes where you're in rural America there is a certain timeless quality in all those small towns which have the old buildings. You know, change comes slowly to these places." In terms of visual models, he said, "we've looked at a number of black and white films and pho- tographs but it's not like I'm consciously saying, 'Oh, Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange' (or The Last Picture Show) or something like that. No, not really. I mean, I've seen them. We're just going to follow in- stinct in how this one should look like."
Albert Berger on Payne and process
Berger supports Payne's aesthetic choice, though it came with a price and a fight as Paramount execs reportedly resisted the decision to forgo color. But Payne and Papamichael held firm. Berger feels the project gives Payne a new creative space to work in. "I always was excited artistically about what he was trying to accomplish," said Berger. "Clearly we would have gotten a lot more money if we didn't film in black and white and life would have been a lot easier for the production. Alexander's films have always had a very authentic look. He's obviously a great appreciator of cinema and he has a wonderful eye and I think in a way this is his first opportunity to showcase a more iconic, archetypal look."
Payne may just do for the north Sand Hills what John Ford did for Utah's Monument Valley in capturing a certain beautiful desolation. The play of light on wind, barns, trees and wide open spaces offers evocative chiaroscuro possibilities. "I think it's exciting to see what he and Phedon will come up with here," said Berger. "And it's scope as well and so that will add yet another dimension. And digital for the first time for him and it's going to be interesting how that helps us getting in tight spaces like cars and using low level lighting. There's all sorts of tools at his disposal on this one that he hasn't had before."
Berger's come to know Payne's meticulous eye for finding locations and actors that ring true. "Once the script is right and once the cast and the locations are in place I feel he's completely ready to make the movie. I wouldn't say the rest is easy but I think that is the critical bedrock upon which his movies are made. I think he's a filmmaker who's completely in-tune with what he's trying to say both emotionally and comedically. It's been a real pleasure to be able to watch this evolution in his work."
Payne said the more specific the character on the page the harder it is to cast, which is why his search for the right Woody and David took so long. "I just know in the time frame in which I was trying to get this film made these guys rose to the top of my research and struck me and John Jackson, my casting director, as being the right fit," he said of Dern and Forte.
The irascible Woody proved most difficult. "In this case Woody's a very, very specifically rendered character and I just couldn't plug any actor in there," Payne said. He interviewed-auditioned many, including big names. For the longest time no one matched his conceptions. "In today's world it was kind of hard to find someone whom I believed in that part and I didn't want it to change the character of Woody." No compromising.
He finally found his Woody in Bruce Dern, whose daughter Laura Dern starred in Payne's Citizen Ruth and remains a close friend. What made Papa Dern (Silent Running, Coming Home, Family Plot) the perfect Woody? "Well, he's of the right age now and he can be both ingenuous and ornery. And he's a cool actor. And in a contextual level I haven't seen on the big screen a great Bruce Dern performance in a few years and I'm curious to see what he can do. He's a helluva nice guy as well."
Dern and Will Forte (Saturday Night Live) didn't meet until they arrived in Norfolk in early October to participate in table readings with other principal cast. Any chemistry they produce will be worked out on set. That's how it worked between Giamatti and Haden Church on Sideways. "I cast those two guys in Sideways separately. They never met before ten days or two weeks before we started shooting. Or George Clooney and Shailene Woodley, they had never met before. I've just had good luck with that. Actors know it's their job to develop some sort of chemistry, hopefully not force it but develop it, and then of course film has a wonderful capacity to lie."
The casting of Forte surprised many. Not surprisingly, Payne has a considered rationale for the choice. "Will Forte, physically, I believed could be the son of Bruce Dern and June Squibb (who play's Woody's long-suffering wife, Kate). and then I just believe him as a guy I would know around Omaha or meet in Billings. He has a very, very believable quality. And I also think for the character of David he is capable of communicating a certain wide-eyed quality toward life and also damage – like he's been damaged somehow, somewhere."
A singular story by Bob Nelson
Payne's confident he has a stand-alone project. "I don't think you would have seen anyone portray characters like these before. I mean, I've never seen exactly this movie with exactly this dynamic." Payne revised Bob Nelson's script alone, then had Phil Johnston (Cedar Rapids) take a pass, before revising it again. He admires how close the material is to Nelson's experience. "His parents were from Hartington, Nebraska and I think Wausa (Nebraska) but he grew up in Snohomish Washington. You know how other people summer in the south of France or the Caribbean? Well, this guy used to summer in Hartington, that's where he would spend time with his many uncles on his father's side." Nelson confirms the hard-tack individualists and towns of Nebraska are composites of relatives and places there and in rural Washington, though Woody is directly based on his late father. He darkened characters and incidents for dramatic effect and invented the sweepstakes storyline. Nelson's best-known writing credit before Nebraska was for the award-winning Seattle television show, It's Almost Live. He meant to shop his feature script around L.A. but it quickly got into the hands of Payne, who instantly committed to making it and never reneged. Getting Payne behind it, he said, "changed everything."
To his surprise and delight, Payne didn't overhaul his script. "I'm pretty sure I would have been happy no matter what he did with it because I believed in him as a filmmaker. The fact that so much of my dialogue and so many of the scenes remain is really almost unheard of if you have a writer-director taking over," Nelson said. "That's another thing that impressed me. I could tell he didn't go in and try to turn it into his own screenplay. He wasn't driven to put his own stamp on it just to do that. He went through it and thoughtfully changed things he thought could use changing but he left in things he thought could work well. For that I'll always be grateful. "When he's rewriting it I think he's turning in a way already into
a director who's thinking, 'Do I really want to shoot this scene and do I want to shoot it like that? Is there anything that could make this better?' You can almost see that going on in his mind. The one thing you hope when your work is adapted is that it will be made better and he's one of the few guys in Hollywood you're almost certain will make it better. I really trust him."
Rooted in Nebraska
Payne rooted the production in Norfolk after a long search. "I spent a year driving around Nebraska when I had free time—a wonderful education on the state. I considered places like Columbus, Grand Island, Hastings, but I landed on Norfolk because Norfolk has a pretty good number of small towns of about fifteen hundred people orbiting it, and maybe it's also no coincidence that that's the area Robert Nelson was writing about. Hartington is within spitting distance of Norfolk."
Earlier this year Payne and Papamichael followed the route Woody and David make in the film, traveling for three days in a Toyota owned by Payne's mother, Peggy, "just to get a feel for the land," said Papamichael. "He really wanted to convey the feeling of the land to me and that was very helpful. I took a lot of black and white stills." Nelson, who's seen footage and visited the set, said the film's locations are spot-on.
Finalizing locations and cast members led Payne to make certain tweaks. "Yeah, as it always does," he said. "I start incorporating locations more into the script and I might steal a line of dialogue or two from an actor in an audition who can't remember his line or adds an improv that I think is quite good. Or as I'm going along I just think of things which could be better." He's continued tinkering.
After seven years between his last two features he's moving quickly from project to project now. He expects to jump from Nebraska, whose editing he should finish in the spring, into Wilson, his adaptation of the Daniel Clowes' graphic novel slated to shoot on the west coast next fall.
When a film becomes a film: the shaping of Nebraska A shorter version of this story appeared in a 2013 issue of The Reader
After wrapping the Nebraska shoot the end of 2012 Alexander Payne holed up with editor Kevin Tent in L.A. to edit the film starting Jan. 7 and finally put the project to bed the beginning of August. When I caught up with Payne and a small post crew in mid-May at The Lot in Old Hollywood they were mere days from completing a mix before the film's world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in Nice, France.
