Alexander Payne: An Eye for American Idiosyncrasy

He’s only ordering a salad, pasta and a glass of wine at a pleasant beach restaurant, but Alexander Payne does it with the, well, panache of a native. “I don’t speak French very well,” he protests, deflecting the compliment. “I have a good ear for languages.”

English most of all.

One of the many joys of the remarkable “About Schmidt,” which Payne directed and co-wrote with Jim Taylor and which debuts in competition at the Festival de Cannes today, is its exceptional use of that language. Delicate and sly, able to mix humor and poignancy with easy skill, “About Schmidt” has an exact ear--and eye--for classically American idiosyncrasies, for the way the odd and the normal turn out to live next door.

Set, like “Election” and “Citizen Ruth” before it, in the director’s hometown of Omaha, Neb., “Schmidt” stars a splendid Jack Nicholson as Warren Schmidt, a 66-year-old non-charismatic husband and father, just retiring after 32 years as an insurance company actuary, who, against his intentions and even his will, finds himself on a quest aboard a 35-foot Winnebago Adventurer to make sense of his life. It was a different kind of a role for Nicholson.

“The main thing I had asked Jack is, ‘I need you to play a small man,’” the director says.

If this kind of filmmaking sounds like the opposite of the MTV-derived, excess-is-us contemporary cinematic style, that, like everything else about Payne, is not an accident. “What I’m trying is not to be cutting-edge, but to make films like they used to make them, about Americans and human beings,” the director explains. “I’m trying to be a throwback while still believing what Rene Clair said: ‘Cinema is today seen with the eyes of today.’”

A youthful-looking 41, Payne has a reassuring air of intelligent caring and precision about him. He knows how he likes his French fries cooked, and he cares enough about “Schmidt’s” language that “the week before last I spent 10 hours with a native French speaker going over the subtitles, and, because I know the language, I have it in my contract that I have to be consulted on the Spanish ones. We spend so much time sculpting our dialogue, it’s extremely important.”

Though he says “the only reason I write is to have something to direct” and though he notes that “my favorite part of the process is editing, where you make the film,” it’s the care Payne and Taylor take with their scripts that is the core of their success.

“We just enjoy dialogue,” he says. “I can imagine the Coen brothers working in the same way, taking the light in dialogue, in mining the American vernacular.”

Payne adds a cautionary “you’re asking me to describe a very intuitive process” before talking about why the words matter so much.

“We’re trying to show Americans. So much of who people are and what they’re doing is reflected in what they say,” Payne says. “When Jim and I start to write characters, they’re defined by how the words come out, it’s how we get to know them. When film students ask for advice, I tell them to make sure all their characters speak like those characters would speak, not like they speak.”

‘Things Are Often Better Subtler,’ He Says

One of the most satisfying aspects of “About Schmidt” is how subtle the script’s effects are, its understanding that pushing just a fraction too hard would be disastrous. “I’m afraid of ever overdoing it; things are often better subtler,” Payne says. He considers the typical studio underestimation of moviegoers (“I get it, you get it, but is the audience going to get it?”) to be “so insulting, so insidious” and strongly feels there’s a place even for things that in fact not everyone is going to understand.

“It’s so important to have jokes only 5% of the audience gets, only the film geek in the corner laughs at,” he says. “It’s better to have 80% of people miss it than have everyone get it if that violates the integrity of that gag.”

Payne and Taylor, who’ve collaborated on all three of the director’s features, were casual acquaintances who first thought of working together after Payne’s then-girlfriend moved out of his Silver Lake apartment and Taylor showed up as a potential roommate. “Just being able to facilitate each other’s good ideas, knowing immediately whether an idea [works] or not,” is how Payne describes the collaboration’s virtues. “We can say the stupidest things to each other--it’s an ego-less constant bouncing of ideas.”

When Payne and Taylor began adapting the Louis Begley novel that “About Schmidt” is very nominally based on, “the more adapting we did, the more I found myself borrowing from a script I wrote when I first got out of film school 10 or 11 years ago. The idea that got under my skin then was if you catch someone at a certain crossroads in life, comedy can be derived from their feeling of alienation. Finally, all the book ended up providing was the character’s last name and the idea that he has an only daughter who’s about to marry a boob, a guy who has something of an overbearing mother. But I’m grateful to the book for reigniting my interest in this theme.”

Payne says he does write scripts with actors in mind, but not necessarily living ones. When he wrote “Citizen Ruth,” he says, he was thinking of Giulietta Masina, Federico Fellini’s celebrated collaborator, and with “Schmidt” he had William Holden and John Randolph (“Seconds,” “Prizzi’s Honor”) in mind.

But he knew Nicholson would see it first because the book had been purchased by producers Harry Gittes and Michael Besman as a possible vehicle for the actor. And dealing with Nicholson, it turned out, couldn’t have been simpler.

“He read it on a Monday and I was at his house on Wednesday,” Payne says. “I have such immense respect for his work; he has a strong authorial voice rare in an actor. And I do like the idea of using an actor who’s been very much the voice of alienation in this particular film. It’s a nice thing to have.”

Yet even with Nicholson firmly attached, Sony, the studio that had a first look at the project, passed on it. Surprisingly, Payne has nothing bad to say about the experience.

“They didn’t want to make it, it was risky, and I understand that,” he says. “The nice thing about Sony is that they immediately said, ‘Go and take it, make it somewhere else,’ and I have nothing but good feelings about that.” The more common studio practice of refusing to put a project into turnaround because of fears of looking bad in the future infuriates Payne:

“That’s very anti-cinema, the worst crime. How can you possibly do that? It’s a mischievous act in the eyes of the film gods.”

“About Schmidt” was soon set up at New Line (it’s scheduled for a fall release), but even with the success his projects have had, Payne says making his kinds of films has not been made easier but only “less hard.”

“American movies are now completely controlled by the presence of marketable elements. For someone like me who’s inspired to make movies that’ve never been seen before, that makes it very hard.”