Payne's Passionate Programming

From the Program Guide of the 36th Telluride Film Festival:

Each year, the Festival invites a great lover of film to join them in the creation of the Telluride Film Festival. The Guest Director serves as a key collaborator in the Festival’s programming decisions, bringing new ideas and overlooked films to Telluride. Past Guest Directors include Salman Rushdie, Buck Henry, Laurie Anderson, Stephen Sondheim, Peter Sellars and Slavoj Zizek.

Guest Director Program sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences

ALEXANDER PAYNE

In Alexander Payne’s debut “Citizen Ruth” (1996), Laura Dern played a hilariously foul-mouthed, glue-sniffing vagrant with a talent for out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Soon, she becomes the object of a tug of war between pro- and anti-abortion activists, the core of a scathingly funny study of hypocrisies on both sides of the political aisle. Payne and writing-producing partner Jim Taylor followed with “Election” (1999), with Reese Witherspoon as a scarily ambitious teenager running circles around her teacher Matthew Broderick.

Payne has since continued making modestly budgeted, character-centered comedy-dramas. In that narrow sense, he is the textbook definition of an American “indie” filmmaker. But Payne’s quietly assured, complex and generous films share more of a spiritual kinship with Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder than with anything in contemporary American cinema.

He has shown a particular genius for working with actors, using stars including Jack Nicholson brilliantly (in “About Schmidt,” 2002), reviving our awareness of talents like Dern and Virginia Madsen, or making fresh discoveries including Reese Witherspoon, Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church. He skewers every pretension and delusion of his protagonists, meticulously uncovering their lust and greed. Think of Giamatti rescuing his buddy’s engagement ring in “Sideways” (which won Payne and Taylor a 2004 Oscar for best screenplay). In “Election” (nominated for a best screenplay Oscar), Matthew Broderick succumbs to a swollen nose from a bee sting while pursuing a tryst with his next-door neighbor, and the ferocious Witherspoon tears down her opponents’ campaign posters in a frenzy. Payne’s tragicomic universe includes cruelty, but is never mean-spirited. His protagonists are simultaneously intelligent and well meaning and hilariously self-absorbed and myopic. They stumble into a universe a little stranger and more bewildering than they or we anticipated, but it always remains a scrupulously observed one, reflective of and often awkwardly familiar to the one we all live in.

Payne draws from a dazzlingly deep knowledge of film history. His selections for Telluride—forgotten treasures all—reflect the breadth of his taste, from scathing German satire to multilayered Japanese drama to forgotten Hollywood gems. We welcome Alexander into the Telluride family. –LG

Payne’s programs include the “Forgotten Hollywood” series, “El Verdugo,” “Daisan no Kagemusha: The Third Shadow Warrior,” and “Le Ragazze di Piazza di Spagna.”

FORGOTTEN HOLLYWOOD

Outstanding screenplays, direction and performance distinguish these undeservedly obscure pictures, each hard-hitting in its own way. Each film introduced by Alexander Payne

The Breaking Point
Warner Brothers released two Michael Curtiz films in 1950, both with the theme of a man pulled by unhealthy forces and torn between a good girl and a bad girl. Both were photographed by the great Ted McCord (“Treasure of the Sierra Madre”) and have terrific supporting performances by an African-American, Juano Hernandez. The first was “young Man With a Horn,” with Kirk Douglas loosely playing Bix Beiderbecke. The other was this faithful adaptation of Hemingway’s “To Have and Have No with John Garfield in his penultimate film, young and hot Patricia Neal as the bad girl and a very moving Phyllis Thaxter as Garfield’s wife. Its succinct, taut style almost mirrors Hemingway’s prose, and the grim violence of the last reel leads to a devastating final shot. —AP (U.S., 1950, 97m)

Make Way for Tomorrow
Orson Welles said it would make a stone cry. Winning the Best Director Oscar for “The Awful Truth” the same year he made this film, Leo McCarey said they’d given it to him for the wrong picture. I’d heard about “Tomorrow” for years—it’s still unreleased in the U.S. on DVD—until finally I watched it alone on a flatbed at the UCLA Film & Television Archive. I emerged into the bright light of day still in tears and remained under its spell the better part of a week. A companion piece to and influence on Ozu’s “Tokyo Story,” this is the rare 1930s Hollywood movie that maintains emotional honesty straight through to the end. It also demonstrates again that only a narrative artist capable of comedy is truly capable of pathos. —AP (U.S., 1937, 91m) Preceded by “The Perils of Priscilla” (d. Carroll Ballard, U.S., 1969, 12m).

