Pavement movie to premiere at Venice Film Festival
A film about the iconic 1990s indie band Pavement, titled Pavements, is set to premiere as part of this year’s Venice Film Festival.
As suggested by the high-brow launch at Venice, Pavements isn’t a typical documentary. The movie is being branded as “a prismatic, narrative, scripted, documentary, musical, metatextual hybrid”.
Merging reported documentary elements with off-beat, genre-defying ideas, it features the band members alongside an all-star cast including Joe Keery, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Gallagher, and more.
At first, Pavements was spawned as a Pavement musical, which was performed in New York with footage included in the film. The announcement of the movie claims that it tracks “the preparations for a musical based on their songs, a museum devoted to their history, and a big-budget Hollywood biopic inspired by their saga as the most important band of a generation,” furthering confusion about what it could look like.
Unsurprisingly, Pavement were never going to do things in ordinary fashion. After forming in 1989 with singer Stephen Malkmus at the helm, the band shunned live performances for a considerable amount of time. They also shied away from the press and the typical boxes a band should tick but quickly became a cult sensation thanks to their recordings. When they did eventually open up to the public, Pavement were known for their eccentric performances that often didn’t involve a prepared setlist.
They disbanded in 1999 but last reunited in 2022, and remain active today. The announcement of Pavements seems to suggest that they’re happy to stick around in the spotlight a little longer, and celebrate their legacy.
However, when it came to making Pavements, Malkmus didn’t want to do a stuffy documentary. According to the New Yorker in 2022, he “wasn’t interested in hiring a documentary filmmaker. He wanted to hire a screenwriter. But he didn’t want a screenplay.” Instead, director Alex Ross Perry was brought on board after working on the band’s ‘Harness Your Hopes’ music video and a string of indie flicks.
Perry’s left-field ideas for the film perfectly aligned with the band’s as he said he wanted to make something “legitimate, ridiculous, real, fake, idiotic, cliché, illogical.” For an insight into how the documentary and story of the band are handled, he said, “You take the Todd Haynes Bob Dylan movie [I’m Not There], the Scorsese documentary [No Direction Home or Rolling Thunder Revue], the Pennebaker documentary, and the movie Dylan himself directed that everyone hates [Renaldo and Clara], and put them all in a blender.”
Although there’s no clear picture of what the film will look like, it will premiere during the Venice Film Festival which is set to run between August 28th to September 7th.
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