Alexander Payne was in jovial mood when he breezed into Sarajevo Film Festival earlier this week to pick up an Honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award, give a masterclass interview, and host a gala screening of his much-loved Oscar-winner, Sideways (2004). Riding high on his latest critical and commercial hit The Holdovers (2023), which won multiple prizes including an Academy Award for screenwriter David Hemingson, the 63-year-old Payne dropped a few teasing hints about future projects, including a long-rumoured sequel to Election (1999) and plans to make a western.
Speaking to a packed masterclass crowd in Sarajevo, Payne also laughed off questions about directors having a singular auteur-like “vision”, stressing that the entire film-making process is a collective, exploratory process born from multiple creative collaborations. With his regular writing partner Jim Taylor also in attendance in the Bosnian capital, the director described their relationship almost like a long-term marriage.
“He makes the coffee, I cook a little,” Payne joked. “It’s pretty harmonious. You have to have that with a creative partner. And I have to say, too, for any film-makers here, the director is rarely alone. The director often has a co-writer. You have a partner in casting, in production design, in cinematography and editing and putting the music on. You always work with someone. And such collaborations have to be ego-less in terms of, you have to feel free to say even stupid ideas and not be made fun of.”
Payne confirmed reports that he and Taylor are currently working on a sequel to their breakthrough hit Election (1999), which is reportedly based on Tom Perrotta’s 2022 novel Tracy Flick Can’t Win, with Reese Witherspoon set to reprise her career-making role as Flick. Having recently been granted joint US-Greek citizenship, the director is also hoping to tap the European film-funding market with future plans for Danish-language and French-language features, but he declined to share details in Sarajevo.
Meanwhile, Payne and Taylor are also working with Hemingson again on a classic American western. “Right now, Jim and I are talking about a sequel to Election,” Payne nodded. “But also with a different writer, the guy who wrote The Holdovers, we are conceiving a western. It would be nice to take a realistic, naturalistic approach to a western and also using landscape. As much as a sense of place is important in the films I do, having an even greater dramatic, archetypal interplay between character and landscape is really interesting.”
Payne caused a ripple of laughter in Sarajevo by confessing he yearns to make more genre-friendly films, notably “a good car chase movie” in the tradition of Peter Yates’ Bullitt (1968), Richard Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (1971) and Henri Verneil’s cult neo-noir heist thriller The Burglars (1971), aka Le Casse. “That’s got a phenomenal car chase,” Payne said. “And Vanishing Point is such a masterpiece… so I want to do a car chase movie, and I’d also like to do a detective movie.”
Asked about his perennial fondness for setting and shooting films in his native Nebraska, Payne bristled a little, insisting that small towns can contain entire worlds. “You can do anything, anywhere,” he told the Sarajevo audience. “Ozu never left Tokyo but he can tell the most universal stories. Not just in the same city, but with the same lens and the same lack of camera movement. William Faulkner basically never left Oxford, Mississippi. Forgive this seemingly sarcastic line, but you don’t ask Martin Scorsese: why do you still shoot in New York? You don’t ask Paul Thomas Anderson: why do you shoot in Los Angeles? Because those are famous places. But when someone’s from Sarajevo, or from Omaha, Nebraska, people ask why you want to shoot there…”
