Alexander Payne creates movie for adults
‘DOWNSIZING’ IS HIS MOST COSTLY EFFORT
There are rituals to an Alexander Payne production. Movie nights on Wednesdays during pre-production at Payne’s house, with pizza and soft drinks. Friday-night screenings during postproduction with martinis. And, reliably, an endless struggle to secure financing.
“Only one studio guy said what I needed him to say, which was: ‘I know it doesn’t make sense on paper. We’re making it anyway,’” Payne says of his latest, “Downsizing.” ‘’Those are the words on which my career has hung.”
At a cost of $68 million, “Downsizing” is double the budget of any previous film by Payne. He originally intended the film, in which scientists have invented the ability to shrink people to five inches tall, to be his follow-up to his Oscarwinning 2004 film, “Sideways.”
“But it was not be,” Payne sighs. Years seeking studio backing followed, even as Payne made other things (“The Descendants,” “Nebraska”). He calls “Downsizing” his Vietnam, a label his writing partner, Jim Taylor, modifies. “Except we won,” he says, chuckling.
For a director who has always made modest, human-sized comedies — many of them set in his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska — it’s especially fitting that Payne’s most ambitious film yet is about people turning small. He is, almost certainly, the only director who would spend millions making special effects appear mundane.
“I wanted the visual effects in this one to be so noticeable as to be banal,” he said in an interview over coffee shortly after the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. “I mean, I’m just trying to make a regular movie. I’m not trying to make a visual effects movie.”
“Downsizing” is the rarest thing in today’s movie industry: a big movie for big people — adults, you could call them. In a shrinking Hollywood, “Downsizing” is a clever inversion of scale: a highconcept, large-canvas sciencefiction from a filmmaker who specializes in the lives of profoundly ordinary schlubs.
In “Downsizing,” miniaturization not only lessens human impact on an overcrowded, overpopulated Earth, it also gives people the opportunity for grander lives. “Get small, live like kings” is among the selling points for Leisure Land, one of the “small” communities that pops up, and just one of the myriad ways the world-changing invention is quickly capitalized upon.
“Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose,” says Payne with a melancholy Midwestern twang. (It’s usually translated as “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”)
Taylor, who has worked with Payne since their 1996 feature debut, the abortion-rights satire “Citizen Ruth,” says the two consciously try to find less predictable directions.
“We think, ‘Well, the obvious way is to go this way, but maybe that’s just our movie-memory working,” says Taylor. “Heroism for us is more about getting through the day than saving humanity, even though there are people literally trying to save humanity in our movie.”
The existential journey of Damon’s character in “Downsizing” is partly triggered by the entrance of Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau), a heavily accented Vietnamese dissident who was miniaturized against her will.
“It’s a character that we don’t often see and it’s a character most filmmakers would not be interested in or just not know where to begin to know how to do the character quote-unquote correctly,” says Chau. “I appreciate that Alexander and Jim Taylor had the cojones to write this character.”
Though some have questioned the strong accent, Chau’s performance — both comically prickly and tenderly sweet — is easily among the best of the year.