Day of the Outlaw
What was it about Robert Ryan? How could an actor be so intimidating? There are so many things to commend this powerhouse low-budget Western in the snow — brilliant script, unblinking visual style that puts the camera and actors exactly where they need to be and cuts only when forced to, fine supporting players. But it’s Robert Ryan’s performance as a brutal rancher defending people he hates from marauders that gives the film its bite; you can’t take your eyes off him even when he has his back to you and a hat on. And his power and menace are matched by—who’d ever guess it?—Burl Ives as the leader of a gang of sadists and rapists. If all that weren’t enough, there’s the pre-Gilligan’s Island Tina Louise. —AP (U.S., 1959, 92m) Preceded by “Rain” (d. Stelios Roccos and James Burroughs, U.S., 1959)

ALEXANDER PAYNE PRESENTS

El Verdugo
From Goya to Buñuel, no one does black comedy like the Spanish. In this hilarious, mordantly subversive masterpiece (released in the U.S. as “The Executionber”), Luís García Berlanga fashions another in a string of satires made under Franco about the inability of the individual to control his own destiny. Here a young undertaker marries the daughter of an aging executioner who wants his new son-in-law to take over when he retires. The film is interesting also as an example of cross-pollination with Italian cinema: it stars the Italian Nino Manfredi; the cinematographer was Tonino Delli Colli, who shot for Leone, Pasolini and Bellochio; and Berlanga’s frequent collaborator, the great Spanish screenwriter Rafael Azcona, wrote many Italian films during his long career. Widely regarded as one of the very best Spanish films ever made. —AP (Spain, 1963, 90m) Introduced by Alexander Payne

Daisan no Kagemusha: The Third Shadow Warrior
I know little about this film other than that I saw a rare screening of it in 1985, and I’ve thought about it at least every six months since. It tells a version of the same story Akira Kurosawa later told in “Kagemusha” (1980)—the hideous misadventures of a 16th-century peasant blessed and cursed by his resemblance to a feudal lord—but in a much more brutal, ironic and exciting way that sends home, like an arrow in the eye, its theme of the powerlessness to change one’s destiny once set in motion. The little-known director, Inoue Umetsugu, had a long career spanning many genres, including directing musicals in Hong Kong with the Shaw Brothers. I remember the film being beautifully shot, and the version we’re showing at Telluride, cobbled together from different sources, might be the only chance in your life to see it projected. Highly recommended. —AP (Japan, 1963, 104m) Introduced by Alexander Payne

Le Ragazze di Piazza di Spagna
Italian cinema of the 1950s and 1960s is a bottomless well of great movies—just when you think you’ve seen it all, more amazing films await around the corner. A few years ago at the Torino Film Festival, I happened upon the work of a director who has all but fallen into obscurity. Like Antonioni, Luciano Emmer made documentaries in the 1940s before turning to narrative — gentle, observant humanist comedies fascinated with the lives of everyday people; his casts often included non-actors. This delightful light comedy (released in the U.S as “Three Girls From Rome”) stars the extraordinarily beautiful Lucia Bosé and features a 28-year old Marcello Mastroianni, still not entitled to his own voice; here he was dubbed by Nino Manfredi (star of “El Verdugo”). Emmer, by the way, just completed a new film a year ago at the age of 90. —AP (Italy, 1952, 99m) Introduced by Alexander Payne

—Reprinted from the program guide of the 36th Telluride Film Festival