Alex Ross Perry revealed an unexpected inspiration for “Pavements,” his experimental musical biopic concert film about the American indie band Pavement: Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning epic “Dunkirk.” Speaking at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where he is screening both “Pavements” and “Videohaven,” the indie director called Nolan’s effort “one of the most structurally incredible, miraculous scripts ever written.”
“This is a hundred-million-dollar World War II film that, to me, had to be my influence in making this documentary,” he continued. “It has three storylines: one that takes place over a week, one that takes place over a day, and one that takes place over an hour, and 80% of the way through the movie all of them converge at the same point at the same time. I had never seen anything like this done in a script before. It works when you read it and it works when you watch it. “
Perry explained that “Pavements” came from a sense of “restlessness” both as a filmmaker and a cinephile. “I watch a movie every day and am very bored by a lot of them. I just had to think of something different.”
“I didn’t invent the essay film, I just wanted to make one,” he added. “That’s not an instinct most narrative filmmakers would ever have. It’s like learning another language. I couldn’t learn another language, every attempt I ever made in school failed, but I can learn another filmmaking language and that’s my version of teaching myself something I would like to be fluent in.”
The result, a hybrid film that mixes scripted scenes, archival footage, and a musical stage play, is something the filmmaker says “has never been done before. “I say this humbly, but not that humbly because this was hard as hell to make: You’ve never seen something like [‘Pavements’] because it is not legally clearable except through the loopholes we jumped through. You’ve never seen that ever until I made this movie and I learned the reason for that and it’s that it is legally almost impossible and takes time.”
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Elsewhere in the conversation, which happened alongside British filmmaker and IFFR Tiger Jury member Peter Strickland (“The Duke of Burgundy”), Perry spoke at length about the importance of a good script.
“I can’t believe that I’ve become one of these people as a writer but when I see movies that don’t work for me I just have to say the problem with the movie is the script doesn’t work,” observed the director. “I’m not a very articulate viewer or reviewer of movies but the only thing I can ever articulate is why a script doesn’t work or why a script is exciting to me. Everything in the middle I have no thoughts on.”
Despite refraining from pointing out exactly which film he was referring to, the filmmaker cited an example of a “very popular” film that “came out recently” with an “unforgivable” script.
“In the two hours that you watch the film, if you’ve ever seen another movie, there is not a single moment where you are not one hour ahead of the characters,” he pointed out. “Every second I spent watching this movie was torture because I am not the world’s most prolific viewer but I have seen a movie before. This is something that, to me, is unforgivable and makes a movie unwatchable.”
Being so aware of a script’s needs is both a blessing and a curse to Perry, who mentioned he has become harder on himself “than I ever thought I would be.” “Even watching a minute of ‘Queen of Earth’ I can just see that we filmed a third draft whereas now I wouldn’t even send out something I hadn’t worked on for a long, long time and felt it had been perfected.”
“Previously I was making movies that the joy of them was that they were spontaneous. I wrote it and six months later we were shooting it and that used to be really fun. Now that would horrify me,” concluded the director.
