Alexander shrinks Hollywood
The $68 million project, ‘Downsizing’, is about people turning small Don’t miss it!
here 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 (Dh249 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 5-inches (0.1-metre) tall, to be his follow-up to his Oscar-winning 2004 film, Sideways.
“But it was not to 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, 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 Director Alexander Payne with actress Hong Chau on the set of ‘Downsizing’. Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig in ‘Downsizing’. over coffee shortly after the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Downsizing, which Paramount Pictures will release on Thursday in the UAE, is the rarest thing in today’s movie industry: a big movie for big people. In a shrinking Hollywood, Downsizing is a clever inversion of scale: a highconcept, large-canvas science-fiction from a filmmaker who specialises in the lives of profoundly ordinary schlubs.
In Downsizing, miniaturisation 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 capitalised upon.
It begins with a Nebraskan couple (Matt Damon and 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 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, releases in the UAE on Thursday.
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 miniaturised 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. She steals the movie, raising its trajectory. “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.
A PERCEPTIVE CINEPHILE
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 sixminutes 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 US. I wouldn’t mind, and in fact I will, seek to make movies in other countries just to get away from the pressure.”
Payne, a third-generation Greek-American would like his next one to go more quickly, 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 with a smirk. “Get a handle on things.”
Downsizing is, in a way, Payne trying to do just that — get a handle on things. “That the film summarily proposes miniaturisation as the only possible solution for overpopulation and climate change reveals how totally screwed we are,” he says.
—AP
“I wanted the visual effects in ‘ [Downsizing’] to be so noticeable as to be banal.”