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Jim Taylor, the Other Half of Hollywood’s Top Screenwriting Team, Talks About His Work with Alexander Payne

November 20, 2011 11 comments

Jim Taylor

 

 

Jim Taylor, the Other Half of Hollywood’s Top Screenwriting Team, Talks About His Work with Alexander Payne

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally published in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

 

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 Paris, I Love You 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.

YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THE STORY IN MY NEW BOOK-

Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film, A Reporter’s Perspective 1998-2012

A compilation of my articles about Payne and his work.  Available this fall as an ebook and in select bookstores.

Jim Taylor and Alexander Payne with their Sideways Oscars

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Phedon Papamichael, Jim Burke and Shailene Woodley Discuss Working with Oscar-winner Alexander Payne on ‘The Descendants’ and Kaui Hart Hemmings Comments on the Adaptation of Her Novel

November 5, 2011 11 comments

George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller

 

 

Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, Producer Jim Burke and Actress Shailene Woodley Discuss Working with Oscar-winner Alexander Payne on ‘The Descendants’ and Kaui Hart Hemmings Comments on the Adaptation of Her Novel

©by Leo Adam Biga

Published in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

 

In his well-reviewed new film The Descendants Alexander Payne reframes the Hawaiian idyll as gritty American terrain where history and culture intersect with human aspirations and failings.

The festival favorite follows a Hawaiian clan set askew by trauma, infidelity, greed and legacy. Feeling the weight of it all is reluctant land baron Matt King,(George Clooney), who tries salvaging what’s left of his family and life by practicing forgiveness and finally growing up. Clooney’s called the film a coming-of-age tale for his 50-year-old character and his estranged 17-year-old daughter, Alexandra, played by Shailene Woodley.

The Fox Searchlight release has two preview screenings Nov. 20 at Film Streams, where the pic plays exclusively beginning Nov. 23.

For this project that’s put Payne back in the game after a seven-year feature hiatus he reunited with producer Jim Burke, who goes back with him to Election, and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, who lensed Sideways. Payne and Papamichael use Hawaii’s natural beauty to inform its prevailing island insouciance and to counterpoint its hard realities. Burke is a partner with Payne and his frequent screenwriting collaborator Jim Taylor in Ad Hominem Enterprises, which produced the project. Woodley worked with Payne for the first time on the new film.

Descendants also marks the first time since Election Payne’s worked with two young actors in crucial roles in Woodley and Amara Miller as her younger sister Scottie.

“It’s all about casting,” Payne says of getting kids’ parts right. “Shailene is a total pro. She’s on a TV show (The Secret Life of the American Teenager). She’s going places. She’s excellent. Amara, who turned 10 while we were shooting, had never been in anything. She’s just a complete natural.”

Payne collaborated once again with his longtime casting director, John Jackson (an Omahan).

Kaui Hart Hemmings, a Hawaii native and resident, who authored the novel the film’s based on, closely vetted the script at Payne’s request to ensure authenticity and was on set for the duration. She praises his “attention to the minutiae of Hawaiian life, his humor and restraint, his casting decisions,” adding that the adaptation “brings Hawaii to the big screen — something’s that’s never been done before in an authentic way.”

Whether bucolic wine country gone sodden or stolid Omaha’s underside revealed or paradise undone, Payne indelibly places broken characters in their milieu. Rather than Hawaii Five-O gloss or native exotic allure, here he focuses on the mundanity of familial disputes, personal tragedies and inconvenient truths. In the Paynsian scheme, life happens messily everywhere and comedy springs from desperate people making mistakes.

Burke says Payne’s deft sardonic touch has, if anything, ripened.

“My feeling is Alexander has made his finest film. It’s sort of a maturation of filmmaker that is actually beautiful to see. Tonally, it still has many of the hallmarks of Alexander’s previous work but it is a bit more emotionally penetrating. I think the stakes are sort of serious in this picture.”

The stakes are high for Payne, too, after being away so long and failing to get his Downsizing project made. He needed this.

“Well, I mean from a straight kind of careerist point of view it’s important,” says Burke, “but that’s not really what he is, he’s more of an auteur. He’s going to make movies when he’s ready to do that and when he’s ready to work on something he feels a connection to, and sometimes that takes awhile.”

