Payne, though, insists that his films are about more than just uptight men and their various hurts. They’re characterized by one thing above all: humanity.
This is the message that he stays on, the mission statement he pounds at like Jerry Maguire with films instead of football players. Ask Payne about pain and he ambles (“I sound like some ridiculous Woody Allen character,” he muses at one point). When it comes to humanity in film, he can’t stop answering the question.
American movies, Payne says, have become too perfect, too artificial. And he thinks that has a lot to do with what’s wrong with the world at large today.
“Things are really dire,” he says. “The fraudulence in movies is…one of the reasons we find ourselves now as a society lost.”
Painted and tailored props, actors with unrelenting good looks—the things some directors spend their days striving for are anathema to Payne. His films, he says, aim to fulfill the fundamental job of movie-making: to mirror the real world as closely as possible.
“If it’s a fake mirror, then what are you doing?” he asks. “What’s wrong with reality?”
If Payne’s easy enthusiasm, his preaching of what he practices, is an oddity in a scene populated by dorky eccentrics who snicker at their own work even as they labor over it, Payne has at least one thing solidly in common with other indie auteurs: he loves the 70s.
“Movies were better when they were more human,” he says of that decade. “You could finally show tits and say ‘fuck’ and show anything that happens in real life.”
Now, Payne fears that those breakthroughs have been “co-opted by these capitalist forces.” Still, when it comes to the future of American cinema, a surprising optimistic streak comes out.
Payne brims with heartening examples: low-budget successes like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Lost in Translation, less conventional studio fare like Spiderman 2 (“just a great film”)—even the fact that he was able to make Sideways “with no movie stars” gives him hope.
The way Payne sees it, the times might finally be on his side. He thinks humanism is “by now an idea so old it can be new again.”
“It can be a new fashion, so why the hell not?” he asks.
Even at his sunniest peak, this dark satirist can’t resist undermining his own predictions. He may embrace the twists and turns of fashion, but at heart he thinks they’re meaningless.
“Who gives a fuck about a lapel?” Payne bursts out at one point.
For now, when it comes to the ever-thinning and widening lapel of realism in film, the answer is Payne.
—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.