friend of the ordinary man
 

Posted on 14.10.2023

There is at least one humanist filmmaker left in Hollywood… A close-up of Alexander Payne, who has brought his eagerly-awaited new film, The Holdovers, to the Lumière film festival.

According to American critic Manohla Dargis, he is "the most gifted social satirist to hit the screens since Preston Sturges". The compliment must resonate with Alexander Payne, an ultra-cinephile filmmaker with eight feature films to his name and two Oscars for Best Screenplay (Sideways in 2005 and The Descendants in 2012). We have here an artist with eclectic tastes who reveres Anthony Mann, who fought for Haneke's Amour to be rewarded as a juror at Cannes, and whose cinematographer for the first three films was Jim Glennon, son of the director of photography of Stagecoach, and keen to recount his father's Fordian memories.

However, for his own part, Alexander Payne would be happy to look further back to the 1970s: "Take Sidney Lumet, he happened to make Murder on the Orient Express, of course. But when he made Dog Day Afternoon, he claimed to be aiming not for realism but for naturalism. He told his set and costume designers: ‘No colour palette. We're not going to paint the walls. All the actors have to wear their own clothes. We're just going to go out and make the film.’ That's a wonderful way to direct your creative team. What was very beautiful about the films of the 70s was that the life filmed reflected more than ever life as it was lived by the citizens of the country. The quality of films was judged by how close they were to real life, not how far they were from it."

Born in 1961, Alexander Payne grew up in a family of Greek origin (his paternal grandfather chose to Americanise Papadopoulos into Payne...) in Omaha, Nebraska, an "ordinary" state in which he would set several of his films with "ordinary" characters. After studying history and Spanish, which led him to live in Salamanca and Medellín, he went on to study film at UCLA, the University of California, and made a name for himself with an accomplished and ironic graduation film, the medium-length The Passion of Martin (1991, available on YouTube). The project landed him a job at Universal, where he developed the screenplay for what was to be his third film, About Schmidt, but he eventually moved on to directing with Citizen Ruth (1996), an utterly dark satire. Inspired by a true story, Laura Dern plays a junkie whose pregnancy is alternately exploited by pro-choice activists and anti-abortionists. Its tone is reminiscent of the irony of Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, for example. The dissection of the excesses of the American way of life continued in Election (1999), a savoury chronicle of a student election in the heart of a high school in Omaha.

The films that followed definitively established him as one of the great American filmmakers of his time: About Schmidt (2002) with Jack Nicholson as a misanthropic retiree; the delightful oenophile comedy Sideways (2004); the touching family dramedy The Descendants (2011), starring George Clooney; and Nebraska (2013), which garnered Bruce Dern (Laura's father) the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. After Downsizing (2017) and a period of doubt during which he declined several projects (including a new version of Babette's Feast), he made a remarkable comeback with The Holdovers (2023), which was a hit at the Telluride Film Festival, prompting Variety to describe it as "a lost classic of the seventies".

Alexander Payne has often co-written his screenplays, notably with partner Jim Taylor (they even wrote a version of Jurassic Park III together, of which, according to them, not much remains in the finished film). "I feel like I write because I'm desperate for something to direct. My background is in filmmaking. The act of directing interests me. But I don't have access to the kind of scripts I'd like to direct without writing them myself. We don't have Robert Towne. We don't have Waldo Salt. We don't have these great screenwriters. Where are they? They're working on television at the moment, I think. So I have to do these things myself. In a way, I'm glad I'm forced to write, because it obliges me to look inside myself and rack my brains to find what I think is feasible, which becomes my own style. But I've just directed a script that I didn't write [The Holdovers was written by series writer David Hemingson] and I had a lot of fun doing it. And I realised that I was able to make it just as personal as things I have created."

Aurélien Ferenczi

MASTER CLASS
Meet Alexander Payne
Pathé Bellecour - Sun. 15 at 11am

SCREENINGS

The Descendants by Alexander Payne (2011, 1h54)
Pathé Bellecour - Sun. 15 at 6.15pm
Institut Lumière (Villa) - Tue. 17 at 11am

Sideways  by Alexander Payne (2004, 2h06)
Lumière Bellecour - Mon. 16 at 5.15pm
Cinéma Opéra - Thu. 19 at 2.30pm

Nebraska by Alexander Payne (2013, 1h55)
UGC Confluence - Mon. 16 at 8.15pm

PREMIERE 
The Holdovers by Alexander Payne (2023, 2h13)
Institut Lumière (Hangar) - Sun. 15 at 7.15pm