Woodley experienced the warm, laid-back set Payne’s famous for. “He really gives you the freedom to express in whatever way you want to,” she says, “and you don’t feel weird being vulnerable around him because he creates such an accepting and open environment.” She says Clooney was equally comfortable to work with and she now regards the two men as her industry “mentors.”

Papamichael says Payne betrayed extra “nervousness” at the start but soon fell into a rhythm. Despite having worked only once before they quickly hit their stride.

“It was pretty instant. We were able to dive right into it. On Sideways it took about 10 days for me to figure out the way he sees things and understands coverage. Sometimes the camera is not as intimate as I’d like to place it. He’s very much an observer — he likes to stay a little wider, a little distant, and I pushed it a little bit and we got in tighter.

“We’re still exploring our aesthetic as our collaboration continues. It’s all very subjective, all very personal. Everybody sees things a little differently.”

YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THE STORY IN MY NEW BOOK-

Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film, A Reporter’s Perspective 1998-2012

A compilation of my articles about Payne and his work.  Now available for pre-ordering.

 

Kaui Hart Hemmings

Jim Burke

Shailene Woodley

Phedon Papamichael

George Clooney

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From the Archives: Alexander Payne, an Exclusive Interview Following the Success of ‘Sideways’

October 29, 2011 20 comments

 

 

From the Archives: Alexander Payne, an Exclusive Interview Following the Success of ‘Sideways‘

©by Leo Adam Biga

Origiinally published in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

 

Even before Alexander Payne’s Sideways premiered September 13 to ecstatic reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival, where he soaked up the accolades, it was hailed as a refreshing change from an artist whose previous harsh satires (Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt) made you squirm as much as laugh.

Sideways, whose national release launched on October 27, marks a departure for Payne in two ways. For the first time in his feature career, he left behind Nebraska’s familiar confines to cast his sardonic gaze elsewhere. Using as a starting point Rex Pickett’s unpublished novel of the same name, Payne and writing partner Jim Taylor found the book’s central California wine country the perfect setting and context for a story about love. Yes, love. Love of wine. Love of self. Platonic love. Brotherly love. Romantic love. Ah, love. It’s something in short supply in Payne’s earlier films, where emotions are savaged and relationships discarded.

After Toronto came the New York Film Festival where Sideways was the official closing night selection on October 17. Payne said he was “very happy” with the prestigious NYFF closing night slot. A darling of the NYFF, where About Schmidt was accorded opening night honors in 2001, Payne is being feted like the star he is in the international film community. In a statement announcing the program, festival chairman and Film Society of Lincoln Center program director Richard Pena said: “Even with now just four films to his credit, Alexander Payne has established himself as a major voice in contemporary American cinema. I can’t think of another filmmaker working today who is able to create characters as complex, as contradictory and as richly human.”

The early warm reception for Sideways, a Fox Searchlight release, bodes well for its commercial potential. The Hollywood buzz says Oscar nods are in store for Payne and star Paul Giamatti. Payne thinks audiences and critics are responding to the evolutionary process he takes with his work. Having returned from the highs of Toronto and New York, he is now preparing to write a new project that promises to be “current and political.”

Humanism and Character-Driven 

Leading film industry trade reviewers Todd McCarthy of Variety and Kirk Honeycutt of the Hollywood Reporter see in Sideways something Payne has strived for — a return to the character-driven movies he cut his teeth on. McCarthy wrote, “Moving away from his native Nebraska for the first time onto what proves to be even more fertile soil … Alexander Payne has single-handedly restored humanism as a force in American films.”

According to Honeycutt, Payne captures in his “hysterically funny yet melancholy comedy … subtle undertones of the great character movies of the 1970s and a delicate though strong finish that fills one with hope for its most forlorn characters.”

“If it’s true, that’s a nice thing for someone to say,” said Payne, whose intimate cinema explores the wreckage of ordinary people doing desperate things to reclaim their lost lives. His films are never just funny or dramatic. They are, like life, a mix.

