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I Will Be Selling and Signing Copies of My Alexander Payne Book at the Feb 16 Author Fair
If you still haven’t made it to one of my Alexander Payne book signings, then stop by the Author Fair this Saturday. Feb. 16 at the downtown W. Dale Clark Library.
It’s like a speed-dating event for writers and litniks.
Dozens of writers, including me, will be plying our wares on the 4th floor from 1 to 4 pm.
Stop by our booths and take a chance on falling in love with a new book to curl up with at night. My book is “Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film – A Reporter’s Perspective 1998-2012.”
Can’t promise curling up with an author. As for me, I’m spoken for (just in case if you were wondering). LOL.
Related articles
- Alexander Payne Book News: Catch me on TV and Come to Signings (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
- 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 (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
Alexander Payne Book News: Catch me on TV and Come to Signings
On select dates this week and next you can catch an encore presentation of the “Consider This” program that features me talking about Alexander Payne and my new book about him. Producer and host Cathy Wyatt does a great job with the interview and with clips from Payne’s films. The half-hour fairly flys by. The encore Nebraska Educational Television telecasts are:
NET 1
Thur. Feb. 7 at 11 pm
Sun., Feb. 10 at 11:30 am
NET 2
Fri., Feb. 8 at 12:30 pm
Tue., Feb. 12 at 12:30 pm
In other news, I am signing the Payne book at the PS Collective in Benson on Thur. Feb. 7 after my 6 to 6:30 pm talk about freelance writing. I will also be signing copies at the Omaha Public Library Author Fair from 1 to 4 pm on Sat. Feb. 16 at the downtown W. Dale Clark Library.
My book, “Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film – A Reporter’s Perspective 1998-2012″ is available wherever books are sold, (Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com). It’s available for Kindle, et cetera. You can find it at The Bookworm store in Countryside Village in Omaha.
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An Anti-Drug War Manifesto Documentary Frames Discussion: Cost of Criminalizing Nonviolent Drug Offenders Comes Home
Until the documentary The House I Live In the best film I’d seen about drugs was the Steven Soderbergh drama, Traffic. The director of the doc, Eugene Jarecki, does something very much akin to what Soderbergh did by taking a multi-perspective look at the insidious grip the illegal drug culture and the so-called War on Durgs exerts upon every one caught up in this human chain of destruction. My story below for The Reader is based on a recent screening and panel discussion of the film in Omaha.
An Anti-Drug War Manifesto Documentary Frames Discussion: Cost of Criminalizing Nonviolent Drug Offenders Comes Home
©by Leo Adam Biga
Now appearing in The Reader (www.thereader.com)
The much-feted 2012 documentary The House I Live In provokes dialogue wherever it plays for its critique of America‘s domestic War on Drugs. Following a January 22 Film Streams screening before a full house a local panel discussed the film’s potent themes.
Director Eugene Jarecki’s (Why We Fight?) film indicts the war as failed public policy that’s wasteful, unjust and morally bankrupt for targeting nonviolent minority offenders. He suggests its true cost lies not only in the vast expenditures for arrest, prosecution and incarceration but in the disruption caused to families and communities. Every drug case has a spiral of consequences that can span generations.
The consensus of the experts and persons directly engaged in the war whom Jarecki enlists to comment on camera is that blacks are disproportionally targeted and punished. He explains he came to tackle the issue upon inquiring why a black family he knew from childhood struggled with poverty and crime. Its matriarch, Nannie Jeter, blames drugs for taking her late son James and leading other members down destructive paths.The film tells story after story of families impacted by addiction and imprisonment.
Eugene Jarecki
One observer notes, “We are engaged in a great experiment. What happens when you take large numbers of people, remove them from their neighborhoods, their families. What does this do to the broader community?”
Everyone from author Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow) to a prison chief of security agree the prison industrial complex has superseded prevention-intervention by incentivizing arrest, conviction and confinement and thus making it a big business prone to corruption that puts profit before humanity.
David Simon, creator of The Wire and a former journalist who covered the drug war, says, “Think about all the money spent on drug enforcement, on prisons and probation officers, on judges, on narcotics agents, on interdiction and everything else. But to what end? We’re the jailingest nation on Earth, yet drugs are purer than ever before, they’re more available.”
America’s draconian approach, he said. doesn’t work.
