Director Alexander Payne Slams Modern Movies and Believe Old Movies Are So Much Better
Alexander Payne, the director behind The Holdovers, Election, and Oscar-winning films The Descendants and Sideways, was recently honored at the Locarno Film Festival with the prestigious Pardo d’Onore. But what’s he most excited about? It’s not the award. It’s watching old movies.
“This university course on post-war British cinema is unbelievable,” he said while attending the festival’s retrospective Great Expectations. “I couldn’t be less interested in the new films. I’m only interested in the old ones. The star so far is Hell Is a City from 1960. That’s an awesome film!”
At 64, Payne still has a rebellious filmmaker spirit, looking back fondly at cinema’s golden eras and less-than-impressed by the current landscape of modern filmmaking.
Reflecting on his award, he noted, “You’re supposed to say: ‘It’s a huge honor. Thank you so much.’ Although I feel too young for a lifetime achievement, I’ll take this as an encouragement for the rest of my career.”
In conversation with Variety, Payne opened up about his frustrations with how bloated and drawn-out movies have become.
“I see so many films which are three or four hours long, and without very good reason. And I sit in a lot of modern films and I say, ‘Cut, cut. I get it. Cut.’”
He blames much of this on the formulaic industry of screenwriting guides and rigid storytelling structures that emerged in the ‘80s, following the creatively rich wave of the ‘70s.
“I’ve evolved in my thinking about that kind of stuff. When I got out of film school in the 1990s, I left film school. I was against Syd Field and Robert McKee. I defecate on those tenets of screenwriting. Who’s to say act one stops at page 30?
“We were coming out of the 70s, which had beautiful exploration and artistic films. I graduated from high school in 1979 so those are the films that taught me what an American commercial movie is. And then you got into the 80s, and things started to go really downhill, certainly in American cinema. And my snobby film school friends and I would accuse those books of turning everything into a formula.”
So what does Payne value in filmmaking? Simply put, story over spectacle. “They’re much better made, more literate, more economical, more efficient, more interested in just telling a story and not being pretentious. I really appreciate narrative economy.”
As for what’s next, Payne has his eyes on several new projects. He’s moving to Denmark this fall to direct a European art film titled Somewhere Out There, starring Renate Reinsve.
He got his Greek citizenship to qualify for European state funding, joking, “I don’t care that much about Greek citizenship, per se, but I got it with a very practical goal in mind, which was to make films in Europe and qualify for state funding, and the Film Gods brought me this project in Danish.”
Once that wraps, he’ll return to familiar territory with a sequel to Election, a film he made 25 years ago, before diving into a project he’s especially hyped about: a Western.
“I’m about 30 or 40 bad pages into it,” Payne said with a grin. And yes, it’s an original story.
Payne’s thoughts are a passionate call-back to the craft of filmmaking that once prioritized storytelling over structure and heart over high-concept formulas. Whether or not he’s interested in today’s new releases, he’s not done contributing his voice to the evolution of cinema. He’s just cutting through the noise.