“I aspire to a certain humanism in my films in that they’re films just about people,” he said. “I don’t need to see a gun. I don’t need to have a chase. I don’t need highly contrived situations. I just want to have situations, which will bare open, in a humorous way but also in a dramatic way, what’s going on in the hearts and souls of people. And they’re comedies. This one get huge laughs. I think, too, people like the emotion in it and the hopeful note at the end. Yet, there’s nothing sentimentalized. If feels earned and felt.

“Also what I hear is that the film is intelligent. Like hopefully my other films, too, it doesn’t talk down to the viewer. It respects the viewer. I mean, I always think an audience is smarter than I am, not dumber. So often, at least in recent American filmmaking, there’s a pressure — however spoken or unspoken — to dilute the intelligence or the sophisticated references or the quality of the jokes or something for a more general audience, and I just don’t like to do that.”

Payne’s comedic sensibilities and instincts have never been sharper. Three scenes in particular stand out, and all involve Giamatti as the lovably neurotic wine junkie Miles. In one, some bad news sends Miles careening for the nearest bottle, which he grabs like a suicide weapon and proceeds to drain while stumbling down a hill side. In another, the idiocy of winery etiquette sets him off and he loses it in a fit sure to join Jack Nicholson’s famous diner rant in Five Easy Pieces. Finally, to help his buddy Jack out of a jam, Miles retrieves some valuables left behind in a house, and nearly gets killed for his trouble.

YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THE STORY IN MY NEW BOOK-

Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film, A Reporter’s Perspective 1998-2012

A compilation of my articles about Payne and his work.  Now available for pre-ordering.

 

 

 



 

 

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From the Archives: A Road Trip Sideways – Alexander Payne’s Circuitous Journey to His Wine Country Film Comedy

October 28, 2011 11 comments

 

 

From the Archives: A Road Trip Sideways – Alexander Payne’s Circuitous Journey to His Wine Country Film Comedy

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally published in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

 

Alexander Payne’s new movie, Sideways, took a four-year road trip from high concept to stalled project to hot property. It finally opens October 20 in a limited national release. Charting its circuitous development offers an inside look at how feature film projects come together.

The inspiration for the film came from that most prosaic of sources, a 1998 unpublished novel by Rex Pickett, who drew closely from his own life to tell the sad and comic story of two loser buddies on a wine tour.

Adapted by Payne and writing partner Jim Taylor, the film follows best buds Jack, a libidinous ex-soap star, and Miles, a junior high English teacher and would-be writer, in a classic “men behaving badly” tale. On the journey, their addictions, obsessions and neuroses with wine and women catch up with them, turning an idyll into a comedy of errors. In Jack, the lame-brained serial seducer who never grows up, and in Miles, the anxious intellectual alcoholic who can’t take a stand, the two sides of the modern American male are on display.

With a director in as complete command of his craft as Payne (Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt), producer Michael London (Thirteen, House of Sand and Fog) got a director who left him little to do but sign off on expenditures, smooth ruffled feathers, cast a keen eye on dailies and keep the train that is a film production on track, meaning, on-schedule and on-budget. Payne, who also controlled the film’s “final cut,” found London a good fit.

“In terms of working with me and the actors, and then working in an effective way with the studio, he just speaks everyone’s language,” Payne said of London.

Although Sideways marks the first time the two worked together, Payne was near the top of London’s list to adapt the book to film.

“I was really just a fan of Alexander’s before this. I really didn’t have any particular history or connection with him other than meeting him very briefly at the Sundance Film Festival the year Citizen Ruthplayed there,” London said. “I’d read an early draft of my friend, Rex Pickett’s novel and we started talking about it as a movie.  At one point, Rex was thinking of adapting it himself and at one point we were going to adapt it together…I had really liked the book and had started talking to a couple of filmmakers about it. Alexander recently asked me, ‘Who passed on it for me to get this?’ I don’t think anyone passed. I think it’s a very particular type of material, and I think the instinct he was right for it was probably a good instinct.”

But London knew who and what he wanted.

“It’s not like there’s 50 directors in the world who could have done this story, and I think that’s probably true of most of the things Alexander does. They’re very unique to Alexander,” the producer said. “I was quite obsessed that he would relate to these characters (Jack and Miles) and to the whole idea of this kind of wasted wine trip and of men in mid-life crisis. It just felt like he would do something really special with that. I chased him through his agent and all the ordinary avenues, but without much luck.”