During the panel Impact One Community Connection founder Jannette Taylor reiterated a theme in the film that the war is actually a campaign to “marginalize people” that leaves havoc in its wake. “We need to look at the broader picture of the collateral damage from this fake war on drugs,” she said. “We need to be more realistic about what this fake war on drugs really is and how it affects poor communities and the people in it.”
She knows first-hand the personal fallout. The father of her daughter has served 17 1/2 years on drug charges. “My daughter has never had her father in her life. He was out only a short period of time before he resorted back to selling drugs and got caught up again and it’s basically because you become so marginalized. You can’t get a job, you can’t find a place to live, so you resort back to what you know – you resort to the economy that pays you.”
Jannette Taylor, ©Omaha World-Herald
Jarecki introduces us to individuals for whom using and dealing were all they saw growing up. Naturally, they followed suit. Picking up a point Simon makes in the film, Taylor said the drug trade may be “the only flourishing economy” in some inner city neighborhoods and “given the limited opportunities poor inner city residents have it’s a rational decision to deal drugs.” Similarly, she said drugs become a way to medicate “if you’re living in a constant state of poverty, in depressed living conditions.”
Taylor said despite never using, dealing or serving time “I’m dealing with the same things, just from a different perspective. My daughter is caught up in this drug war because she doesn’t have a dad, so she’s being raised by a single mom. It was very hard. Once somebody gets sentenced into the system because of drugs their family’s affected. It’s like a crazy avalanche. The kids no longer have both parents, the other parent is pressured into making more money and that takes them away…It’s a domino effect. It’s a cycle and it never ends.”
Scholar Richard Lawrence Miller draws comparisons in the film between the war and “the chain of destruction” he says the ruling class historically applies to minorities in order to target, control, demonize and isolate them. He and others point to profiling, mass incarceration and mandatory minimum sentences as its manifestations.
Simon terms the drug war “a Holocaust in slow motion.”
“This is basically slavery in a new form,” said Taylor, who with others cautions, “If someone else’s rights can be compromised and violated then yours can too.”
Panelist Rodney Prince, who served a federal drug sentence, said, “I believe this war on drugs is a means, a guise to deal with a segment of the population no longer needed in this transforming economy. The intention for me doesn’t really matter, this thing is happening to people.”
Taylor and others advocate America recast the war as a public health issue that gives nonviolent addict offenders treatment rather than jail time.
Prince said, “This is an economic issue. If we know our economy can’t absorb everyone now then we have to push our elected officials and business leaders to act responsibly and to make more room for people in the economy.”
Douglas County District Court Judge Marlon Polk said education is the best deterrent to being caught up in the drug culture. Nebraska Corrections Youth Facility director Marilyn Asher and other panelists suggest we all have a stake in giving people the support and skills they need to prosper.
Upcoming Alexander Payne Book Events
A COFFEEHOUSE ALEXANDER PAYNE BOOK EVENT
The Alexander Payne book event tour continues…
Friday, Jan. 11
7-9 pm
…with a laidback gig at 13th Street Coffee & Tea in the Old Market, 519 South 13th St.
It’s the perfect venue for all you Beats and Hipsters. Have a cup of java as I talk about how I came to write about the filmmaker and why attention needs to be paid to him and his work. I’ll take questions and of course I’ll sign copies of “Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film.” The book makes a great gift and should be part of any film lover’s library. The event starts at 7 pm. I’ll do my last signings at 9 pm. Join me for a night of coffee and cinema in the Old Market.
Be there or be square.
AN OMAHA PRESS CLUB ALEXANDER PAYNE BOOK EVENT
Your friendly neighborhood author-journalist-blogger discusses reporting and writing about Alexander Payne…
Thurs., Jan 17
5:30-7 pm
…at the next Omaha Press Club Professional Development Series. The Press Club is at 1620 Dodge St., 22nd flr of the old First National Bank.
I’ve covered Payne from the start of the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s career. My unprecedented access to Payne and his collaborators has resulted in a body of work available online. I’ve compiled the collection into a new book, “Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film – A Reporter’s Perspective 1998-2012.”
The book is generating serious buzz, including an Indiewire exclusive in November. National film critic Leonard Maltin offers this: “Alexander Payne is one of American cinema’s leading lights. How fortunate we are that Leo Biga has chronicled his rise to success so thoroughly.”
