Downsizing director Alexander Payne on Hong Chau’s star turn, and why sterilisation should be in the drinking water
Despite initial reservations that the premise would not be taken seriously and it could only be made as ‘a romp’, Payne was able to make the film humane, humorous and authentic just like his previous hits Nebraska and Sideways
Alexander Payne isn’t afraid to admit that when he first heard the concept behind Downsizing from his long-time collaborator Jim Taylor, he didn’t quite get it.
“It was a little silly for me,” says the Oscar-winning American filmmaker. “Jim and his brother Doug had knocked around that idea for years, looking to hook me in.”
Their idea certainly defies conventional description. In Downsizing, scientists in Norway discover a technology that permanently shrinks people to five inches in height. It becomes an alternative lifestyle for people in modern society, in a bid to outsmart overpopulation. But it wasn’t until the director was on a flight from Los Angeles to Seoul in 2006 that he really started thinking about it.
“I thought, ‘how would you treat that seriously, and not as a romp?’,” says Payne, 56. “Then the dominoes began to fall into place, and we started to think about all the facets of hideous contemporary life that could be included in this big science-fiction-social-satire net of an idea, and I thought, ‘this could be a good movie’.”
It helps that Payne, whose previous works include the acclaimed Nebraska, Sideways, The Descendants and Election, is the master of films that are humane, humorous and authentic. Those traits are in abundance in Downsizing, even if the film doesn’t fit into a specific genre.
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Even after Payne had agreed to jump on board – he says that after Sideways he “had the urge to do something more ambitious, maybe political” – the film still spent several years in development. “Because the idea is so big, the script took a long time to crack and to get into a directable and affordable length. The problem was, how do you find a story? And who is the character who is going to lead us into this world?”