Downsizing a rare movie for big people
TORONTO — 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 post-production 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.
At a cost of $68 million US, 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 fiveinches tall, to be the follow-up to his Oscar-winning 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 première 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 high-concept, large-canvas science fiction 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 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 ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” says Payne with a melancholy Midwestern twang.
It begins with a Nebraskan couple (Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig) who, saddled with mortgage payments, decide to undergo the process.
But the film will surprise many moviegoers by just how far it travels from its initial premise. Going from the Omaha plains to Norwegian fjords, Downsizing wanders a near-future, looking for meaning in a dying, upside-down world. “Ultimately,” says Payne, “we’re just interested in people, not so much in plot.”
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 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 ‘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. (She’s nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award and a Golden Globe.)
“I’m very happy to play a character who is specifically Asian, who is up against very real obstacles in an environment that feels very familiar and realistic to what people are actually experiencing right now,” says Chau. “For people who have a problem that I’m speaking with an accent or whatever, my question is always: ‘Did she seem intelligent to you?’ And the answer is always yes, so I’m like: ‘What’s the problem?’ ”
Payne is himself a mix of sardonic and romantic. He’ll accept the praise that his Paris, je t’aime short is his finest work, but only because it’s six minutes long. “You can get on with your life,” he says.
He’s a precise and perceptive cinephile with an expert Robert Ryan impression and a strong devotion to Milos Foreman films, but he frequently chafes at the extreme attention Hollywood moviemaking brings.
“The movies will never die,” Payne says. “But I think they’re too expensive to make and that’s a drag, at least in the U.S. I wouldn’t mind, and in fact I will, seek to make movies in other countries just to get away from the pressure.”
Payne would like his next one to go quicker, though his fondness for filmmaking sometimes makes him inclined to stretch the experience — at least location scouting.
“I wish life were long enough where I could just go into everyone’s house on Earth and see how they live and meet them and say hello,” Payne says.