Novelist and “Studio 360″ host Kurt Andersen writes: “I’d be an Alexander Payne fan even if we didn’t share a Nebraska upbringing: he is a masterly, menschy, singular storyteller whose movies are both serious and unpretentious, delightfully funny and deeply moving. And he’s fortunate indeed to have such a thoughtful and insightful chronicler as Leo Biga.”
Acclaimed actress Laura Dern, the star of Payne’s first feature, “Citizen Ruth,” offered: “Leo Biga has beautifully captured Alexander’s incredible journey in film for us all to savor.”
Hear more from me on Jan. 17. A no-host bar with hors d’oeuvres will open at 5:30 p.m. My presentation begins at 6 p.m., followed by open discussion and book signing at 6:30. The cost is $10 for members and their guests, $15 for nonmembers and $5 for students. RSVP to 402-345-8008. Hope to see you there.
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New Alexander Payne book events for December and January
New Alexander Payne book events for December and January
My book “Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film” is getting crazy good endorsements (see below).
Come out and support the project at any of the new talks and signings I am doing in December and January. It would mean a lot to me to have you stop by. And for all of you Facebook friends I haven’t met in person, consider this a special invitation to make that happen. I look forward to signing copies of the book for each and every one of you.
The book makes a great gift for the film lover in your life.
UNO Criss Library
60th and Dodge campus
Thur. Dec. 13
6:30-8:30 pm
Greek Islands
3821 Center St.
Thur., Dec. 20
7-9 pm
Rose Blumkin Home
323 So. 132nd St.
Wed., Dec. 26
Noon- 1 pm
13th Street Coffee & Tea
519 So. 13th St.
Fri., Jan. 11
7-9 pm
Omaha Press Club
First National Bank Bldg., 1620 Dodge St., 22nd Flr
Thur., Jan. 17
5:30-7 pm
Here’s what others are saying:
“Alexander Payne richly deserves this astute book about his work by Leo Biga. I say this as a fan of both of theirs; and would be one even if I weren’t from Nebraska.” – Dick Cavett, TV legend
“Alexander is a master. Many say the art of filmmaking comes from experience and grows with age and wisdom but, in truth, he was a master on day one of his first feature. Leo Biga has beautifully captured Alexander’s incredible journey in film for us all to savor.” – Laura Dern, actress, star of “Citizen Ruth”
“Alexander Payne is one of American cinema’s leading lights. How fortunate we are that Leo Biga has chronicled his rise to success so thoroughly.” – Leonard Maltin, film critic and best selling author
“I’d be an Alexander Payne fan even if we didn’t share a Nebraska upbringing: he is a masterly, menschy, singular storyteller whose movies are both serious and unpretentious, delightfully funny and deeply moving. And he’s fortunate indeed to have such a thoughtful and insightful chronicler as Leo Biga.” – Kurt Andersen, novelist (“True Believers”) and “Studio 360″ host
“Leo Biga brings us a fascinating, comprehensive, insightful portrait of the work and artistry of Alexander Payne. Mr. Biga’s collection of essays document the evolution and growth of this significant American filmmaker and he includes relevant historical context of the old Hollywood and the new. His keen reporter’s eye gives the reader an exciting journey into the art of telling stories on film.” – Ron Hull, Nebraska Educational Television legend, University of Nebraska emeritus professor of broadcasting, author of “Backstage”
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Dick Cavett is the latest luminary to endorse my Alexander Payne book
“Alexander Payne richly deserves this astute book about his work by Leo Biga. I say this as a fan of both of theirs; and would be one even if I weren’t from Nebraska.” - Dick Cavett
Dick Cavett is the latest luminary to endorse my new book, Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film – A Reporter’s Perspective 1998-2012.”.
“Alexander Payne richly deserves this astute book about his work by Leo Biga. I say this as a fan of both of theirs; and would be one even if I weren’t from Nebraska.”
Thanks, Dick. Some background: I’ve written extensively about Cavett over the years and those stories can be found on this blog.