In that variegated, Byzantine way in which Hollywood deals get made, London said during the period he was trying to contact Payne in order to court him, the book somehow got to Payne through another source.

“But it wound up sitting in his hands for about nine months because he was finishing Election, and then he was touring and doing press,” London said.

Payne was in Scotland of all places when he finally called London to put his dibs on the project.

“He wound up going to Scotland for a film festival,” London says, ” and I walked in my door one Friday night and there was a phone message saying, ‘This is Alexander Payne. I just got off a plane in Scotland and I want to do this movie Sideways next.’”

London said Payne felt so strongly about the material that he became boldly proprietary about it, making his directing it a fate accompli.

“From our first conversation he was like, ‘I have to direct this. No one else can direct this.’”

YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THE STORY IN MY NEW BOOK-

Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film, A Reporter’s Perspective 1998-2012

A compilation of my articles about Payne and his work.  Now available for pre-ordering.

 

 

Alexander Payne and Michael London


 

 


 

 

 

Paul Giamatti as Miles, left, and Thomas Haden Church as Jack in "Sideways," a film often cited by critics as the best of 2004.


 

 

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From the Archives: A Hollywood Dispatch from the Set of Alexander Payne’s ‘Sideways’ – A Rare, Intimate, Inside Look at Payne and His Process

October 26, 2011 13 comments

From the Archives:

A Hollywood Dispatch from the Set of Alexander Payne’s ‘Sideways’ – A Rare, Intimate, Inside Look at Payne and His Filmmaking Process

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally published in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

 

I am taking Alexander Payne up on his invitation to view the making of Sideways, his first movie made outside Nebraska. My America West early bird special from Omaha to Phoenix, Ariz. gives me plenty of time to think on this Oct. 27 morning. From Phoenix I am to catch a commuter flight to Santa Barbara, Calif., the nearest city to the Sideways shoot and the start of wine country.

In this $17 million project lensed for Fox Searchlight Pictures that began filming Sept. 29 and wrapped Dec. 6, Payne is once again exploring the animus of dislocated characters running away from their problems and seeking cures for their pain.

Coming off About Schmidt, the 2002 hit that played more sad than funny for many viewers, but that garnered critical plaudits, a juried Cannes screening, a handful of Oscar nods and the biggest box-office take yet for any of his films – an estimated $106 million worldwide – one might expect Payne to lighten up a bit.

After all, his films have thus far fixed a withering satiric-ironic eye on human frailties.

Citizen Ruth, Election and About Schmidt  heralded him as an original auteur, a considered observer and a strong voice in the emerging post-modern cinema.

One only has to recall: paint-sniffing Ruth Stoops, the unlikely poster girl for the embattled-exploitative abortion camps, in Citizen Ruth; student election-rigging teacher Jim McAllister acting out his frustrations against the blind ambition of student Tracy Flick in Election; or the existential crisis of Warren Schmidt, an older man undone and yet strangely liberated by his own feelings of failure inSchmidt, a funny film that still felt more like a requiem than a comedy.

While Sideways will never be confused with a Farrelly brothers film, it’s a departure for Payne in its familiar male-bonding structure, its few but priceless slapstick gags and its romantic, albeit dysfunctional, couplings. Its surface contours are that of a classic buddy movie, combined with the conventions of a road pic, yet Sideways still fits neatly within the Payne oeuvre as another story of misfit searchers.

In Sideways, the search revolves around two longtime California friends, the shallow Jack and the intellectual Miles, who ostensibly set off on a fun, weeklong wine-tasting tour in the verdant rolling coastal hills northwest of Santa Barbara. Their trip soon turns into something else, a walkabout, pilgrimage, forced march and purging all in one, as they confront some ugly truths about themselves en route. The buddy pairing is built on a classic opposites-attract formula.

If, as they say, casting is most of a film’s success, then Payne’s home free. After seriously considering filling the rich parts with mega-stars George Clooney (Jack) and Edward Norton (Miles), he went with “the best actors for the roles” and found perfect fits. Jack, played by Thomas Haden Church (best known for the 90s TV series Wings), is the dashing, skirt-chasing extrovert, a former soaps actor reduced to voice-over work. Now in his 40s, he’s about to be married for the first time, and this inveterate womanizer goes on the wine tour not to enjoy the grape but so he can go on one last fling.