The edit-mix process is one few outside the inner circle are allowed to witness. It's where a film becomes a film. Over a four-day period at the Audio Head post facility, with its long console of digital controls and theater projection screen, I watch Payne, Tent, mixer Patrick Cyccone, sound designer Frank Gaeta, music editor Richard Ford and others engage in the rather anal exercise of extracting nuance from the minutiae of sound and image, time and space that comprise a film.
I ask Payne how much more can really be massaged this late into the edit. I mean, isn't the soundtrack a relatively simple proposition?
The art and science of sound mixing
"Seemingly simple," he said. "There's always little complicated stuff to modulate and calibrate." It may be a snippet of dialogue or the sound of a character walking across a wood floor or music from a jukebox or the rustle of wind. It may be how long or short an actor's beat or a shot is held. Nothing's too small or incidental to escape scrutiny. Anything even vaguely amiss is ripe for "a fix" often only arrived at after several adjustments that might involve raising a level here, dropping a level there, sweetening the pot with a bank of recorded sounds or snipping a frame.
To the untrained eye and ear, few problems appear obvious or even to be flaws at all. Many are flat out undetectable until brought to your attention. But to the hyper-attuned Payne and his crew, who've watched the footage hundreds, even thousands of times, the slightest element out of synch is a jarring distraction. When something really bothers Payne he's apt to say, "That's hideous."
There's a poignant scene in Robert Nelson's original screenplay when taciturn protagonist Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) looks out on a field spread before his family's old abandoned farmhouse and relates a childhood story to his son David (Will Forte) about his father, a hail adjustor and a knife. I was visiting the northeast Nebraska set in November when the scene was shot. The rather barren, wind-swept location with its forlorn wooden farmhouse and rough-hewn harvested fields made an evocative backdrop for the nostalgic moment. But the part where Woody reveals this incident from the past didn't make it in the final cut because try as he might Payne decided it just didn't work.
"You know, so much of filmmaking is if you can't make a perfect omelette you try to make perfect scrambled eggs," he said. "So we just cut the scene down." As I glimpse the mix process Payne asks me more than once, "Are you finding this interesting or are you bored out of your skull?" I admit the attention to detail is surprising, to which he replies, "It's all important though . . . because there's always discovery. You're discovering it frame by frame. Ways to make it delightful so it never breaks the spell it has over the audience. Kevin (Tent) and I will have knock down-drag out fights over two frames, over tenths of a second." I ask if he ever fears he's micromanaging the life out of a picture. "I never worry about that," Payne answers.
Fractions of frames and seconds
Even to the filmmakers themselves the fixes can be hard to quantify. At the end of July Payne told me in a phone interview, "I was just watch- ing the film with Phedon (Papamichael), the DP. He had seen it in Cannes and then he saw it again here in L.A. and he said, 'It feels so much better,' I mean, it's the same movie but after Cannes Kevin and I came back and spent two weeks doing some more picture cutting. Two frames here, six frames there, 12 frames there, you know, fractions of seconds. And we did another pass of course on the mix. We remixed it. It smoothed out some of the way the music was functioning. It made it less repetitive and more emotional. Film is in detail and squeezing that last one, two, three, four percent out of a film like in any creative work makes a big difference. And there's nothing you can even concretely point to. It just feels better, it just feels more like a real movie."
Tent, who's edited all of Payne's features, said the filmmaker is "more involved than most (directors) with the small details." Payne said what makes he and Tent a good team is, "number one we get along really well and number two we both want to be and are the actor's best friend. We go through the takes over and over again to make sure we're getting the best stuff up on screen in terms of what represents the actor's work and then, of course, what's appropriate for the character. And then beyond that I think we both have a pretty good storytelling sense—telling a story effectively and making it rhythmic."
Located on Santa Monica Boulevard, The Lot owns a storied history as the Fairbanks-Pickford Studio and original home of United Artists. For most of its life though it was the Warner Hollywood Studio that served as the smaller sister studio to the main Warner Brothers Studio in Burbank. Some film-television production still happens in the cavernous sound stages there but today it's mostly a post site for finishing films. It's one of countless L.A. industry venues where films of every imaginable type are supported and tweaked behind closed doors. It's safe to say two-time Oscar-winner Payne was the star resident client at The Lot with his Cannes-bound project.
Payne's sixth feature enjoyed a warm reception at the fabled film bazaar, where star Bruce Dern won the Best Actor prize. Payne, who accepted the award for Dern, said even a stellar performance like Dern's is partly shaped in the editing room. "It's definitely what the actor's doing but its also the work of editing where you're combing through and getting the best of every set up and then creating both from what they gave you and from what you're choosing and culling as absolutely necessary to tell the story. You tease out a great consistency to performance and to the creation of the character and then once we do that the work the actor's done really starts to pop. Bruce did a good job."
During my visit last spring to the Audio Head suite Payne introduced me to the insular post production world where he and his crew were under the gun preparing the film for its Cannes debut. "We've been working twelve-hour days. It's been very much a mad dash to the finish because we're getting ready for Mr. Frenchy," Payne said to me shortly upon my arrival.
Notes and tweaks
Nebraska is a six-reel picture. Each pass through a reel takes put to six hours. It's time consuming because each team member has notes made from previous screenings of what fixes need addressing. With each successive pass, there are new notes to respond to. After a screening of the twenty-minute reel five with a running time count on the screen Payne said to his collaborators, "I have a bunch of little things, so maybe we should fast track." After noting several areas of concern and the corresponding time they appear in the reel, everything from extraneous noises to wanting some bits louder and others quieter, he said, "Sorry, I have a lot of notes here guys."
Then Payne invites Tent and the others to chime in with their own notes. Payne interjects, "I'm looking froward to our whole film playback so we can gauge all of these things." He asks for input from personal assistant and aspiring filmmaker Anna Musso and first assistant editor Mindy Elliott before asking, "Anyone else?"That's how it rolls, day after day.
During my stay I watch an uninterrupted playback of the entire film at a large screening room on the Paramount lot with Payne and the edit-mix team poised with notepads and pens in laps. Several folks are moved to tears despite having seen the film countless times. For the duration of the edit-mix the post crew becomes Payne's family. It's the most time intensive segment of creating a film. "I spend more time with the post production crew than with the other (the shooting crew) and each thinks it's THE filmmaking family. Many of them never meet each other. But I meet all of them, down to the musicians who play on it or to the guy who designs the titles."
Recently, Payne told me that post work on Nebraska took twenty eight weeks but even with that it still marked the shortest "period of time I've posted a film. I think The Descendants was about thirty eight weeks total. And in these twenty eight weeks I took time out to go to Cannes, I took a week off after Cannes. I went to Bologna, Italy to watch old movies. Even within there it's been a faster process than my previous films."
Ever since he began talking about Nebraska he's described his vision for it as "austere," referring to the small budget ($12 million), tight shoot schedule (six weeks), short script (ninety five pages) and minimal camera set-ups. The script's lack of a voiceover motif, something most of his films have featured, was the biggest time saver in the edit room. "It was shot in a more austere style so I had fewer camera angles to do deal with. I wanted to be complete in my coverage but very limited in the coverage and to have as much play out as possible in single takes, and cut as little as possible. Plus no voiceover. Ask anybody who does a voiceover picture—voiceover adds a whole level of time to the editing of the film to calibrate, to get the voice over just right. It's a rather musical element really. Dramatic and musical." He said he was never tempted to impose a narrator on the story. "Absolutely not, no way, that's not how it's conceived. Voiceover isn't something you decide to add later. Usually people only do that when the film's in trouble. For me, voiceover's always been an integral part of the conception of a film."
