The press conference was initiated by the director of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival Orestis Andreadakis, who welcomed the two guests and said: “The Thessaloniki International Film Festival is again hosting Alexander Payne. In the past he had attended as president of the International Competition Jury, and he has also participated with all his films. Phedon Papamichael is with him, as both are TIFF’s friends. As for Downsizing, it is a great film which I hope you’ll enjoy”.
TIFF’s head of programming Yorgos Krassakopoulos, who moderated the event, asked Alexander Payne why it took a while for the film to reach the big screen. “The answer is not that interesting”, the director said, adding: “We wrote the screenplay together with Jim Taylor, we started in 2006, but the idea was too ambitious. Writing took so long, and we took so long to secure funding. Many times I heard that the screenplay was too smart compared to the film budget”.
Asked if he is considered overall clever in Hollywood, Alexander Payne noted: “I don’t think my screenplays are brilliant. That is what studio people think. I understand, thought, that when you make a high budget film it has to appeal to big audiences. I usually find someone to make the film with, and this time I found a person who told me, “I know the film does not worth much, but we’ll make it”. My career has depended on people that have been telling me the same all these years. But I never doubted myself, or the film”.
The film Downsizong is a sci-fi social satire with many special effects, a kind the famous director is dealing with for the first time. On this, he explained: “It was my first experience with special effects. I thought: How hard can it be? So many people are doing it. The point is the time you need to shoot a scene, since often you have to repeat it three or four times. In addition, you need hours of editing to achieve the effects. Special effects do not undermine the story and acting. It is as if you were doing a handiwork at home: it starts well, then it gets long drawn-out, and then the time comes when you say to the handyman, “Either you finish it or I’ll pay you to finish”.
Speaking in his turn about the experience of shooting this film, Phedon Papamichael noted: “We tried to shoot in real sites. Shootings took place partly in Toronto, at the biggest studio in North America. As Alexander says, a film with effects takes much time. You have to be in specific distance, use specific lenses. I was not particularly worried and eventually I saw that the vibe in the set and the chemistry among people were maintained. We tried to keep things as simple as possible. Anyway, I was telling Alexander, “If there’s something you don’t like, I’ll do it from the beginning. Time was a problem, because we kept rejecting things and re-doing them”.
Describing his collaboration with Alexander Payne during the shootings, Phedon Papamichael said: “We talk for fifteen minutes about how the film will be like and then we get to work. We try to keep things simple. We do one shooting at a time, there is no storyboard, we bring the actors to the set and then, after they leave, we talk about the shootings. Not everything is planned in advance. In any case, our approach was not different than in films such as Nebraska. We didn’t let technical details to ‘strangle’ the film”.
Asked how he pitched the film and whether he tried to sell it as a sci-fi film or a comedy, Alexander Payne replied: “I never said it was a sci-fi film. I always said it was a comedy. One way or another I don’t pitch, I write the script and I’m not being asked to discuss it. I pretend every film I make is a comedy. Sure enough this film is a comedy too, but has dark spots as well”. As to how easy it is to combine humor and gloom in a film, the director noted: “Each time I complete a film I’m being asked about the balance between comedy and drama, or passion. It just happens. Anyway, my films that have been admired the most have these elements, humor and passion together, which is something that happens even in Charlie Chaplin’s films”. He prefers to describe himself as “realist” instead of pessimist and admits that, just like the hero in his film, he too feels lost: “I feel absolutely and constantly lost. The world around us gets more and more lost”.
Payne also remembered the first film he came to TIFF 21 years back, with his film Citizen Ruth, starring Laura Dern, an actor he would like to work again with, as he noted. Asked about his relationship with TIFF, he replied: “It is the sixth or seventh time I’m attending. In the past I brought four films to TIFF, while I attended twice as a member of the jury and once as its president. I’m having a great time here, I’m happy. I’m always glad that, despite the crisis and the cutbacks in TIFF’s funding, Thessaloniki keeps its film culture alive”.
On his collaboration with the American actor Matt Damon, the protagonist in his film Downsizing, Payne had only good things to say: “It was a very positive experience. Matt Damon works with more stars than I do. He is absolutely professional, devoted, he knows his lines. He helped me a lot and did not ask outrageous sums of money. He really knows cinema, he is close to the cameras, he asks, he likes the procedure. It is an excellent experience to work with him. One of the best people I’ve worked with. Steven Soderbergh told me he is the best and he will do whatever he’s told”.
Payne was also positively impressed by his collaboration with Swedish actor Rolf Larsson. “He is an excellent actor. The film’s story unfolds partly in Norway, but I didn’t find as many Norwegian actors as I would like and looked for Swedish. It was the first English-speaking film for Larsson and was a great honor for me that he accepted”, the director stressed. As to Norway, the country he chose for part of the shootings, he said: “Jim Taylor thought that such a crazy idea could only come from a Scandinavian country. In Norway there are people who are very clever and very crazy”.
As to his contribution to old films digitalization, Payne said: “I am a member of Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation board. I fund it and it funds the restoring of films worldwide. I am also a member of the artistic committee of the Bologna Festival that screens old films”.
He avoided answering if he is close to shooting a film in Greece, noting with bitter humor: “I get every day closer to everything, even death”.
Asked if he was surprised learning about the Hollywood scandals and the Weinstein case, Alexander Payne replied: “Personally? Yes. I was shocked. All these things happen everywhere and all the time, but the scale of crime is what shocked me. The scale of the phenomenon stroke us all. It is a pity that these things remained hidden for so long. Now they unravel, though, women talk, they can’t stand it anymore, and this is good. I disliked Weinstein from the start. I did not want to collaborate with him anymore. He is a very obnoxious person and I don’t know how others get close to him”.
