Tommaso Body Deadline
Director Alexander Payne holdoverssaid he sometimes receives backlash for the types of films he makes, but he plans to persevere and hopes there will be more space in theaters for “human” stories. he said.
“People ask, ‘Why are you making human comedy dramas like this?’ I think, ‘Why don’t other people do that?’ And I don’t want to say I’m the only one. There’s a lot of quality stuff going on on the streamer, both features and series. Now that supremacists like superheroes are taking up so much space in theaters, a lot of other writing is happening on streaming. And I’m very grateful for that. But I wish they could have devoted a larger percentage of their theatrical real estate to more humane films,” Payne said.election, landscape, descendants, nebraska) said during a Q&A at Deadline’s Contenders Film event in Los Angeles.
He was joined by writer/producer Dave Heminson and editor Kevin Tent, a longtime collaborator who has worked with Payne on eight projects.
The Focus Features film, which premiered at Telluride, has been in theaters since late October and has been doing very well. Paul Giamatti stars as a grumpy history teacher at a New England boarding school who ends up staying on campus during the holidays with his troubled student, newcomer Dominick Sesa, but is abandoned by his mother and stepfather and goes to school. But it’s gone.
Related: ‘The Contenders’ Movie: Los Angeles – Deadline’s complete coverage
Also staying at the fictional Barton Academy is Mary Lamb (Daveen Joy Randolph), the school’s cafeteria director, who is grieving the loss of her son, a Barton graduate, in the Vietnam War. After a rocky start, the three form a kind of ad hoc family, but things go a little off the rails when they take an impromptu trip to Boston.
Payne appeared in the 1935 French film Merlus, but he did not set out to study it. Then he read a television pilot set in a prep school by Heminson and called him.
“When I get a phone call, I immediately say, ‘Yes.’ At first I thought it was a joke and almost hung up, but then I saw the Omaha area code,” Heminson recalled, writing that the script was “very He called it “a love letter to the people who raised me.”
Set in 1971, the film has a grainy look that they were all proud of. “It was shot digitally, but we put a lot of effort into making it look like an old movie,” Payne said. “That was a fantasy challenge I set for myself and my co-creators…It’s a period piece, but we’re not making a period piece, we’re making a modern movie pretending it’s 1970. We told ourselves that we are.”
Watch the panel video on Monday.
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