Although a purely aesthetic choice, the film's middle range black and white photography that's neither expressionistic nor impressionistic is congruent with its austerity, Payne said Paramount, the studio that bankrolled the picture and is releasing it this fall, initially resisted his making it in black and white because that's what suits and bean counters do to appease shareholders. Payne held out and when push came to shove he got his way. "They said they were glad I stuck to my guns because they like it so much. They've been great. I've had a great experience with Paramount, honestly. Once we were able to make it at a budget level they were comfortable with given the fact it was black and white with no major stars in a non-rebate state then I couldn't have asked for a more supportive group. I couldn't be more happy about it."
So was their resistance a bluff to see how committed he was to black and white? "Kind of," he said. "I mean, they want you to, they don't want you to, which is fine, that's their job. Color makes more money apparently. But they trusted me and then it's just about the budget at that point." "I guess I traded in my last Oscar for a black and white movie," Payne adds jokingly.
Heart and soul getting personal
It's a black and white movie with perhaps more heart and soul than Payne realized. After living with the film for months he recognized it has more emotional depth than he initially appreciated and part of that was him informing the story with things from his own life. "The script had a kind of deadpan hilarity. I think the direction and the acting and the music are bringing out a lot of sweetness in the film thats making it a more heartfelt film than maybe the screenplay might have suggested at first glance.
"The other thing, too, I was able to make it quite personal in certain details related to David taking care of his older folks. I'm at that age and everyone I know of my generation is at that age where our parents are getting on and need a little special attention. We love them to death and they drive us crazy as we figure out how to take care of them and accommodate them and all those things, including how far do we extend ourselves to be dutiful and at what point do we cut it off. All those questions. I was able to insert some of my own experiences with that in the film. Even though I didn't originate it it wound up being because of the time in my life when I was making it quite personal and I think that helps the film. It always helps a film if you can put some of yourself in there." Payne's pleased by a common refrain he hears from those who've seen the film. "A lot of people tell me it makes them think about their parents and I was stopped a number of times in the street in Cannes by people who'd seen the film who said, 'I was very touched by the film.'"
Woody Grant, the geezer Bruce Dern plays so effectively, is a wreck and wretch demanding attention be paid near the end of a misspent life. Payne's appreciation for the character and the way Dern portrays him grew during the project. He said Woody has "a lot more in common" with the title character Jack Nicholson played in Payne's About Schmidt than he might have imagined. While Woody's not as articulate as Schmidt is by the end, both share a similar existential angst about the value of their lives. "People sometimes come to the end of their lives and are overwhelmed with the feeling they have nothing to show for it. I think that's certainly whats driving Woody's crazy mission (to redeem a worthless sweepstakes prize mailer) in some part."
While Payne finds "kind of sweet the smallness of Woody's dreams" —he only wants a new pickup truck and a compressor—he said Woody's admission that he wants "to leave something" for his boys is generous but also selfish. "He wants to know he's done something." David, the sweet son who elects to take Woody on the road trip to retrieve the prize, feels many things about his father during the course of that journey but by the end, Payne said, it's "unconditional love." He said David is a classic case of "how you seek the love of those who belittle you. Look at his father, who's a nothing anyway, and how he has to take out his low esteem by belittling others, including his son. So I think the end is complicated. He's still seeking approval but also granting a last wish."
Along the way, said Payne, David "finds some understanding" for why his father is the way he is. "Like the graveyard scene with the irreverent things the mother is saying about all the deceased but David is taking all this in for the first time and learning. And when they go to the old farmhouse and then in the bar. Why did you have us? David asks his dad. Well, I liked to screw, Woody said. Again it's kind of a weird, disturbing yet comic scene. David drank the elixir and is able to wander into his father's turf and ask him questions he never asked him before."
Payne said his appreciation for Will Forte's work also "deepened." As the sweet son desperate for approval Forte plays a guileless Everyman we all know from our own lives.
Little seen America
The film is filled with sweet and savory small town archetypes. After the Cannes screening Payne said many viewers commented, "We haven't seen these Americans in a long time. It's as though they're forgotten. We never see them in the cinema," referring to the average types that populate the pic. "I thought it interesting they really feel they're seeing Americans they've never seen before. Of course I really appreciate that. I've been saying for a long time Americans make films but not American films about Americans. We make cartoons easily digestible for the rest of the world. But we're not showing ourselves to ourselves.
"I like when art is a mirror somehow to represent or reflect or distort or refract just to see ourselves, like our film in the '70s was, to see common people doing every day things to some degree. It makes me think of what Martin Scorsese said in his documentary about Elia Kazan—that when he was a kid and saw the faces from the street used in On the Waterfront suddenly it was as though the people he knew mattered. People want to see themselves. In general we Americans need to see Americans we recognize in our films but we kind of don't. Within that to see Midwesterners is an even more uncommon thing."
The film is a singular Nebraskaesque work. There's the title, which has never graced a feature before. Then there's the rarely seen northeast Nebraska locale and by extension the rarely glimpsed denizens of its rural hamlets. And the film's writer and director both have strong Nebraska ties. Of all the Nebraskans who've gone on to Hollywood careers few have been filmmakers. Payne's the only one to have returned to make films here about the people and places he knows. "Yeah, it's as though the people I knew mattered and in that way I think I'm lucky I'm from Nebraska in that I have a virgin territory to show in movies," he said. "And maybe the fact I've seen so many movies informs the fact that I can know even unconsciously what would be new. I don't want to make derivative films. I want to do something new.
"Rachel Jacobson asked me to program a series of films in the fall at Film Streams that have influenced this one and I kind of can't think of any. Maybe I can, but in general I can't. It's like the Latin phrase, suis generis – of its own kind or genus."
Nothing particularly emphatic or dramatic happens in the story. The NEBRASKA 245
way Payne puts it is: "The movie has a lot of anti-climaxes," What does happen is authentic and delivering the truth is always his overriding goal, which is why he's "proud" of the work of the nonactors he and casting director John Jackson found for the film.
Payne's among the leaders of the Indiewood movement that finds filmmakers like himself making independent movies with studio backing. He's defied all odds by not having a single critical miss in his growing body of work. His last three features (About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants) have been commercial successes.
How Nebraska fares is anyone's guess but it's well positioned to generate buzz between its Cannes reception and expected screenings at the Telluride and New York Film Festivals. After the film opens in late November it should be a prime contender come awards season.
The Nov. 24 Film Streams Feature Event welcomes Payne, Dern and Forte in conversation with Kurt Andersen.
Local color: Payne and Co. mine the prairie poetry of Nebraska
©by Leo Adam Biga
Published in a 2014 issue of The Reader
Local color, of the achingly human variety, is where Alexander Payne's new black and white film Nebraska most deeply comes to life. After fall festival premieres abroad and across the U.S., Payne's coming home to show off the film named for his native state and primarily shot and set here. Nebraska had an exclusive limited run at Film Streams. On Nov. 24 Payne joins stars Bruce Dern and Will Forte at the Holland Per- forming Arts Center for the sold-out Film Streams fundraiser, Feature V, that will find the troika interviewed on stage by Studio 360 host and novelist Kurt Andersen. The following day Payne and Dern travel to Norfolk, Nebraska, the production's base camp last fall while the proj- ect filmed in nearby Hartington, Plainview and environs, to premiere the picture there.
Ringing true and finding Woody
Oscar-winner Payne is a stickler for the truth and with the by-turns elegiac and silly Nebraska he went to extreme lengths finding the people and places that ring true to his and screenwriter Bob Nelson's vision of Midwest America. "This is the most authentically Nebraska feature film I've released to date," said Payne, who previously made Citizen Ruth, Election and About Schmidt in-state.