As he tells his well-moneyed bride-to-be, “I need my space.”

Code words for philandering.

Miles, essayed by Paul Giamatti (American Splendor), is the smart, neurotic introvert – a failed writer unhappily stuck as a junior high English teacher and still obsessing over the ex-wife he cheated on. Miles concocts the tasting tour as much to indulge his own seemingly perfect passion for wine, which he still manages to corrupt with his excessive drinking, as to treat Jack to some final bachelor debauchery. When Jack announces his intention to get he and Miles laid, it’s clear that as much as the repressed Miles expresses dismay and outrage at Jack’s libidinous behavior, he lives vicariously through his friend. And as much as Jack is irritated by Miles’ depression, often on the verge of, as Jack says, “going to the dark side,” and by Miles’ warnings that he curb his unbridled sexual appetite, Jack understands his friend’s dilemma and appreciates his concern.

Eventually the two hook up with a pair of eager women whose presence upsets the balance in the buddies’ relationship and redirects the tour. Jack loses his mind over Stephanie, a hottie party girl of a wine pourer played by Sandra Oh, a darling of indie cinema. Longtime companions, Payne and Oh were married in January. Miles tentatively feels things out with Maya, a nurturing waitress and fellow wine buff portrayed by Virginia Madsen, a veteran of features and television.

In classic road picture fashion, the foursome traverse a string of wineries, diners, motels and sundry other stops on the highways and byways in and around Santa Barbara, Los Olivos, Solvang and Buellton. Along the way, relations heat up with the gals before a reckoning – or is it bad karma? – causes things to come crashing down on the guys. Each has his own cathartic rude awakening. A pathetic, repentant Jack goes through with the wedding. A wizened Miles, perhaps finally outgrowing Jack and exorcising his own demons, takes a hopeful detour at the end.

I am about to take my own detour.

During a brief layover in the Phoenix airport, where faux southwestern themes dominate inside and tantalizing glimpses of real-life mesas tease me outside, my fellow travelers and I are reminded of the raging California wildfires when flights to Monterey are postponed due to poor visibility. On the hop from Sun City to Santa Barbara, sheets of smoke roll below us and billowing plumes rise from ridges on the far horizon beyond us.

I’ve arranged for the Super Ride shuttle to take me to Solvang, the historic Danish community I’ll be staying in the next six nights. At the wheel of the Lincoln Town car is James, a former merchant mariner who describes the Marine Layer that drifts in from the Pacific, which along with moderate temps and transverse valleys, makes the area prime ground for its many vineyards.

We cut over onto U.S. 154 and then into Buellton, home of Anderson’s Split Pea Soup, passing an apple orchard and ostrich farm en route to the kitschy, friendly tourist trap of Solvang and its gingerbread architecture. Everything is Danish, except the Latino help. Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch is nor far from here and I’m told the veiled pop star is a familiar sight in town. After settling into a low-rent motel where most of the crew stays, I unwind with a walk through the commercial district, ending on the outskirts of town, where a mini-park overlooks the Alisal River Course below and oak tree-studded hillsides beyond. The brushed, velvety blue-green hills resemble a Bouguereau painting of French wine country. All that’s missing are the peasant grape-pickers. Wildfire smoke filters a screen of sunlight across the hills, obscuring outlying ridge lines in a ragged gray silhouette.

After a Danish repast in the afternoon and a burger-malt combo at night, I make last minute preps in my room for tomorrow, my first day on the set.

YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THE STORY IN MY NEW BOOK-

Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film – A Reporter’s Perspective  1998-2012

A compilation of my articles about Payne and his work.  Now available for pre-ordering.

 

For some scenes, not this one, I stood directly behind or beside Payne as he directed



Producer Michael London


DP Phedon Papamichael




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Categories: Alexander Payne, Books, Film, From the Archives, Hollywood, Nebraskans in Film, Oscar Winners, Sideways, The Descendants, Writing Tags: , , , , , , ,
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