Music, Style & Culture

Alexander Payne: ‘I Ask Myself: Can This Story Be Told More Or Less Visually?’

The Descendants director on his George Clooney-starring drama.

The new film from Election, About Schmidt and Sideways helmer Alexander Payne hits cinemas today.

The Descendants has earned the writer and director two Academy Award nominations for adapting Kaui Hart Hemmings' bittersweet novel, with star George Clooney deservedly up for best actor.

Clooney plays a Hawaiian lawyer who discovers his comatose wife had been having an affair. Forced to reconnect with his troubled daughters, the family go on a warm, witty and unexpected island-hopping journey of discovery. Read our full review here.

Here's our account of Clooney's wit and wisdom, and our own interview with author Hemmings. At the London press conference, Payne spoke about the tone of the film, casting wonderful newcomer Shailene Woodley as Clooney's teenage daughter, and subverting people's view of Hawaii.

Read the highlights of Payne's chat below, and watch a video of Clooney and Payne basically congratulating themselves on their brilliance.

On the fine line between comedy and drama.
Payne: I don’t really separate them very much, in my mind, in writing and directing. Rather than seeing them as two different tones, I like my films to have a single, thicker tone which includes both the sadness, the tragedy, the pathos and the funny. I think it’s all one thing - just a bigger bandwidth of emotion and tone, like real life. I spent a lot of time editing this film, it was nine months from start to finish, from the beginning of editing to finishing the sound mix, and a lot of the calibration of that tone was done there. I think on set we harvest a lot of different things, and then the editor and I work a lot to make sure it's all part of the same movie.



On casting young characters.
Payne:It's tough to cast anyone but it's tough to cast young people. The ones who have a lot of experience often don't read – at least to my eye – as being the age that I want them to be or in fact the age that they actually are. I can’t tell you how many girls her age who read who have a lot of experience but were seventeen going on thirty-five. I’d had some experience of that casting Election, a high school movie ten years previous. She had to be physically believable as George Clooney's daughter. I wanted someone like a young Deborah Winger, who had great fire and great vulnerability. Shailene came in to read at an audition in December 2009 in New York, and two minutes into her reading I knew she was the one, she just knocked my socks off.

On his honest depiction of Hawaii.
Payne: The weather is constantly changing, and when we were shooting outdoor scenes it took a lot of patience and a lot of waiting. The clouds would roll in and we would have to wait. These are standard filmmaker problems though. I like the moodiness that's evoked by the darkened skies and the rain. I thought it was wonderful to subvert people’s visual pre-impressions of it. I didn’t want so much to see Hawaii as I did want to see Honolulu, hence the montage of streetlife in downtown Honolulu. I thought, I had never seen that before, and maybe others hadn't either.

On his love of visuals over dialogue.
Payne: They are my favourite scenes to direct. In this film, the sequence I like personally is when George is running along the beach and crosses paths with Brian Speer and spies on him, and it cuts to the beginning of that scene where he is waiting with the three kids to see if he will come out. Not only because there is no dialogue, but also there is no music - just the sound of the waves, leaving a mysterious quality to it. When I'm deciding or not to make a film, and this is the third adaptation, I ask myself: do I like the story, and can this story be told more or less visually? Written as films are, with dialogue, I craft them in a way like Warner Bros. cartoons - can you watch them with the sound off and tell exactly what's going on?