"That Columbus Guy Isn’t Such a Great Director"

9Nov/040

"That Columbus Guy Isn’t Such a Great Director"

Alexander Payne, co-writer/director of Sideways, tells it like it is in a great interview in this week's Onion A.V. Club.

O: Another school of thought says, "We have to be faithful to the book to do justice to it." But your films do drift away. They seem to have the spirit of the source material, but not the content, at least to the letter.

AP: The obvious point is this: A book is a book, but a movie is a movie. The more faithful you are, the more you'll come up with Harry Potter #1 and #2, which are like filmed books on tape. They're so petrified of turning off the readers that they make no concessions to the fact that they're trying to make a piece of cinema. I haven't seen Alfonso Cuarón's [Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban], but I'm sure it's far more cinematic, because he's a real director. That [Chris] Columbus guy isn't such a great director. But you have to change things. The better a novel is, in literary terms, the more you can't be faithful. The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies, like Jaws or The Godfather.

Of course, that passage is going to get more attention than this passage.

O: Cinema's few depictions of Midwest life seem to describe it as America's Heartland. Do you consider your films a corrective to that?

AP: It's not really my job to say that, because I don't think that way. I think about what movie I would like to see. I don't think of them as a correction or palliative. I certainly am irritated by anything that's shot in the Midwest and filled with these noble people. "Oh, they're so good, and they're so honest..." I'm not interested in that. I just think of what's right for a movie.

He's a big auteurist, which is a dangerous thing in my book. But he cites the movies of the 1970's, which had great screenwriters and actors backing up those legendary directors -- and Payne has always been charitible to his partner in crime, Jim Taylor. So I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Onion A.V. Club Alexander Payne Interview (scroll down a bit, the graphic is deceiving)