Audio Interview: Alexander Payne

Scott Feinberg [THR] with an audio interview of writer-director Alexander Payne. Some highlights per Feinberg:

During our time together, I was particularly struck by the fact that Payne, despite having co-written several of the most celebrated scripts of all-time, doesn’t seem to think very much of himself as a writer. “I don’t know how talented I would say I am,” he told me at one point. Asked to name his greatest strength as a writer, he said with a straight face, “I have very good spelling, and my grammar’s quite good.” As for his greatest critical and commercial success, he volunteered, “I genuinely did not expect that success of Sideways. I thought it was kind of a slight film.” And he later confessed, “It’s [only] out of desperation that I write.”

All of this helps to explain why the next two films that Payne is set to direct will be his first two from scripts that he himself was not involved in writing — and why, for so many years, he and Taylor wrote together. (They collaborated on every Payne-directed project until The Descendants, for which Nat Faxon and Jim Rash are credited as his co-writers.) “Writing can be so painful that it’s good to have a compatriot,” he tells me. “We [Jim and I] have a great friendship, and that friendship translated very readily into a good creative collaboration.” Logistically, he explains, they always worked in the same room — “Dick van Dyke style” — usually with one monitor and two keyboards, but sometimes with two monitors and two keyboards that are connected and make it look “like we’re playing Battleship.”

To hear the interview, go here.