Casting director John Jackson and Payne searched long and hard for the right players to animate the oddball yet familiar characters Nelson created on the page. In a rare star turn winning him much acclaim Bruce Dern so fully inhabits his old codger of a character, Woody Grant, that despite the actor's well known face and voice he disappears into the part to become just another of the story's small town residents. Dern plays Woody as written: a taciturn man of stoic roots and repressed pain long alienated from everyone around him. Feeling a failure near the end of his life, he's desperate for some validation and so gets it in his head that he's a sweepstakes winner. His son David, played by Will Forte, takes him on an epic journey to claim the prize. Amid the missteps and detours comes discovery, empathy and closure. As their strained relationship warms the son gives his father a gift born of understanding, forgiveness and love.
One of the reasons Payne said Dern leapt to mind when he originally read the script a decade ago is that like the actor's actress daughter Laura Dern, who starred in Payne's feature debut Citizen Ruth, he doesn't worry about what he looks like on screen. To convincingly play the gone-to-seed Woody the actor inhabiting the role had to look a wreck. "Those Derns don't have vanity," Payne said admiringly. "They'll do anything, they want to do anything. When working they're more inter- ested in hitting a certain level of truth, an often ugly truth or pathetic truth, and now you're talking my language."
Payne elaborated on what made Dern the right fit, "Bruce is a handsome guy when he's cleaned up and obviously as you can see in the film when he's not cleaned up he can really look like a coot and a weirdo. If you took many other actors and tried to do the same thing they'd look fake. The guy would have to portray someone cut off from others and lost in his own world. Woody's probably been like that somewhat his whole life but as a young man they just thought he was reticent. Now he's a coot and ornery and pissed off at himself that he hasn't done anything with his life and now he's about to start taking a dirt nap. I think that's certainly what's driving Woody's crazy mission in some part.
"When I thought about who could communicate that I thought of Bruce." Payne felt Dern could express the two sides of Woody as both prick and pushover who can't refuse doing favors, even if it means be- ing taken advantage of. He also detected "a certain childlike nature" in Dern that aligned with Woody's fragility. "I think within Woody's ornery crust there is something of a child – of a very disillusioned and disappointed child." Indeed, we first meet Woody as he's running away from home. "There's also a sweetness about Woody and Bruce is a sweet guy. He hasn't often played that."
Dern acknowledges it's a departure for him. "Throughout my career I've been flamboyant in a lot of roles, especially flamboyantly evil, and there's a certain style that goes with that." Nebraska called for him to be a dull, muted, passive presence. "What the role demanded was a character who appeared to not be touched too much or too little," he said, "and probably not touched at all. And if he touches other people it's without planning to do it. He's just who he is and he's always going to be that way. I think he's a fair man, Woody, and that's another thing I based the character on a lot. Because he's fair he believes what people tell him because he doesn't know why anybody would want to lie to him about anything."
The tangibles and intangibles of a character go into any casting decision. "When you cast someone in a lead you're not casting just his or her ability to act," explained Payne. "you're casting the substance or essence of their person. There's two things going on simultaneously seemingly contradictory but not. One is you want them to become that person in the script yet at the same time not act."
Actor and director arriving to the truth
Dern said Payne has an uncanny way of communicating what he wants, variously tapping "your strengths and weaknesses and sometimes invading your privacy" to extract the emotion or tone he's after. Actors Studio veteran Dern believes he achieved a progressive in-the-moment reality in Nebraska he'd never accomplished before on a film. "I've always wanted to be a human being and just kind of acting—otherwise leave myself alone and not perform and I don't think there's really a moment in the movie where I perform—in other words take it above the context of what it really is. The first day of the movie Alexander said to me, 'I'd like you to let Mr. Papamichael (cinematographer) and I do our jobs,' meaning don't show me anything, let me find it with the camera, and that's what he did and that's what you see.
"That doesn't mean I wasn't acting. It was as hard a role as I've had to take on but I feel I owed it to the material and to my career for just once in my life to try and have as many consecutive moment- to-moment pure moments of behavior. That's what I began when I worked with Mr. Kazan and Mr. Strasberg in the Actors Studio—how much moment to moment real behavior can you have? And I think in Nebraska I've done far and away the most I've had in an entire film."
Forte, a relative newcomer to acting after years writing for television, said he learned a lot from his co-star. "Bruce would always say, 'Just be truthful,' and that always sounded like acting mumbo jumbo to me coming in but for some reason the way he would explain it and describe it it made sense. There's such an honesty that comes from his performance and all the performances that it really taught me a lot to watch everyone work."
Dern said Payne lived up to what his daughter Laura and his old acting chum Jack Nicholson, who starred in the director's About Schmidt, told him about the filmmaker: "They both said in separate conversations, 'He'll be the best teammate you've ever had.' They were right. I feel it's the best team, overall, I've ever had."
Payne, whose sets are famously relaxed, said he also casts with an eye to who will "be nice to work with" and contribute to the playfulness he believes essential to good filmmaking. "I want to be there to play. I don't know exactly how it (any scene) should be, I'm there to sort of say, 'Oh, well, let's try this and let's try that, nudging the machine toward a certain direction. It's not all preconceived, you're discovering it day by day, so I think you want actors who are willing to have a sense of, Let's be playful and free. It's all about having fun, and that will create something none of us have thought of exactly."
Dern said he's glad it took nearly a decade to get the film made – the project came to Payne as the filmmaker was setting up Sideways – because "I wasn't ready to play this role a few years ago." The passage of time put some more natural wear and tear on Dern, both physically and emotionally. The limp he walks with in the film is real, if exaggerated, and the way Woody leaves things unsaid is something Dern said he's been guilty of himself and regrets.
Life informing art
Similarly, Payne's personal life caught up with the experience of David in Nebraska as an adult child dealing with aging parents. Payne's father is in a nursing home and his mother recently survived a serious health scare. "I was able to make it quite personal in certain details related to David taking care of his older folks," Payne said. "Everyone I know of my generation at that age has parents that are getting on and need a little special attention. We love them to death and they drive us crazy. How we take care of them and accommodate them and all those things, and how far do we extend ourselves to be dutiful and at what point do we cut it off, all those questions. It wound up being because of the time in my life when I was making it quite personal. The fact that I had that much more life experience for this film with respect to my parents, I think helps the film. It always helps a film if you can put some of yourself in there."
Payne said the bottomed-out economy also enhanced the austere shooting style and stark look of the film, adding, "Those winds blew their way into the film as well and it becomes more of a Depression Era film." Undoubtedly some will take umbrage at the film's portrayals of quirky. salt-of-the-earth types. But if the strong reception the picture's received at the Cannes, Telluride and New York Film Festivals, among others, is any indication, than most audiences realize Payne and his collaborators sought archetype, not caricature in bringing to life small town inhabitants and the dysfunctional Grant family.
"I hope what people take away from this movie is his genuine love for Nebraska because he really does love Nebraska" said Forte. Dern calls the film "a love poem" to Nebraska from Payne.
Payne, Nelson, Jackson, Papamichael, editor Kevin Tent, assorted other crew and the ensemble cast all committed to realizing authentic portraits of this comic-dramatic Midwest Gothic tale. As Payne is both a writer and a director he made his own pass on the Nelson script. He's particularly proud of the simple yet sublime and nearly wordless ending he hit upon that may just go down as one of the most memorable and moving conclusions in the annals of American cinema. A series of telling looks are exchanged that say more than any words can. He's pleased too by his handling of the film's black and white and wide screen that help make Nebraska an expressionistic experience for the way he and Papamichael evoke mood from light, shadow, landscape and framing. The juxtaposition of persons and places carries meaning.
Creating a world through casting
But what Payne's most eager to talk about is how Nebraska lives and breathes on the strength of its casting and melding of actors and extras. "Whatever achievements this film Nebraska may or may not have for me its greatest achievement is its most significant marriage of profes- sional and nonprofessional actors and nonactors because to create that world it's dependent equally on production design and casting. That's what suggests that world is that flesh. We spent over a year doing it so that they all seem like they're in the same movie. Finding those vivid nonactors takes time.
