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MillimeterFade to Black:
Alexander Payne, Director
Oct 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
“I really wanted a '70s movie,” says Alexander Payne, director of Election and About Schmidt, about his latest film of men emotionally adrift in America, Sideways. “I love the soft feeling of the colors of early '70s movies. But film stocks now are different, and lenses are different, and everything is so sharp and contrasty and fine-grained. Somehow you lose those lovely — and for me they're very human — pastels that I associate with those movies of the '70s.” Think Hal Ashby.
Sideways is the painful and funny sojourn of two old friends (played by Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church) to California wine country prior to one of them getting married. The movie traverses the wrenching crossroads of midlife where the heroes must face their aging selves, all against the golden hues of the California grape harvest. Payne knew the look he wanted and conferred with DP Phedon Papamichael over many old films. “I don't know that much about film stocks. I know lenses well, obviously, since I'm a director, but what Fuji makes, what Kodak makes — I don't care,” Payne says.
They ended up with stocks from both, and used Pearl Mist filtration to blow out the definition around some of the sunsets. But what they really captured was the beauty of the wine. Though Payne cringes at the idea of the wine in the glasses looking like a commercial, he is pleased with the result. “I have to give a lot of that credit to the prop master. A lot of the wine we shot that the actors were drinking was real. But when we did use fake wine, if they had long dialogue scenes and had to be drinking, I insisted to the prop master that he make the wine. I mean, pinot has to look like pinot, and cab has to look like cab. It's got to be right, the color of it. And so a lot of credit is there.”
Payne indeed does know his lenses, and there were some decisions to be made in preproduction for his fourth feature film. “I'm anxious to shoot Cinemascope at some point,” he says. “Election had been Super 35, which I liked because it's fast and everything, but I very much disliked the grain that you take on by the time you go to release print. I thought about Cinemascope [for Sideways] so you can shoot that way but not have the grain. [As for] using anamorphic lenses, it turns out anamorphic lenses are very stylish and the lenses are always checked out. We couldn't get all the lenses we would need. Plus, we're on that cusp right now where you can save the grain by doing digital intermediate, but it's still pricey, so I didn't really have the budget to make entirely a digital intermediate show. So I went 1.85:1, which is fine because it's a human movie and you want faces and good close-ups.”
In keeping with his old-school filmmaking philosophy and a '70s look, Payne included several of his guilty pleasures. “Kevin Tent, the editor, and I, we like split screens. We just like it. We like montages. It's fun, it's very filmic. People love split screens. This is our fourth movie together. We've always been saying, ‘Do we get to do split screens on this one?’”
Payne is proud to be an old-fashioned filmmaker, steeping himself in time-honored techniques. “I was trained as a director — you keep your head right next to the lens and you watch the actors, always. The first among equals in cinematic components is the acting.” Along with monitors, he eschews storyboards. “You come in with some pretty strong ideas, and then suggest those ideas to the actors and the DP, and then work it out. Are your ideas organic to what the people would be really doing in the scene, and if you confirm that they are and then kind of nail it down with the actors, then you figure out how to shoot it.
“I mean, Antonioni, whose films are so very visual, there's no storyboard. He would say he never storyboarded, and that he would come in in the morning, block the actors, then make a documentary about that scene. … More and more with experience, I'm understanding that director really is director — directing the energies of others, rather than so much creating or imposing.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