His kind words join those of fellow world-class creatives:
“Alexander is a master. Many say the art of filmmaking comes from experience and grows with age and wisdom but, in truth, he was a master on day one of his first feature. Leo Biga has beautifully captured Alexander’s incredible journey in film for us all to savor.” – Laura Dern, actress, star of “Citizen Ruth”
“Alexander Payne is one of American cinema’s leading lights. How fortunate we are that Leo Biga has chronicled his rise to success so thoroughly.” – Leonard Maltin, film critic and best selling author
“I’d be an Alexander Payne fan even if we didn’t share a Nebraska upbringing: he is a masterly, menschy, singular storyteller whose movies are both serious and unpretentious, delightfully funny and deeply moving. And he’s fortunate indeed to have such a thoughtful and insightful chronicler as Leo Biga.” – Kurt Andersen, novelist (“True Believers”) and “Studio 360 host
“Leo Biga brings us a fascinating, comprehensive, insightful portrait of the work and artistry of Alexander Payne. Mr. Biga’s collection of essays document the evolution and growth of this significant American filmmaker and he includes relevant historical context of the old Hollywood and the new. His keen reporter’s eye gives the reader an exciting journey into the art of telling stories on film.” – Ron Hull, Nebraska Educational Television legend, University of Nebraska emeritus professor of broadcasting, author of “Backstage”
The book, released through Concierge Marketing Publishing Services and my own Inside Stories, may be previewed at www.facebook.com/LeoAdamBiga.
Available via Amazon, Barnes and Noble and for Kindle and other e-Readers.
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Another sweet endorsement for my Alexander Payne book…
And the hits just keep on coming where my Alexander Payne book is concerned.
On top of Leonard Maltin’s recent thumbs up, we just received another sweet endorsement, this one from novelist (“True Believers”) and “Studio 360″ host Kurt Andersen, who has bestowed on us a beautifuly worded and generous statement of support:
“I’d be an Alexander Payne fan even if we didn’t share a Nebraska upbringing: he is a masterly, menschy, singular storyteller whose movies are both serious and unpretentious, delightfully funny and deeply moving. And he’s fortunate indeed to have such a thoughtful and insightful chronicler as Leo Biga.” Kurt Andersen
Thank you, Kurt.
More big news about the book is just around the corner.
The book, “Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film – A Reporter’s Perspective 1998-2012,” can be pre-ordered at AlexanderPayneTheBook.com.
Available November 13 from Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com as well as for Kindle and other e-reader devices.
Preview the book at www.facebook.com/LeoAdamBiga.
Media Notes:
Watch me talk about the book, Payne, and his new film on “Heartland Focus” this Saturday, Nov. 3 at 6:30 pm on WOWT.
Listen to me do the same on the current “Worlds of Wayne” podcast at http://worldsofwayne.libsyn.com/
Book Events:
And I hope to see you at my next book event, Saturday, Nov. 10, The Bookworm, 1 p.m.
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Alexander Payne’s ‘Nebraska’ Comes Home to Roost: The State’s Cinema Prodigal Son is Back Filming Again in his Home State after Long Absence
I call Alexander Payne Neb.’s cinema prodigal son because he left here to find himself as a filmmaker, then he came back to make his first three features in his home state, only to leave again to make Sideways and The Descendants in faraway Calif. and Hawaii, respectively. And now, after a 11-year absence filming here he’s back shooting his new pic, Nebraska. In truth, he was never really gone-gone. He’s maintained a residence in Omaha all along and has returned innumerable times for all sorts of things. That he’s returned to make a feature with the name of his native state in the title and is doing so after the immense success of The Descendants only makes Payne, who’s already the most compelling living Nebraskan outside perhaps Warren Buffett, only more a figure of intense interest. The following cover story for The Reader (www.thereader.com) is the first of what I anticipate will be a whole string of pieces I do related to this film. My reporting on the project converges with my new book out on the filmmaker, Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film – A Reporter’s Perspective 1998-2012, which you’ll find plenty of posts about on this blog. My coverage of Nebraska will undoubtedly end up in future editions of the book.
Alexander Payne’s ‘Nebraska’ Comes Home to Roost: The State’s Cinema Prodigal Son is Back Filming Again in His Home State after Long Absence
©by Leo Adam Biga
Now appearing in The Reader (www.thereader.com)
In 1968 Francis Ford Coppola led a small cinema caravan to Ogallala, Neb. for the final weeks shooting on his independent road picture 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 Neb. 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 35 days of principal photography by the end of November. A week of second unit work will run into early December.
The project is set up between Payne, Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa’s Bona Fide Productions and Paramount Pictures.
