What defines great cinema is truly individualized, but we all know it when we see it. Alexander Payne is one of the great filmmakers of our time and has directed several modern classics, including Election, Sideways, and recent favorite The Holdovers.
Every movie is the product of an internal battle between industry and art. Sometimes these forces corrupt one another or cancel each other out, but when things work well, we’re given remarkable works of art that we see over… and over… and over again. Payne sat down with MovieWeb to discuss the era of classics, what makes a movie a classic, and what every movie should probably strive to accomplish:
“Great movies are an extraordinarily remarkable presentation of humanity to humanity. If art is a mirror, cinema is the most accurate mirror…”
Alexander Payne and TCM Are a Match Made in Movie Heaven
Payne is a frequent guest host for Turner Classic Movies, one of the few places left on this earth that cherishes, stewards, and upholds the medium’s artistic legacy, so we all may continue to bask in its projected glow. If you love movies, TCM is one of those “must-subscribe” services. It not only offers access to a massive library of great films, but also context from some of the finest minds as they host and present films.
Payne is one of them, having done a memorable job hosting in the past, including stints at the TCM Festival. Most recently, he presented William Wyler’s Ben-Hur. Why Ben-Hur? According to Payne, there’s a reason why Wyler’s film has endured:
“What I want to say about Ben-Hur…. the whole reason they hired William Wyler to do it, not Cecil B. DeMille, was to get the humanity and the intimate story. The producer, Sam Zimbalist, told Wyler, ‘the spectacle is going to take care of itself. What we want is the good intimate stuff.’ Ben-Hur was awesome when it came out, and is still f*****g awesome because of how you relate to it. The Roman occupation of Judea at the beginning and the Jews struggling for freedom speaks to what’s going on now. On all sides. You can see it as the Israelis oppressing the Palestinians, or the Israelis feeling oppressed. It’s timeless. These are eternal issues which preceded our birth and will follow our death. They are represented in these movies. You don’t see much like that anymore.”
Payne emphasizes that audiences can relate to a film like Ben-Hur today not just because there are relevant current events, but also because these relevant events are, in fact, eternal, as are our responses to them. When a movie can tap into the human element of the biggest and broadest types of experiences, it becomes a classic.
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To Payne, the classic cinema era spans roughly the first 80 years. “The newness of the medium, collectively, was an extraordinarily remarkable presentation of humanity to humanity,” Payne says. “It was all about humanity and all about people; an artistic and vigorous representation of the human condition.”
The reality is that, somewhere along the way, the medium became about other things, too, and those other things weighed more heavily on the finished products than representing the human condition. This has led to other advances – maybe it’s even a result of them – but the byproduct is that fewer of our movies reflect ideas and principles about what it is to be alive.
Payne spoke about one of the most lasting genres, the Western, which holds a special place in his heart and has been a mainstay of classic American cinema.
What Makes a Great Western? Alexander Payne Recommends Classic Westerns Everyone Should See
“When I say I love westerns, I don’t love all of them. In fact, maybe I even love a limited number of them.”
The Western was there from the start. The movies were being made out west with the help of cowboys, whose adventures, ripped right from the dime novels, were perfect inspiration. There have been countless entries in the genre, but the best of them – the classics – travel across the rich American landscape, and not just in the physical sense. They also cross the internal landscape of our hearts and minds, capturing our essence and our archetypes.
“Cinema also exists interestingly and movingly in the land of archetypes,” Payne says. “You have archetypes made into flesh and blood characters… these are films set in the American past. Anytime you make a period film, or a futuristic film, a science fiction film… you’re making a film intensely about today.”
As is the case with other genres, the Western often struggles to connect to the eternal truths of the present day. “That’s been a failure of Westerns,” Payne explains. “I don’t think we’ve had a great Western since Unforgiven. We’ve got some good ones, but that’s the last great one. A lot of times it’s a story that just sits there and has no resonance or meaning, and I don’t get much out of it.”
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Which Westerns capture all the genre has to offer? Well, The Searchers is high on everyone’s list, including Payne, who has presented it at TCM festivals in the past. There are also some slightly lesser-considered titles, like Ride the High Country, a masterpiece by Sam Peckinpah. Payne says, “It’s hard to say ‘best movie.’ It’s kind of a stupid thing to say, but for my money, it’s [Peckinpah’s] because he would kind of go back and forth between muscular and misogynist and elegiac. Kind of like an alcoholic rage. He has that duality in his films. I love Junior Bonner, too. I love The Lusty Men by Nick Ray.” What is it about these Westerns, though, that work so well for Payne?
