Highways, Byways, and 'Sideways'

Wine flows through Sideways, the latest film by director Alexander Payne. The story of wine aficionado Miles (Paul Giamatti) who takes his soon-to-be-married actor buddy Jack (Thomas Haden Church) on a week long tour of southern California wineries as a wedding present, it has received some of the most glowing reviews of the year and has firmly established Payne as one of the most interesting, talented and uncompromising directors of our time.

Like wine, Payne just gets better with time. From his first film, the wicked little political satire "Citizen Ruth," through the even smarter "Election," the bittersweet "About Schmidt," and finally "Sideways," his work has gotten successively richer, deeper and more complex. Of course, credit must be shared with longtime writing partner Jim Taylor. They began as a team on "Citizen Ruth" and their creative partnership and personal friendship continues to this day.

Payne and Taylor were in Seattle on Friday, Oct. 29, 2004, to promote "Sideways." In the brief half hour we had together, we discussed their writing partnership, the state of personal filmmaking in Hollywood today, and, of course, wine. As often happens with old friends, questions sparked discussions between them, and their give and take reveals as much about their collaborative process as their answers do.

Sean Axmaker: "Sideways" is your fourth feature, and your fourth collaboration.

Alexander Payne: We've actually collaborated on other things. We've done script doctoring, so we've actually written like seven features together.

How did you start collaborating and how does that collaboration process work?

Jim Taylor: We met through an acquaintance who is actually someone I knew from Seattle, Meg Richman. Do you know Meg? She did a movie here called "Under Heaven" [also known as "In the Shadows"].

Yes, it's a modern take on "Wings of the Dove."

JT: She knew both Alexander and I and she had a room in this apartment ...

AP: I don't think either of us really anticipated having co-writers in our film careers but it happened in the best possible way, which is naturally, from our friendship. We were roommates, and I have to say that the way we work happens as naturally as the way we came together in the first place. I don't know, it's like something, once introduced to us – we've never fought, it just happens. So when we write, we're together and it's kind of like this; we sit around and talk and think of what could happen next and the computer is over there. We think, "Oh, that could be good," and one or the other of us will get up and pound out a page or two.

JT: It's funny because, as you can imagine, that question comes up a lot, and I think people – especially screenwriters – are surprised that we work the way we do.

AP: How are you supposed to work?

JT: I think when they get into collaborations, they get together and say, "Let's make an outline and then you go do this scene and I'll do this scene." But I think that we're not surprised we work the way we work because we see pictures of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett sitting around ...

AP: I always think of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

JT: ... and Jean-Claude Carriere. My image of people collaborating was people like that. So we have an office and we sit around and we talk and we go have lunch and write something, but it doesn't seem to be that that's other people's images of collaborating. They're surprised we work that way.

Your first film, "Citizen Ruth," was an original screenplay, but your three subsequent films are adaptations of novels.

JT: "About Schmidt" is about two-thirds an original, really.

Which leads to my next question. The novels that you adapt tend not to be best-sellers and are not well-known to the general public. Does that give you more latitude to bring in your own ideas and rework the material?