"Official preproduction is going to start maybe fifteen weeks out but I need casting and location scouting to start many, many weeks before that and I do a lot of the scouting way in advance of a greenlight. Whenever I'd have three free days I'd just take off in my car around the state." He's come to know rural Nebraska quite well. It's why he's confident he cast not only the right locales but the right faces and voices. He goes so far as to say, "Casting is the most important thing" and "The best thing I do as a director is cast. You can't f___ up casting. You've got to get the right people in every part and of course the leads and the secondary, tertiary parts have to be exactly right. It's creating a world." He likes saying his movie is as much "anthropological" as anything.
Prepping the movie, he said, "I looked at a number of small town American films. One of them in particular is an excellent film and it has professional actors but also people cast from that small town. But there's a great chasm between the acting styles of the two. It's like the faces of the real people lend what they're supposed to lend which is authenticity, verisimilitude and all that but they're not acting properly, even as versions of themselves.
"So I knew we had to spend time to get local people who could act as vividly as possible as versions as themselves but also to have the professional actors act flatter. They both had to meet in between. I like when professional actors act more flatly like people do in real life. People don't gesticulate, go into histrionics in real life, not Midwesterners anyway."
A cinema seldom seen
Truth is always the litmus test for Payne. "When I'm in a casting session it's no different from how I am on the set, which is the moment they start acting I pretend in my mind that we're not making a movie, that I'm just there invisible watching something. Do I believe it? That's the trick. Do I buy it? Do I think these are real people?"
Payne's likely to return to Nebraska again to make films. It's only natural. "Other directors continue to make films in the cities where they grew up. Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino shoot in L.A. Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese and so many others in New York. Kurosawa would never leave Tokyo. Pedro Almodovar hasn't made a movie outside of Spain. Fellini never made a movie outside of Italy. They were courted and invited a lot. 'No, no, this is where I feel comfortable, where I feel like I know the people and where I can get the details right.'"
It's the same reasoning Payne uses for making movies here. Then there's the fact that by tackling subjects so close to home he can show a segment of America too often missing from today's cinema. "I think in general we Americans need to see Americans in our films but we kind of don't, we see cartoons largely. As Americans we make cartoons easily digestible for the rest of the world but we're not showing ourselves to ourselves. I like when art is a mirror somehow to represent or reflect or distort or refract, just to see ourselves like our film in the '70s, showing common people doing every day things. . . ."
He said a recurring comment he hears about Nebraska is that "we haven't seen these Americans in a long time. It's as though they're forgotten, we never see them in the cinema. I thought that was interesting that people really feel they're seeing Americans they've never seen before. Of course, I really appreciate that."
As one of only a handful of Nebraska feature filmmakers who's cultivated the state on screen, he said, "I think I'm lucky I'm from Nebraska and that I have a virgin territory to show in movies. Maybe the fact I've seen so many movies informs the fact that I can know even unconsciously what would be new. I don't want to make derivative films, I want to do something new."
By the same token, Payne, who reveres classic cinema, said, "People have said of Nebraska, 'This is a film like they used to make,' and that makes me feel good because I'm trying to make films like how they used to make. I'm trying to make the films I myself would like to see, which is film from the '70s and before."
In truth, Payne's made a timeless film that plays like a loony requiem set to its own internal rhythm and logic. It unfolds slowly but surely and from the mix of somber, sweet and surreal emerges a lyrical comic- drama unlike any other. Because of this cinematic prairie poem the state will surely never be looked at the same again.
Alexander Payne on working with Jack Nicholson
Alexander Payne on working with Jack Nicholson
©by Leo Adam Biga
Drawn from my book Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film
As I wade through the edit on the new edition of my Alexander Payne book, I am coming across some things that I am selectively posting, including this aggregation of quotes and musings in which Payne refers to working with Jack Nicholson on About Schmidt. Getting Nicholson to star in the film, in a part that requires he be on screen for virtually its entire duration, was a huge turning point in Payne's career trajectory but what really catapulted Payne to the upper echelon of cinema was the great performance he elicited from Nicholson in the lead part of a killer script that Payne co-wrote with Jim Taylor and that Payne brought to the screen as the film's director. Payne grew up watching Nicholson's work in that decade of 1970s American film that was so foundational for the filmmaker and his own work as a writer-director. It meant a lot to Payne to have Nicholson deliver the goods in what was Payne's biggest film, in terms of budget, prestige and risk, up to that point.
NOTE: The new edition of Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film releases September 1. It is the only comprehensive treatment of the Oscar-winning Payne in print or online. It is a collection of articles and essays I have written about Payne and his work over a 20-year span. I have basically covered him from the start of his filmmaking career through today. The book takes the reader through the arc of his filmmaking journey and puts you deep inside his creative process. There is much from Payne himself in the pages of the book since most of the content is drawn from interviews I have done with him and from observations I have made on his sets. I also have a good amount of material from some of his key collaborators.
I self-pubished the book in late 2012. It has received strong reviews and endorsements. I am releasing a new edition this summer with the help of a boutique press here, River Junction Press, and its publisher Kira Gale. The new edition features major content additions, mostly related to Payne's Nebraska and Downsizing. It will also feature, for the first time, a Discussion Guide and Index, because we believe the book has potential in the education space with film studies programs, instructors, and students. But I want to emphasize that the book is definitely written with the general film fan in mind and it has great appeal to anyone who identifies as a film buff, film lover, film critic, film blogger. It has also been well received by filmmakers,
Kira and I feel hope to put the book in front of the wider cinema community around the world, including producers, directors, screenwriters, festival organizers, art cinema programmers. We feel it will be warmly embraced because Payne is one of the world's most respected film artists and everyone wants to work with him. People inside and outside the industry want to learn his secrets and insights about the screen trade and about what makes him tick as an artist.
Alexander Payne on working with Jack Nicholson
NOTE: These excerpts are from 2001-2002 articles I wrote and that appear in my book
Alexander Payne derives much of his aesthetic from the gutsy, electric cinema of the 1970s and therefore having the actor whose work dominated that decade, Jack Nicholson, anchor his film About Schmidt is priceless.
"One thing I like about him appearing in this film is that part of his voice in the '70s kind of captured alienation in a way," Payne said, "and this is very much using that icon of alienation, but not as someone who is by nature a rebel, but rather now someone who has played by the rules and is now questioning whether he should have. So, for me, it's using that iconography of alienation, which is really cool."
Beyond the cantankerous image he brings, Nicholson bears a larger-than-life mystique born of his dominant position in American cinema these past thirty-odd years. "He has done a body of film work," Payne said. "Certainly, his work in the '70s is as cohesive a body of work as any film director's. He's been lucky enough to have been offered and been smart enough to have chosen roles that allow him to express his voice as a human being and as an artist. He's always been attracted to risky parts where he has to expose certain vulnerabilities."
The film's title character, Warren Schmidt, is a man adrift in a late life crisis where the underpinnings of his safe world come unhinged, sending him reeling into an on-the-road oblivion that becomes a search for redemption. Because the story is really about a man's inner journey or state of mind the film is not so much driven by traditional narrative as it is subtext.
"This film isn't so much about the story because there isn't really much of a story. It's about a man and kind of about a way of life," Payne said. "And it's a way of life I kind of witnessed in Omaha. Not that it doesn't exist elsewhere and not that many different lives don't exist in Omaha. But, from time to time, it has a whiff of something that's very genuine. It's just a feeling, and I'd be hard-pressed to describe it beyond that."