“When you can get to that, muscular cry, a muscular emotion. Betrayal between men, fathers and children, fathers and sons, fathers and daughters. Archetypal stuff that existed in Greek tragedies, in Shakespeare,” Payne explains. “That’s the right arena for those themes in cinema. For Westerns and samurai movies.” The more Payne talks about the potential of the genre, the more you want to see him tackle it. In the meantime, he has other adventures on his plate.
‘Tracy Flick Can’t Win’ Can’t Come Soon Enough
In 1999, Alexander Payne made one of the most incisive comedies about the election process and high school with Election. Starring a young Reese Witherspoon as the iconic Tracy Flick, the film explores the intersections between ambition, power, popularity, and our win-at-all-costs culture. The result is hilariously dark, and the implications of the story haunt us to this day. There is a potential sequel, and the major players, Witherspoon and Payne included, are interested in revisiting the project, with some important caveats:
“Jim Taylor, my co-writer, and I hadn’t thought about a sequel until Tom Perrotta wrote this fine book, ‘Tracy Flick Can’t Win,’ and it whetted everybody’s appetite. Reese Witherspoon’s, mine, Jim Taylor’s, the producers, the studio. The only trouble was that I just can’t go back to high school. I just can’t do it. So Jim and I have reconceived it differently, and we’re working on it actively.”
With so many new and truly insane layers to the election experience for Americans, it was interesting to note that, once again, Payne doesn’t see his films as commentary on specific events, but rather on “eternal” human experiences, which constantly, paradoxically play out in the specifics:
“My interest in making [Election] then, and interest in revisiting that world now, is not at all based on wishing to comment on or satirize politics. I approached the original as a comedy, a human comedy, set in a political arena. So ipso facto, it becomes about politics. Maybe what gives legs to a political film is that the filmmakers aren’t really interested in the politics. They’re interested in the people, in the human comedy. But here’s where it does become a political satire or commentary, and not just about contemporary politics, but again, eternal politics: people act out their individual psycho-dramas in the public arena. You certainly see it now with this hyper, you know, psychiatrically damaged, narcissistic pattern. You see that being played out in public. You choose interesting characters, like Tracy Flick, who is kind of an eternal symbol of blind ambition.”
It’s refreshing to note that Payne wants to pursue the exact things he thinks can make a movie last. He’s not interested in anything but adding to the list of classic films, because he wants the work he does to embody the very things he loves to see.
What “Makes” a Movie a Classic?
No matter what seems to be happening in the entertainment industry, no matter the challenges or chatter, the capacity for the medium to be great has never gone away. It’s still as present as ever. The human experience is vast, endless, and evolving, and it’s there to be reflected in all kinds of stories, packaged in the genres and conventions we love, giving us new ways to consider ourselves, the events of our time, the events of other times, and one another. There is no good reason that more classic movies can’t be made.
There are a few factors that define a classic beyond its resonance with the audience. Some are determined by how the artists and craftspeople utilize the medium. For Payne, staying true to the visual nature of film is tantamount to success:
“…Even though I make verbal comedies, I’m much more interested in directing figures in space and action in a way. So if you ever watch my movies again and forget the dialogue, just watch the blocking. I always wanted to approach my features the way Chuck Jones and I. Freleng used to for the six-minute Warner Brothers cartoon shorts. Can you turn down the sound and music, but still tell what’s going on? That’s what I hope for. In a responsibly cinematic way, can you still follow the action?”
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The unfortunate resistance to ‘classic’ cinema is that it’s dated. The way the stories are presented may be out of step with current expectations. The pacing is off. Younger audiences will bump against black and white (tragic, since it’s the most beautiful photography possible) or outdated conventions. Filmmakers could once rely on a greater frame of reference and some historical awareness for humor, while cultural norms were different enough in 1945 that movies from that time are harder to ‘relate to’ on the surface.
These things can be impediments to the classic, but the more that audiences can move past them – with the help of the context provided by TCM and its hosts – the more likely it is that they’ll be able to unlock the treasure chest of cinematic art, Hollywood’s only true legacy. Beyond the surface differences, almost all of these classic movies have something extremely relevant and powerful to say to us. We need only find the willingness to listen.
In Payne’s view, there is an inherent timeliness to everything a filmmaker does, and that is what the best movies – both new and classic – have in common:
“When we say it’s still timely. It’s about today. What that means for me, at its best, is it’s about every day. It’s an eternal thing. The more you can touch on eternal themes in your work, the more you are making something about today. You don’t even have to think about it very much, because as you’re writing something or directing something, the winds of the culture are blowing through you in ways you don’t even understand. Your number one job as a creator is to be open to everything around you and to fearlessly, consciously, or unconsciously channel it into whatever you’re making at that moment. What classic movies touched on, and what good movies made at any time continue to do, is deal with eternal themes. The more specific something is, the more universal, the more eternal something is, the more timely.”
