Alexan­der Payne: ​‘It’s a big idea you could take in myr­i­ad directions’

Alexan­der Payne’s suc­ces­sion of sly, insight­ful, mod­est­ly-scaled ​‘peo­ple’ movies, have made him a crit­ics’ dar­ling, essen­tial­ly the go-to observ­er of con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can mores. The likes of Elec­tion, Side­ways, and The Descen­dants have deserved all the plau­dits heaped upon them yet, through no fault of his own, also per­haps left Payne some­what enclosed.

Unde­ni­ably fine on its own terms, 2013’s gristly black-and-white char­ac­ter study, Nebras­ka, looked about as arti­sanal a prod­uct as you could still hope to get financed by a major stu­dio. So its not hard to read his lat­est offer­ing Down­siz­ing – an effects-dri­ven, high-con­cept fan­ta­sy, no less – as a way of break­ing the mould of indus­try and audi­ence expectations.

LWLies: It’s on record that you start­ed writ­ing this after Side­ways in 2004, so why did it take so long to come to fruition?

Payne: It was dif­fi­cult to finance. Stu­dio heads kept telling us – and this is not my word, but theirs – it was too quote-unquote intel­li­gent for its bud­get. And it also took us a while to cor­ral the premise into a sto­ry. It’s a big idea you could take in myr­i­ad dif­fer­ent direc­tions, and we did. It might actu­al­ly be more suit­ed to eight hours of TV, but where we’ve end­ed up is with one every­man indi­vid­ual tak­ing us on a – and I hate the J‑word – ​‘jour­ney’ of his own, and thence touch­ing on all the polit­i­cal ideas that the theme allows us to touch on.

Struc­tural­ly then, not so dis­sim­i­lar to the road trips tak­en in About Schmidt, Side­ways and Nebraska?

Yep. It’s anoth­er god­damn road movie. I don’t know why so many peo­ple tell me it’s a depar­ture, and I thank you for not being one of them. Not only is it not a depar­ture, it’s dis­ap­point­ing­ly like my oth­er pic­tures, with some schnook from Oma­ha going on a series of adven­tures and com­ing out the oth­er side. Actu­al­ly, I’d like it if Down­siz­ing were actu­al­ly a sum­ma­tion of a cer­tain phase of my film­mak­ing career. I’m start­ing to feel I want to do some­thing gen­uine­ly dif­fer­ent. Get away from the heavy machin­ery, leap a bit higher.

Still, Down­siz­ing is unusu­al, in that the world it cre­ates seem­ing­ly denies Matt Damon’s pro­tag­o­nist the real­i­sa­tion of his dreams, instead point­ing up the prob­lems of our own cur­rent sociopo­lit­i­cal malaise.

That’s the sit­u­a­tion we’re in now, where the indus­try and pub­lic have been trained to see adult, human, ​‘peo­ple’ movies as com­bat­ants gird­ing their loins to con­test against one anoth­er for awards sea­son spoils, as opposed to just being seen as movies. I talk about this stuff a lot with my direc­tor bud­dies, and it’s like the Roger Cor­man B‑movies of yore are now the big-bud­get stu­dio tent­poles, and what used to be the pres­tige projects are now these pre­cious items with shrink-wrapped bud­gets. Thank­ful­ly we still get to make a dozen of them a year, but I’m well aware I’m a rare bird in that.

What does it say about human­i­ty if the shrink­ing process designed to save the plan­et ends up demon­strat­ing some unpalat­able truths about human nature?

Hmm. If human nature is immutable regard­less of cir­cum­stances, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I guess the cyn­i­cism of the film would sug­gest it’s a bad thing. Because no mat­ter what we do, we’re fucked.

You also have Christoph Waltz’s Euro­trash wheel­er deal­er try­ing to make a buck out of our impend­ing doom.

I sup­pose the movie has a lot of imagery sketch­ing out the prison of mate­ri­al­ism, and all that crap. But I guess peo­ple from the Mid­west aren’t huge­ly impressed by ‑isms of any kind. We just sor­ta stand back and look at every­thing. We hate every­body, essen­tial­ly. But hope­ful­ly in a nice way.

Is that why the film nev­er seems to take the prospect of envi­ron­men­tal calami­ty alto­geth­er seriously?

That’s not true. We do have a Nor­we­gian sci­en­tist in there, read­ing us the riot act and telling us we’re done for. But I guess the whole envi­ron­men­tal aspect would have seemed a bit more real had we fol­lowed through on the nar­ra­tive fram­ing device we ini­tial­ly had in mind. We end­ed up cut­ting it dur­ing the edit, but the idea was that the entire sto­ry is being told as a sort of fable by tiny peo­ple in a cave some thou­sands of years into the future – in a lan­guage which is a blend of Nor­we­gian and Eng­lish. So there’d be sto­ry­teller with a long beard and gnarled staff regal­ing every­one with tales of the giants who once walked the earth but poi­soned the seas, etc. It would have been a voiceover film, which assured us that the world did indeed go bel­ly up and these 300 souls were the only survivors.

Did you actu­al­ly shoot all that?

Well, we edit­ed with it in mind, but as the process wore on and the movie was already long enough, we nev­er quite got to it. We felt the point sor­ta came across any­way. But when we pub­lish the script it will def­i­nite­ly have that ele­ment in it. And if we ever get the chance to turn the idea into a TV series, say, then it might be some­thing we’d come back to.

You’ve already had a lit­tle barbed crit­i­cal com­ment about the por­tray­al and the bro­ken Eng­lish spo­ken by the Hong Chau char­ac­ter, Matt Damon’s Viet­namese love inter­est – is this real­ly a ​‘white sav­iour’ film, as the detrac­tors are try­ing to paint it?

It’s a yel­low sav­iour movie. The white guy just tags along. I’ve read those com­ments too and I’m a lit­tle puz­zled. I mean, how else are we meant to write dia­logue for a woman who’s nev­er learned Eng­lish for­mal­ly and just picked it up on the street. The actress her­self said this is exact­ly how her par­ents speak. Go figure.

The film’s por­tray­al of the His­pan­ic under­class who live in squalor just the oth­er side of a big wall, does how­ev­er seem to speak about Don­ald Trump’s America…

That’s because Jim Tay­lor, my co-writer, and myself are extreme­ly pre­scient… Not! That stuff was in the script all along, and we could nev­er have pre­dict­ed that the depic­tion of the His­pan­ic-Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty would become so much more rel­e­vant. After all, it’s like a scene from Metrop­o­lis, right? But some­how it now has a new significance.

Maybe you were even more pre­scient back with Elec­tion – Tra­cy Flick is Don­ald Trump, discuss…

Or maybe, Hilary…

So if this is the end of a cer­tain chap­ter in your career, do you look back on your achieve­ments to date?

No, nev­er. Elec­tion is not so bad. It’s the one I get the most com­pli­ments about from film geeks. Bour­geois peo­ple, they like Side­ways, because they know about wine, and there’s a whole cult attached to that. From my per­spec­tive, Elec­tion is the only film I’ve made which isn’t too long. It suc­ceeds with a cer­tain cyn­i­cal bite and holds to a crisp rhythm. The oth­er ones, you nev­er want them to get so unwieldy, but you need this scene to get to this place, and some­how you’re stuck with it. What can you do?

Down­siz­ing is released 26 Jan­u­ary. Read our review.