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 says, “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,” says 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 Calif. 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 northern 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. Mont. to the prize company’s home office in Lincoln, Neb. by way of several 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 car finds them passing through Woody’s old haunts, including his hometown, the fictional Hawthorne, Neb., 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 turns requiem. To salve his father’s broken spirit David performs a simple act of grace that gives Woody a valedictory last laugh.
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 says, “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 Neb. 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 as yet unrealized 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 Neb. 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.”
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 says 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” says 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,” says 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 says, “we’ve looked at a number of black and white films and photographs 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 instinct in how this one should look like.”
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,” says 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 northeast 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,” says 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.”
“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.,” Payne says of Dern and Forte.
The irascible yet playful 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 says.
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 and visit locations 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 10 days or two weeks before we started shooting. Or George Clooney and Shailene Woodley (in The Descendants), 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 Squib (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.”
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 move 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, Neb. and I think Wausa (Neb.) but he grew up in Snohomish Wash. 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 Wash., 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 says, “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 says. “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.”
Payne rooted the production in Norfolk after a long search.
“I spent a year driving around Neb. 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 1,500 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,” says 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, says the film’s locations are spot-on.
Finalizing locations and cast members led Payne to make certain tweaks. “Yeah, as it always does,” he says. “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 improve 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 in San Francisco next fall.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Biga is the author of a new book about Payne. Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film – A Reporter’s Perspective 1998-2012 is a compilation of the reporter’s journalism about the filmmaker. Preview it at http://www.facebook.com/LeoAdamBiga. Pre-orders are being taken at AlexanderPayneTheBook.com. Biga’s appearing at several venues through the fall to discuss the book and his many years covering Payne. At each venue he will personally sign copies. The book retails for $19.95.
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Author Leo Adam Biga to Sign His Alexander Payne Book at Various Events as Shooting Continues on the Filmmaker’s New Picture, ‘Nebraska’
The Film Dude, Nik Fackler, Goes His Own Way Again, this Time to Nepal and Gabon
Bwiti ceremony using iboga
The Film Dude, Nik Fackler, Goes His Own Way Again, this Time to Nepal and Gabon To Shoot Psychotropic Documentaries About a Young Buddha and the Bwiti Culture’s Iboga Initiation
©by Leo Adam Biga
As published in The Reader (www.thereader.com)
Fresh off the warm reception to his debut feature, Lovely, Still, Omaha‘s Film Dude, Nik Fackler, is unexpectedly making his next two film projects documentaries.
Following the path of cinema adventurer Werner Herzog, Fackler’s tramping off to shoot one film in Nepal and the other in Gabon, Africa, drawn to each exotic locale by his magnificent obsession with indigenous cultures and ways.
Fackler, Lovely producer Dana Altman and two other crew left August 11 for Gabon in west central Africa. They plan living weeks with the shamanistic Mitsogo, whose practice of Bwiti involves ingesting the hallucinogenic iboga root. The mind-altering initiation ritual is about healing.
“Part of it is you’ve got to prove yourself to the tribe,” says Fackler. “They don’t just give it to anybody, especially Westerners.”
The extreme project is based in a fascination with and use of ancient, underground medicines and practices.
“I have a great interest in dreams and a great interest in psychedelic experience. I’ve had a lot of healing I’ve gone through using silicide mushrooms,” says Fackler.
A heroin addict friend is along for this exploration.
Bwiti initiation ceremony with iboga
A quest for spiritual enlightenment brought Fackler and Lovely DP Sean Kirby to Nepal in May to film the end of a six-year fasting and meditative regimen by Dharma Sangha. The filmmakers followed Boy Buddha’s exodus, with tens of thousands of followers gathered, and plan returning in the fall.
Fackler is tackling the unlikely projects while awaiting financing for his next two narrative features: an untitled puppet film with illustrator Tony Millionaire; and a phantasmagorical mythology pic called We the Living.
The docs square nicely with Fackler’s eclectic interests in alternative therapies and philosophies.
Dharma Sangha
“I’m always searching. There’s so many beautiful cultures out there. I have to explore and learn as much as I possibly can. I have to go out there to discover them, document them, before they disappear into the weird one-world culture we’re heading towards.”
Mere days before leaving for Africa he still wasn’t sure the Bwiti cultists were on board, but put his faith in miracles.
“I suppose I’m in the mindset of looking at everything in a magical way rather than an intellectual way. That’s sort of where I need to be to make a film like this.”
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Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film