As an artist, Payne does not like limiting himself to expository narrative. He understands how seemingly whimsical, quirky or incidental elements, like the moon serenade in Citizen Ruth or the lesbian romance in Election, have value too.
"One thing Hollywood filmmaking urges you always to do is tell the story. If it's not germane to the story, then leave it out. And I kind of disagree with that," he said. "I mean, I like stories. I like seeing movies that tell stories. I like my movies to tell stories. But films don't operate only on a story level. There's a quote I like that says, 'A story exists only as an excuse to enter into the realm of the cinema.' Films operate on emotions, moods, sub-themes and maybe even poetry, if you're lucky enough to have a bit of mystery and poetry in your film."
If the screenplay is any guide, then reading it reveals Schmidt as a man who has built his life around convention and conformity but who, along the way, has lost touch with what he really is and wants. The things in his well-ordered life have become his identity. His actuarial job with Woodmen of the World Life Insurance. His office. His home. His routine. His marriage. When, in short order, he retires, his wife dies and his estranged daughter prepares to marry a man he does not like, he realizes he is alone, at odds, angry and restless to find answers to why his supposedly full life seems so empty.
What makes Schmidt's dilemma more complex is that he is not a wholly likable man. He is a square, a miser, a malcontent. Payne is drawn to such richly shaded and often unsympathetic characters because they are more interesting, more real, more truthful. Just think of inhalant addict mother-to-be Ruth Stoops in Citizen Ruth or arrogant, spiteful teacher Jim McAllister in Election. Neither is totally a shit, though. Stoops is brave, outspoken, independent. McAllister is sincere, caring, dedicated. And, so, Schmidt is solicitous, careful, reflective. As he begins defining a new life for himself without a job or wife, he begins behaving in ways that defy family-societal expectations.
In this way, the film is an indictment of the prefabricated mold people are expected to fit. With Schmidt, Nicholson mutely echoes the alienated character (Bobby Dupea) he essayed in 1970's Five Easy Pieces. Just as Dupea turns his back on his classical piano career and blue blood roots to work the oil fields, Schmidt shucks his constraints to embark on a road trip that is as much escape as quest.
Then there's the whole star power thing Nicholson brings. The clout Nicholson wields. The Player label he wears. The attention he commands. Payne is savvy enough to know that having Nicholson on the project boosts the prestige and the pressure that goes with it. That's why this production is a little more all-business and a little less laid back than Payne's previous two. For example, the filmmaker is, for the time being anyway, giving no interviews (outside this one) and the set is closed to reporters.
This limited access all gets back to the Nicholson factor. It means catering to him and shielding him.
Or, as Payne put, "we have a big fish on this one. Everyone knows him. Most everyone is a fan of his. Plus, there's the Pop stuff of his winning three Academy Awards and having been in very many popular and artistic films. So, he's a big presence in American culture. And all of us, certainly from me down to the crew, want him to be impressed. We want him to feel protected and supported. We want to feel that we have his approval. And, as director, I'm really bending over backwards to make sure he feels comfortable enough so he will expose vulnerabilities and really dive into the part. So, just because of his stature there is a heightened will among the film company and crew to do a good job."
Making no bones about what a fan he is of Nicholson, Payne said his star has thus far been a filmmaker's dream.
"Sometimes, you think about a movie star as being more star than actor, kind of playing some version of themselves. That's not the case with Mr. Nicholson. He's all about the character. He really dives into who is that person. He's a consummate actor. I've been really impressed with what I've seen so far. And I think watching the character unfold through him is going to be really amazing."
Instead of full-blown rehearsal periods for the film, Payne, Nicholson and the film's other name actors, who include June Squibb as nis wife, Hope Davis as the daughter, Dermot Mulroney as the future son-in-law and Oscar-winner Kathy Bates as the future in-law, have held script readings. According to Payne, Nicholson is not throwing his weight around, as one might expect, but rather acting as a colleague and collaborator.
"My experience so far is that he expresses his opinions as he sees them and he tries to be helpful to me and to the process. He seems to respect the filmmaker. So far, it's been a really interesting collaboration. And I also think I have much to learn from him, so I welcome his input."
Nicholson became attached to the project through the kind of old-boy networking Hollywood thrives on. The actor was given Begley's book by his old friend, producer Harry Gittes (whose name Nicholson appropriated for the private eye he played in Chinatown). Then, Payne came on board, writing the script with Taylor and being assigned directorial chores as well. All Payne knew was that Nicholson would read the finished script first.
"And, oh, thank God he liked and agreed to do it," Payne said. On a practical level, Nicholson's participation has meant a much bigger budget than Payne has worked with before. "It's around $30 million. Mr. Nicholson's getting a salary which is larger than actors have gotten in my previous movies. Another factor is that this is a union movie, where my previous two were non-union, so there's a little added cost there.
"Thirty (million) is actually quite modest – it's hard to believe, I know – by Hollywood standards. And it's really amazing this script is getting made with this caliber of star at that budget level, because there's no gimmicks, no special effects, no guns. It's just a guy in crisis."
Nicholson's presence netted a bigger budget than Payne ever had before, which meant New Line insisted he use sound stages and multiple cameras as safeguards against cost overruns caused by shooting delays.
"Because it's not a terribly commercial film and because it's somewhat costly I was urged to not go over budget. I had to make all my days, so in order to do that I shot more on sound stages and I sometimes threw up two or three cameras. I'd used sound stages on a limited basis before because, one, we didn't have the budget to build sets and, two, I don't really trust it, I trust what exists. But practical locations, as they're called, are difficult. They're tight. You wreck people's front lawns.
"Building sets and shooting on them poses its own logistical problems, but it also solves a lot of problems. And rather than shoot from one angle and then move in closer, I tried to get both (shots) at once. I like doing it precisely for the reason of not wearing out the actors and saving time." In the end, Payne did meet his sixty two-day schedule.
Despite the hike in budget, the presence of a superstar and the imposition of union realities, Payne insists the film, which is being made for New Line, remains closer to his first two intimate independent features than to overblown mainstream Hollywood pics.
"The scale of filmmaking is, for me, not that much different than my previous two. A lot of directors, as they get older or have more films under their belt or have more success or whatever, they consistently make bigger, more impersonal films. I am conscious of wanting to make increasingly more personal films."
Directing Nicholson allowed Payne to work with an actor he greatly admires and solidified his own status as a sought-after filmmaker. He found Nicholson to be a consummate professional and supreme artist.
"Nicholson does a lot of work on his character before shooting. Now, a lot of actors do that, but he REALLY does it. To the point where, as he describes it, he's so in character and so relaxed that if he's in the middle of a take and one of the movie lights falls or a train goes through or anything, he'll react to it in character. He won't break." Payne said Nicholson doesn't like a lot of rehearsal "because he believes in cinema as the meeting of the spontaneous and the moment. His attitude is, 'What if something good happens and the camera wasn't on?'"
By design, Nicholson carries the film. He is in virtually every scene. That Payne got him to play the lead in the first place was a coup. That he worked with an artist he's long admired was cool. In an interview Payne gave the Omaha Weekly only days before shooting began, he said the actor was accommodating in every way, immersing himself in the part and making himself available to the entire process during script readings. Now months removed from the shoot, Payne said Nicholson remained a pro throughout the production and his extraordinary talent provided him as a director with endless choices.
"I had a very excellent experience working with him. He was extremely professional and committed to his part. Jack Nicholson is a movie star and an icon and that's fine, but in the moment of doing it and really who he is in his heart he's an actor who gets nervous like other actors and wants to do a good job like other actors and hopes he got it right like other actors and needs reassurance like other actors.
