A lot of bottle

Witty, poignant, wracked with modern, yet age-old dilemmas about love and relationships, Alexander Payne's Sideways is movie of the moment. The director talks to Donald Clarke

Towards the close of Alexander Payne's sombre 2002 comedy About Schmidt, the title character, a morose widower played by Jack Nicholson, faces up to oblivion. "Relatively soon, I will die," he says. "Maybe in 20 years, maybe tomorrow, it doesn't matter. Once I am dead and everyone who knew me dies too, it will be as though I never existed. What difference has my life made to anyone? None that I can think of." Well, that's cheery.

"Most people do feel that way," Payne says. "Doesn't that describe most people of the 20 billion who have ever lived?"

I'm not sure it describes Alexander Payne. Tall, dark and considerably more handsome than most film stars, the urbane Nebraskan, whose CV claims, against all evidence, that he was born as long ago as 1961, is currently promoting the most highly praised American film of the season. If an anvil were to fall on his head tomorrow, it would take years to tidy away the acres of positive newsprint concerning the witty, poignant Sideways. The film has received so many gushing notices (and so many award nominations) that a minor backlash - see recent think-pieces in the New York Times and the Village Voice - is currently stuttering into action.

Though no film deserves quite this much attention, Sideways is unquestionably a smashing piece of work. Based on an unheralded book by one Rex Pickett, the picture follows two unlikely pals, an uptight, unpublished novelist played by Paul Giamatti, star of American Splendor, and a free-spirited, not-so-bright actor played by sitcom specialist Thomas Haden Church, as they embark on a tour of California's wine region.

As in both About Schmidt and the director's 1999 high-school satire, Election, we are invited to spend time with a hero - Giamatti's Miles Raymond - who feels he has failed in life. Why does this scenario remain so fascinating to Payne? "I wish I had a good answer that I could stumble my way through and then be shocked at my own inarticulacy," he says. "Well, we make comedies. Chaplin was always a tramp and there is failure there. But comedy about what? That word means a million different things. But comedy can be found in the discrepancies between what we hope to be, what we could have been and what we actually are."

But even the most pessimistic writers are surely nagged by the urge to inject redemption or hope into their work. There is not much of either commodity in About Schmidt.

"For the writer himself the redemption is in the act of writing. You are leaving a mark through what you write," he muses. "But I certainly don't feel the need to say there is hope for everyone, because I don't think there is hope for everyone. Most people believe they are beyond help."

Payne cultivated his pessimism while studying history and Spanish literature at Stanford and then film at UCLA, but it appears that some bleak part of his soul will always belong to his hometown of Omaha.

Payne's first three pictures were all filmed there and, weirdly, one particular junction - between 50th and Underwood - serves as the location for a significant scene in each.

"That became kind of a joke. There are a lot of things like that which are between me and my production designer. They are not even interesting enough to talk about," he laughs.

But it is interesting that he insisted on locating those early films in Omaha. About Schmidt and Election were both based on novels set elsewhere. What is the attraction of the city? "I think other directors have an even greater connection with their home cities, like Martin Scorsese or Woody Allen in New York. Like Tarantino in LA." Yes but, with all due respect to the capital of the Cornhusker State, New York is the hub of the universe and LA is, well, LA. Omaha is, according to my encyclopaedia, known for its air force base and fertiliser factories.

"Well, is Baltimore the hub of the universe? No, but Barry Levinson and John Waters go back to shoot there. Is Stockholm the centre of the universe? Bergman goes back there. Fellini, who spent most of his time in Rome, shot I Vitelloni in Rimini. Antonioni even returned to Ferrara." And so on. When it comes to naming the hometowns of European film-makers, Alexander Payne is your only man. With his formidable knowledge of world cinema and his impressive argumentative skills, I imagine he was more than a match for Harvey Weinstein, the baby-eating beast of Miramax, when the two men collaborated on Payne's first film, Citizen Ruth. It has, however, been suggested that Harvey managed to greatly annoy the director by imposing a clumsy title - the wry abortion satire was originally called The Devil Inside - and an unspeakably crass poster on the production.

"Correct. All true. A very bad poster and Harvey did threaten to pull the movie from Sundance if I didn't play ball with the title. He insisted I put a title card at the end which suggested a happy ending. And there was a piece of casting - I won't say who - which was forced upon me. But I must make clear that I was still very grateful to them for making the film when nobody else would touch it. But all things being equal I really don't want to have an experience like that again."

