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Alexander Payne with Reese
Witherspoon during the filming
of Election

Alexander Payne was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on February 10, 1961. A graduate of Stanford and UCLA film school, he has risen to the front ranks of American writer-directors through the critical and commercial success of About Schmidt (2002) and Sideways (2004). Integral to his work has been his collaboration with writing partner Jim Taylor (now also a director in his own right.) The breakthrough movie of Payne’s and Taylor’s collaboration – following Citizen Ruth (1996) and a few years of remunerative studio script doctoring – was Election (1999), an adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s novel. In this extract from the essential interview compendium Screenwriters’ Masterclass by Kevin Conroy Scott (published in the UK by Faber and Faber and in the US by Newmarket), Payne describes how he and Taylor went about their work on Election, and why he feels the generally accepted rules of the game in screenwriting ought to be generally resisted.

Kevin Conroy Scott: How did you come across Tom Perotta’s novel Election?

Alexander Payne: [The producers] Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa sent the book to us in January of ’96 but I didn’t read it until April – because I was not remotely interested in anything set in high school. But as a favour to Albert I went to Palm Springs for a weekend and read it, and I got sucked into it. Then I sent it to Jim [Taylor] and he agreed that we should do it.

Election is set in New Jersey but the film is set in Omaha, Nebraska which is where you are from. How important was it in the writing to have a location that you could identify with?

I think Election could have been set anywhere. It’s not that “Omaha” in the writing or structure of it, but it is in the production design and the photography and the casting.

How long did you and Jim work on the screenplay for?

It’s always about six months.

Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon
in Election

For just your first draft?

Yes, but our first drafts are always very much within striking distance of the final draft. They’re usually about 83 per cent there . . . Then we’ll let a month go by, and we may do another two or three weeks and that’s pretty much it but with constant tweaking after that. It never stops. It’s there structurally, but we never stop thinking about it.

When you were adapting Election, how did you know when you had established authority over this high school world that you hadn’t created?

From the get-go, because of its striking chords inside of us. The great thing about adapting novels is that they become immediately personal, because of the dialogue between those concerns in the book and how they echo with your own. Most of Kubrick’s films are adaptations and he obviously had the same experience, finding things that struck a chord in him and he then took complete authority in terms of making it his own.

Were you at all nervous about showing Tom Perotta your work?

When you adapt a book, you’re not making another book -- you’re making a movie, which operates grammatically very, very differently. The better the book is, the more you have to change it. A good book succeeds with literary effects, but you need cinema so you have to just treat it as raw material. Anyone who expects a movie to be faithful to a book is not really giving the proper respect to cinematic form and literary form.

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Payne with writing partner Jim
Taylor

Tracy Flick’s sexuality was much more overt in the book than in the film. Why did she become less of a Lolita and more of a busybody?

Because it seemed more interesting for her not to be more overtly sexual – even though she really is.

Do you worry that it might be harder for the audience to believe that Mr. McCallister would be attracted to her if she were not as sexually overt?

No. We’re in New York. Go to the subway and look around – all of those people, they fuck. If people were only attracted to other people who are themselves attractive then we wouldn’t have an overpopulation problem on this planet. The notion that people have to be pretty or sexy to be attractive is bullshit to me, because that’s not how the world is.

The voice-over works really well in the film and I think it’s wonderful. Why do you think Hollywood screenwriting books are so against the technique of using voice-over?

It seems that there are two schools of thought against voice-over. The first is that in cinema you are supposed to show, not tell. The second is that if a film is perceived to be bad or is incomprehensible you slap voice-over on it so you can at least release it. I don’t know why some people take those examples of voice-over badly used and translate it into a blanket statement against all voice-over work. You can point to all the great directors and great films that have used voice-over… What about Clockwork Orange? I really think it’s tantamount to saying that in a play you shouldn’t have a character speaking a soliloquy all by himself: “I feel this, I aspire to do this.” But I saw Uncle Vanya last week and three or four characters have moments when they express their inner thoughts on stage. I can’t conceive of Election without voice-over. That is where form and content are very much united.

You’ve spoken elsewhere about how Scorsese talks about a film being composed of five sequences rather than three acts?

I think it’s good to get away from thinking about three-act structure when you’re writing films. When you see Scorsese movies or Fellini movies you just see episodes. At the same time, you know that Robert McKee could go and say, “Yes, but it still responds to the three-act structure and here’s how…” Howard Suber, who taught film structure at UCLA and is a proponent of the three-act structure, used to say that in pretty much every film, no matter what structure, at the one-hour mark there is usually a major change. I’ve kept that in mind when I have watched films and you can almost set your watch to it. Within plus or minus three minutes of the one-hour mark there is some major turning point, a reversal or something. But that’s more about making an observation than it is about making a film… When I give screenwriting seminars or classes and they ask me, “What advice do you have for young screenwriters?,” I say, “Don’t read any screenwriting books.” I actually think the whole three-act structure is so deeply ingrained in us from living in this culture and watching movies that in order to come up with new movies – which is what I want to see – you really have to fight what you have innately learned. When you’re writing, you will find yourself being drawn naturally by gravity into doing something which corresponds to all of these things that you have seen. You have to fight that instinct in order to come up with a new movie.