"What was great about directing him was that unlike many situations where you give the direction and hope to God the actor can do it just the way you'd like him to or you hope you've thought of the right words that will trigger the right response, with Nicholson I had to be careful with what I told him because not only would he do it, he could do it. He just has an excellent instrument. Sometimes, when I'd impose blocking or I wanted a certain scene a certain way, I'd say, 'Is that all right with you' and he'd go, 'Well, anything you come up with I can find a way to justify it to myself, so, what do you want?' I was like, 'Ohhhh…' He makes every possible choice doable."
Payne said, "There's always a bit of nerves between actors and director the first couple weeks as you're learning to trust one another." That was true at the start of Schmidt, as Nicholson felt Payne out, but in short time "he made it very easy to direct him. He put a lot of appreciated effort into breaking the ice with those around him. He was very professional and very cool and very kind."
The crowds of fans that followed the Schmidt traveling all-star band from location to location have long dispersed since production wrapped.
If reaction to the film by preview audiences is any gauge, than Payne may be striking the right chords with this gray, introspective story. He said test cards consistently use words like "real," "true-to-life," "genuine," "naturalistic" and "not funny" to describe it. "And that's been kind of nice," said Payne, whose aesthetic is informed by the European and American cinema of the last Golden Age (the 1960s and '70s) when the best films were about real life. Payne said the September 11 terrorist attacks "helped cement more than ever my already existing desire to make human films – films which are about people."
Laura Dern and Alexander Payne: An Actor-Director Marriage Made in Heaven
Laura Dern and Alexander Payne: An Actor-Director Marriage Made in Heaven
©by Leo Adam Biga
A version of this story appears in my book Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film
Doing some more proofs and edits to the new edition of my Alexander Payne book reacquainted me with this piece I did about the close friendship and great working relationship the filmmaker forged with Laura Dern when making his debut feature Citizen Ruth. The two remain chums 20-plus years later. Payne brought her to Omaha for a Film Streams Feature Event that saw him conversate with her at the Holland Center. She's come back to Omaha at his invitation a few other times as well. In the interviews I did with Payne and with Dern for this story I probably dug deeper than I ever have before or since in fleshing out the collaborative director-actor dynamic. I share the story with you now. As the story reveals, it turns out Citizen Ruth might have never happened if Dern hadn't fallen in love with the script and championed the project. What was origially called The Devil Inside was going nowhere until she fought for the part and once she got it she fought for the project. Indeed, Payne credits her for getting it made. In my opinion, her performance is one of the bravest pieces of acting I've ever seen by a major female lead and the film remains the most raw and real, if not the best, of Payne's work.
NOTE: The new edition of Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film releases September 1. It is the only comprehensive treatment of the Oscar-winning Payne in print or online. It is a collection of articles and essays I have written about Payne and his work over a 20-year span. I have basically covered him from the start of his filmmaking career through today. The book takes the reader through the arc of his filmmaking journey and puts you deep inside his creative process. There is much from Payne himself in the pages of the book since most of the content is drawn from interviews I have done with him and from observations I have made on his sets. I also have a good amount of material from some of his key collaborators.
I self-pubished the book in late 2012. It has received strong reviews and endorsements. I am releasing a new edition this summer with the help of a boutique press here, River Junction Press, and its publisher Kira Gale. The new edition features major content additions, mostly related to Payne's Nebraska and Downsizing. It will also feature, for the first time, a Discussion Guide and Index, because we believe the book has potential in the education space with film studies programs, instructors, and students. But I want to emphasize that the book is definitely written with the general film fan in mind and it has great appeal to anyone who identifies as a film buff, film lover, film critic, film blogger. It has also been well received by filmmakers,
Kira and I feel hope to put the book in front of the wider cinema community around the world, including producers, directors, screenwriters, festival organizers, art cinema programmers. We feel it will be warmly embraced because Payne is one of the world's most respected film artists and everyone wants to work with him. People inside and outside the industry want to learn his secrets and insights about the screen trade and about what makes him tick as an artist.
When Laura Met Alex: Laura Dern & Alexander Payne Get Deep About Making Citizen Ruth and Their Shared Cinema Sensibilities
Published in July 10-16, 2008, Vol. 15, 20, issue of The Reader
Citizen Stirrings
When Alexander Payne and Laura Dern chat on the Holland Performing Arts Center main stage July 13 for Films Streams' first annual fundraiser they'll naturally get around to Citizen Ruth. The 1996 abortion comedy he co-wrote with Jim Taylor marked Payne's directorial debut and Dern's portrayal of title character Ruth Stoops earned her critical acclaim.
What the pair may or may not discuss is how pivotal their collaboration proved.
Sixteen years ago Payne was still an aspiring feature filmmaker. His UCLA graduate thesis project from a few years before, The Passion of Martin, turned heads. The newcomer showed enough promise to land a studio development deal, analogous to a college baseball star getting drafted by a major league franchise, inking a fat contract and getting assigned to the high minors.
But he hadn't broken through yet. He and Taylor did finish their abortion comedy script, then-known as The Devil Inside, that fall. They were trying to get it set up for Payne to direct. The script made the rounds, generating heat, but nobody wanted to finance it. Too risky. Too political. Too controversial. It didn't help that Payne was untested in features.
Cut to Dern, by then established as an edgy screen actress for bare-her-soul performances in Joyce Chopra's Smooth Talk, Peter Bogdanovich's Mask, David Lynch's Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart and Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park. She was already Oscar-nominated as the free spirit title character in Martha Coolidge's Rambling Rose, for which her mother, Diane Ladd, was also nominated. Her acting genes extend to her father and fellow Oscar nominee, Bruce Dern.
Reminiscent of a young Barbara Stanwyck in her ability to play innocence and guile, sweetness and toughness, Dern was a catch for any director. Payne was a big fan of her work but never thought of her for messed-up Ruth Stoops. He probably didn't think he could get her. That changed when, unbeknownst to him, Dern's then-beau, actor Jeff Goldblum, got ahold of the Devil script and gave it to Laura.
"And I just was obsessed the moment I read it," she said by phone from the L.A. set of a short film she's appearing in. "I just forced their hands."
Shared Cinephile Leanings
What did she respond to so strongly?
"Well, in terms of the material," she said, "it's a very unique and hilarious and extremely honest voice about this country and about what happens when you get two opposing sides in America, on any subject frankly. And the idea of putting this not just flawed but impossible protagonist at the middle of it is just completely genius. I felt I had something to bring to it that was unique.
"My love for finding empathy and voice in untenable human territory made me determined to force myself on them. I could love nothing more as an actor than one specific challenge, which is finding an empathetic place for a character we would ordinarily have disdain for, and Alexander happens to love that, too. Alexander, Jim (Taylor) and I have the same sensibility and that's a very rare thing to find."
Studio execs often express dismay at Payne's unsympathetic protagonists. "My response is always, 'It hasn't been cast yet.' I think it's the actor who brings the humanity and the sympathy to that part," he said. "Yeah, of course, how the film is directed and the tone contribute also, but that's the actor's job – to bring us a really full human person, and I'd like to think that truth is always sympathetic."
"And the goal probably isn't finding the sympathy, the goal is finding a multi-dimensional authentic person," Dern said. "Everyone is filled with their own dark and light places."
She said the sensibility she and Payne share derives from their cinema weaning.
"Alexander and I both grew up on the humanist films from the '70s. In the '70s there was a blossoming of the auteurist view and in the very specific way directors worked with their actors to find a singular voice. I think probably because humanity was the goal. The bottom line is it's up to your actor to find the humanity in a way that can only happen through behavior. That was the focus those directors had and it seems to be such a focus of Alexander's work as well."
Putting Herself On the Line
The only other time Dern's gone after a role so aggressively, she said, is Rambling Rose. Her commitment to Ruth changed everything.