He admits that both Election - in which high-school teacher Matthew Broderick worked hard to frustrate megalomaniac student Reese Witherspoon - and About Schmidt were slightly less grim experiences, but there were still disagreements with producers. "With Election I had to jump through certain casting hoops and hold previews and so forth, but that is the deal," he says.

At any rate, About Schmidt turned out to be a notable success. Few reviews failed to mention that Payne managed the not unremarkable achievement of making Jack Nicholson, who received an Oscar nomination for his performance, look like a little old man. I wonder if Payne was ever concerned that the sheer weight of Nicholson's celebrity might impose an unwanted glamour on the role.

"I did think about that and there is nothing I can do about it." He could have cast some bloke we'd never heard of.

"And not get any financing for the film?" he snaps back. "But, also, what a joy to work with Jack Nicholson. Why would I not want to work with one of the great presences in the first 100 years of cinema? There was no vanity to him. When I said I wanted him to play an older man he grabbed his chicken neck and said: 'How much of this do you want?' We had shirts that were half-a-size too small and that increased the chicken-neck. He will do anything for the scene."

Payne, as canny as he is talented, secured final cut on About Schmidt (that is to say he had the last word on how the film was edited), but he wanted even greater control over Sideways. Accordingly, the director and his regular co-writer, Jim Taylor, secured the rights to Pickett's novel independently, some time before they approached a studio.

"The most important thing in the American system is to retain control of the written material for as long as possible," he says forcefully. "Which we did even through casting. We paid for casting independently. So we went to the studio and said: 'Here is the script. Here is the cast. Here is the director. Do you want to be involved?' There is nothing much for them to say. If they don't want to do it the way we want it done we just say: 'Thank you. Bye bye!' The power in negotiation comes from the ability to walk away."

Payne's stubborn refusal to compromise has given us a funky, laconic film whose apparently sloppy structure belies the director's keen understanding of the dynamics of romance. The male leads seem almost to be playing two opposing sides of the same personality. Church, who hooks up with feisty Sandra Oh (Payne's wife) days before his wedding, represents that side of us uninhibited by mores. Giametti, terrified to embark on a relationship with Virginia Madsen's sensitive waitress, stands for repression and fear.

"That's right. It is an old idea. Jim and I weren't thinking exclusively about that, but it definitely is in there," he says. "The prime example for us was Zorba the Greek. Nikos Kazantzakis [author of that novel] is placing within us the intellectual and the sensualist. The intellectual is like Miles; he becomes paralysed when it comes to getting the woman he wants, while the other guy is like 'Oh, just go and get her'. For Kazantzakis it is very much the playing out of the two sides of himself, and that is very much the key to understanding these two guys."

But, for all its psychological profundity, Sideways may be remembered as 'that film about the wine'. The picture manages to suggest some intricate oenological metaphors - life when lived fully is like pinot noir: complicated, but rewarding - without drifting too far into pretentiousness. Gratifyingly, this is a film where people, rather than just sipping, gurgling and spitting, actually get roaring drunk on fine wine.

"I had been such a prisoner of wine shops and reading about wine and tastings and all that," Payne says. "Shooting this I broke through a barrier and was hanging out with winemakers and putting my hand in vats of recently-pressed grapes. Then, just on a drinking level, I got to drink a lot of young wines. I had got used to all that laying wine down stuff. Forget about it. Just drink them now." He pauses to set up an uncharacteristically low-brow joke. "I like 'em young! Young and fresh."

Was it a boozy set? "A little bit. Who says that wine has to be dealt with delicately? Yes, it is nice if you have a great wine, a great Bordeaux, and you have the right stemware and so on. But we were drinking wine every day, not so much while shooting, but at wrap time. Any time you are with a film crew and you are shooting in a bar everyone is going to get snockered at rap. And so it was." Payne and his crew will almost certainly encounter more opportunities to get mightily snockered (it means what you think it means) as the award season continues. But the director treasures one less obviously prestigious honour over all others.

"I was given an award this year from my Jesuit high school for alumnus of the year. That was significant to me, I must say. Not just because I had achieved some modicum of fame, but because the people at my high school who knew me well appeared to recognise my film work as some kind of public service - the sort of public service that Jesuits urge you to be aware of through your life. That background equipped me fairly well to go into a den of wolves and remain steady through it all." To retain his integrity? "Well that's not for me to say. But at least to keep trying."

Sideways opens next Friday