Alexander Payne’s five favourite movies
There is a strong case to be made that Alexander Payne is one of the most underrated filmmakers of the contemporary era. Of course, that is an odd concept, considering the director has been nominated seven times for the Oscars and has won two of them for 2004’s Sideways and 2011’s The Descendants.
Yet when people discuss who the greatest filmmakers of modern cinema are, the same creatives crop up – Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson, and David Lynch, but rarely does Payne’s name get brought into the fold. Considering Payne has made some of the best and most extraordinary films of the era, his status in Hollywood is a curious one. With his eighth picture, The Holdovers, imminently due to hit cinemas, it seems fitting to acknowledge the five films Payne lists as his favourite movies of all time.
The Nebraska-born director began his journey at UCLA, where he wrote and directed his graduate film The Passion of Martin. It’s a brilliant and hilarious short that put Payne on the radar of Hollywood studios as the new hot property in town. What followed soon after was Payne’s debut feature, Citizen Ruth, and then his brilliant black comedy, high-school drama (and satire of the political system), Election.
What Payne is perhaps most remembered for among filmgoers is his sensational comedy Sideways, starring Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church as two buddies that go on a wine-tasting tour in California to celebrate a bachelor party. The picture had one of the most memorable and repeated lines in comedy film history: “I’m not drinking any fucking merlot!” The moment was so popular that sales of the wine actually fell after the film’s release.
In the list that Payne provided during a conversation with A.Frame, he reveals the five films that are his personal favourites “that I am really happy to recommend to other filmgoers… They’re not so much films that have influenced me, per se, but they are five movies that I like to champion.”
Making the cut was Peckinpah’s excellent western, which stars Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott as ex-lawmen who are tasked to transport gold across the country from a mine to a bank. Payne elaborated on the film: “We remember Peckinpah more for his great Western from 1969, The Wild Bunch, which is a towering masterpiece and a phenomenal achievement. But Ride the High Country has a tenderness in it. Peckinpah could go back and forth between his violent, masculine side and what’s called his elegiac side, that you see in movies like Junior Bonner and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid.”
Another film Payne adds to the mix is Breaking Point, the 1950 noir thriller by Michael Curtiz, who also directed Casablanca. He explained: “The Breaking Point is a movie worth championing because a lot of people don’t know it. It’s directed by Michael Curtiz, who was still under contract at Warner Brothers. Of course, people know Michael Curtiz as having directed the paragon of perhaps Hollywood’s most perfect movie, Casablanca.”
Check out the full list below.
Alexander Payne’s five favourite movies:
- Ride The High Country (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)
- The Breaking Point (Michael Curtiz, 1950)
- Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)
- It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934)
- Westward the Women (William A. Wellman, 1951)