"Laura's presence helped finance the film," Payne said by phone from his Topanga Canyon, Calif. home. Her involvement also lured other cast members. "I know Laura's presence helped woo Burt Reynolds. These things catch their momentum however they catch their momentum. The script opened doors and then Laura liked the script and then the snowball stated growing."
Finally, Payne secured the financing, which, he added, "was still hard to get even with Laura attached. This film almost wasn't made." He said it was only by the slimmest of margins the money came through.
Few besides Payne and Dern know how close it all came to not happening and how long it took to be realized.
"We finished our first draft in the fall of '92 and I wasn't shooting until fall of '95," he said. "I was so frustrated I left L.A., in a kind of self-imposed exile, wondering, What does it take to get a film made?"
Without Dern the project might have died or at least been delayed and Payne's dream to direct deferred. When she signed on he recognized his good fortune.
"Yeah, and the exciting thing was that she kind of came after me," he said. "I had lunch with her and she evinced such enthusiasm for the part and understanding of the role that she was the one."
To help make the small-budgeted indie pic feasible Dern agreed to work for SAG scale along with everyone else.
"Here she was a big movie star coming to Omaha, Nebraska to play a pregnant drug addict," he said. "She was getting, I don't know, four thousand dollars a week or something, so that proved she was there because she wanted to be there. It wasn't for any other reason than for the pleasure, for the joy of it."
Said Dern, "We were all there for our passion and it made for an incredibly creative and professional experience for all of us."
On the set he soon discovered her reputation for putting herself out there, on the line, totally exposed, for her art is well deserved.
"Yeah, that's where she's most comfortable," he said. "She gives one hundred percent to the role."
A Safe Place
Ruth Stoops is among many roles in which she's gone to emotional extremes and done provocative scenes. There's no holding back. No hedging or softening. She lays it all out to see. She clearly enjoys pushing boundaries.
"I mean, for whatever reason it is my favorite thing to do," said Dern, who won her legal emancipation from her parents at age sixteen in order to pursue her craft full-time. "And I have a feeling that being raised by Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd had something to do with it, both in my film life and in my life. I definitely seek it out."
Before she can put herself out there she has to feel she's in good hands. Despite Payne's inexperience, she felt protected.
"I must say I had implicit trust in him. I never questioned him. I don't think I ever will. I believed in him and I think like we felt we knew each other, and that's a bond where you can't go wrong. That's some kind of innate knowing. If there was a feeling out process it was really just – What do you like? How do you like to work?
On that level. Just on the day to day things."
Payne said it's inevitable a director and a lead actor size each other up.
"Oh yeah, you know I was so happy she was going to be in my movie but still the director thinks, I hope this person doesn't screw up my movie," he said. "And the actor might think, Who's this director who's going to screw up my performance?"
In their case, he said, it helped that she'd checked his work out.
"She liked The Passion of Martin, my student film, so she did her homework in watching that."
Still, he was a newbie. He soon found out about her astute grasp of cinema.
"Of course she was justifiably concerned as to who my other partners were going to be – who my cinematographer was, my editor…because that's the thing, she really understands the filmmaking process and how it's not just about the actor or the director," he said, "it's about everyone involved. It's such a huge effort. And she really gets all of that.
"So, yeah, she wanted to know she was going to be placing her hard work in safe hands and I think once she felt that, then she was able to give her all. And once I felt she was going to give me what I wanted and even more, then I felt safe, and then we just skyrocketed."
Dern had a hand in a key crew member coming on board.
"One thing that worked out really well on the film – it both made her feel safe and it began a friendship and a professional collaboration that lasted through three films – is that she introduced me to Jim Glennon, the cinematographer" he said.
Jim had shot her in Smooth Talk, her kind of star-making film, back in '85, and she recommended him. I went to meet him, if nothing else just as a courtesy to Laura, thinking, Well, I'll be able to tell her I met him but I didn't like him. And I adored him, and so that was a right move in many ways."
The late Glennon went on to shoot Payne's Election and About Schmidt.
In Synch
Payne and Dern meshed in that way only two artists who respect each other can.
"Look, we worked together extremely well," he said. "It's one of the richest collaborations I've ever had with an actor and I was so happy it was happening on my first feature film. We really got in tune with each other pretty early on and we really felt a partnership.
"I mean, when you make a film your production designer is your partner and your cinematographer is your partner and your editor is your partner. And it's nice when the lead actor is your partner in the same way and it's not somebody you have to handle or manipulate or anything."
For her part, Dern said, "I consider one of the best moments of my life was working on Ruth with Alexander. I had been acting for sixteen-seventeen years. I'd worked with extraordinary people, for sure. I think that speaks so much to his innate abilities and instincts."
The comfort level she felt with him and Glennon helped her tap into an aspect of Ruth and women like her she feels deeply about.
"One of the things I always loved about Ruth, why I felt like I understood her so completely, was that Ruth isn't just a character trying to find her voice but she's a character who doesn't now she's entitled to one, and I long to play women who are in that struggle," Dern said. "I think Rose in Rambling Rose is similar that way.
"And I know they're the two that have probably penetrated my heart the most as characters I really love and find really relatable for women in this country. I really crave playing women who are on that discovery."
Mutual Admiration Society
Payne said Dern's commitment to craft isn't a self-absorbed ego trip. She's not just concerned with her own performance but with contributing to a fully realized film.
"She gives a hundred percent to the role and she also is a good kind of team captain for the entire cast," he said. "The rest of the cast look to the lead actor – how is he or she feeling about the film…and she always had such great enthusiasm and professionalism."
Payne couldn't have asked for anything more. But he got it. When he and Kevin Tent were editing the film he got another glimpse of Dern's cinema savvy.
"She has such a knack for film acting. I mean, many months later when I was editing I would talk to her by phone or she would come by the cutting room and I'd say we're cutting a scene a certain way or she'd see how a scene was cutting and she'd say, 'You know, I think in that shot on take three I did something kind of interesting. You might want to take a look at that.' She had a prodigious memory for what she did in what scenes and what other actors did.
"I've read recently about her performance in Recount. That she would do many scenes three ways – underplayed, over the top and then kind of neutral, so that Jay Roach, the director, would have choices to calibrate her performance in the cutting room. And that's just like textbook Laura. She understands film to the nth degree. She knows it's about editing and she gives you choices in editing."
Payne went on to have the same experience with Jack Nicholson on Schmidt.
"Oh, yeah, that's the kind of actor you want. Everyone has to understand it's not about what happens on set, it's about what you harvest on set to get to the cutting room."
For Payne, Dern's enduring gift was the example she set "that one can work the way one wants to, which is with a real sense of partnership with the lead actor," he said. "That it really can be the way it should be. And have fun. I mean, we all had a really good time making Citizen Ruth. A really good time. She's a blast. I'd like to think it set a tone for what the rest of my films have been."
Both would like the opportunity to work together again.
"We've definitely talked about," Dern said.
"I'd love to work with her again but I haven't had a part for her," said Payne, who doesn't know yet whether his upcoming film, Downsizing, may include a role for her. An original screenplay written with Jim Taylor, Downsizing's described by Payne as "a large-scale, possibly 'epic' comedy that uses a science-fiction premise as a way to paint a fairly large satiric mural of today's world."
Just as Payne surrounds himself with a family of film artists on project after project, Dern enjoys longstanding collaborations.
"I'm a big believer in it and I feel like I have found a tribe of people I've worked with over and over again, someone who gets you, and you feel like you can do your best work with someone who gets you."
The two know each other so well, he said, he's not preparing copious-James Lipton notes for the Holland event but rather winging it. "I mean, look, all we have to do is start talking and it'll all come out." Maybe he'll wear his lucky Ruth pants, white jeans whose pants leg was torn by a dog that bit him on a location scout.