Alexander Payne interview - The Descendants

The 'Sideways' and 'About Schmidt' director talks to Cath Clarke about his Oscar tipped film

Alexander Payne during the production of The Descendants

Alexander Payne is showing me his death stare. He uses it in TV interviews when he’s asked for a soundbite. ‘I can’t stand that crap,’ he fumes. ‘Describe the film in a sentence? I go the other way. I give them awkward silences.’ A sly curl of the lip gives him away: he’s not so curmudgeonly. I suspect Payne is a bit of a softie underneath the waspish professor act. Like his films: all those portraits of ageing men and their crushing mid-life disappointments: plenty of sharp edges and close-to-the-bone humour, but with sympathy and humanism running through them. Think of Paul Giamatti as failed novelist Miles in 2004’s ‘Sideways’ or Jack Nicholson, giving the schlump-iest performance of his career as a retired insurance exec in 2002’s ‘About Schmidt’.

On the subject of Payne’s no-nos, he’s not pleased when people tell him ‘Sideways’ is their favourite movie. Who would have guessed that a story about a couple of guys on a wine-tasting holiday would become a $100-million hit? It won Payne his first Oscar, made Giamatti the best-known character actor in town and gave Merlot a bad name. Plenty of people love it. Some think it’s a classic. But when they tell Payne, he says: ‘Come over to my house and watch some real films.’ He thinks the movies he’s directed are ‘minor’. It’s not that he’s masochistically harsh, but he’s comparing them to Kurosawa or Fellini, whose work he’d show anyone who took him up on the offer. He says of ‘About Schmidt’: ‘Even I think it’s dreary… I’m hoping one day I can make one really good film.’

George Clooney and his on screen daughter Shailene Woodley

You can say things like that when Rolling Stone calls your latest film ‘damn near perfect’. Somewhere between comedy and tragedy, ‘The Descendants’ stars George Clooney as frumpy Hawaiian lawyer, Matt King. His wife is in a coma after a speedboat accident and, as King says, he’s ‘the back-up parent, the understudy’. So he watches haplessly as their daughters, a stroppy 17-year-old and a puppy-cute pre-teen, act out.

Payne is a stickler for casting. He knocked Clooney back for the part of Miles’s sleazy soap-star buddy in ‘Sideways’ because he couldn’t buy him as a ‘washed-up TV star’. This time, Clooney was his first choice. Why? ‘He’s the right guy for the part,’ Payne answers with an ‘isn’t-it-obvious’ shrug. It’s true: Clooney dispenses with every shred of movie-star charisma with the help of a bad haircut and Hawaiian shirts tucked into his dad slacks. What’s more, he performs possibly the most ungainly running scene in movie history – he runs like a man who has never broken out of a walk, launching into a flat-footed duck-shuffle. ‘I’m never going to get laid again,’ Clooney quipped the first time he stepped out of the dressing room in character. Payne’s response? ‘I don’t believe you.’

The familiar line is that Payne’s characters are loser alter egos, terrible ‘what-if’ visions of what might have been had he not graduated from UCLA a talented young director: disappointed misanthropes basking in the reflected failure of others. Payne has heard it all before and doesn’t like it: ‘That makes me think that all I’m doing is repeating myself.’

But yes, he admits, at a push, there might be something to the theory: ‘Perhaps it’s something I fear… it’s possible. I don’t want to be Schmidt, I don’t want to be Miles, or King.’

But failure was never on the cards. Payne was unbelievably driven in his twenties and lived like a student in low-rent flats even after he became successful, right into his late thirties: ‘I never wanted money worries to slow me down or make me take a job

I didn’t want.’ He adds: ‘That’s partly why I’m 50 and unmarried. Maybe I’m just picky, but also I had to jettison anything that I thought would slow me down.’ He used to be married, to the actor Sandra Oh, who was in ‘Sideways’; they divorced in 2006.

That rawness is in the films. In ‘The Descendants’, Hawaii is nothing like the postcards: he makes it look as provincial as Omaha, Nebraska (his hometown and the setting of his first three films: 1996’s ‘Citizen Ruth’, 1999’s ‘Election’ and ‘About Schmidt’). In another director’s hands, Matt King’s story, adapted from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, would run aground on sentimentality: tears and tantrums wrapped up with a hugs ’n’ healin’ family reunion. Here it’s more dysfunctional. It sounds facetious, but for me one of the most gripping performances is by Patricia Hastie as King’s wife, motionless in hospital, wasting away. It’s shockingly real, right down to the bloody gauze over her tracheotomy wound. Hastie lost 20 pounds by the time they finished shooting, ‘so that her cheeks were really that sunken.’

Payne bristles when I mention it’s seven years since ‘Sideways’. No, he says sharply, ‘The Descendants’ did not take a long time to make. He spent two years writing ‘the Vietnam of scripts’, a satire about overpopulation which will cost a lot of money to make.

‘The Descendants’ is warmer than his earlier films, and King a good few shades more palatable than previous characters. Is he mellowing? He winces. ‘Mellowing sounds horrible… expanding maybe.’ No, he lays the film’s cockle-warming qualities on the story itself: it doesn’t have the sharp cynical edge of, say, ‘Election’. ‘This film requires a different approach, because it’s family drama and they are going through grieving, hatred, forgiveness,’ he grins one last mock-crabby grin, ‘and all that crap.’

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