Alexander Payne is at the Locarno Film Festival to receive the Pardo d’Onore, where he is once again espousing the value of a tight storyline and shorter runtime.Look, I get it. I see this as an issue that can start on the page, or even in your short film—I think sometimes, writers and directors don't know where to trim the fat, and any of my film friends would tell you I prefer a short short film. It's better for short attention spans, especially if you're trying to fund a feature and get eyeballs on a proof-of-concept, and it's better for shorts programming at festivals. Those are just the facts.But Payne, a two-time Oscar winner, is pretty firm about it regardless of where he sees the issue. When asked about modern film writing, he told Variety in a recent interview:I’ve evolved in my thinking about that kind of stuff. When I got out of film school in the 1990s, I left film school. I was against Syd Field and Robert McKee. I defecate on those tenets of screenwriting. Who’s to say act one stops at page 30? We were coming out of the '70s, which had beautiful exploration and artistic films. I graduated from high school in 1979 so those are the films that taught me what an American commercial movie is. And then you got into the '80s, and things started to go really downhill, certainly in American cinema. And my snobby film school friends and I would accuse those...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Today