Q: Fifteen years later, do you feel Mono No Aware “melancholy at the fleeting nature of things”—more or less strongly?
ALEXANDER PAYNE: I feel it more strongly—how could I not?—but the increased sensation is now accompanied by increased acceptance of it, and of death. I think in my twenties, when I made this film—and stole the term from discussions of Ozu’s work—I was looking at it more than feeling it. What I was feeling more at the time was something I feel less of today—the jealousy and rage and insecurity that can follow in the wake of first love, if you can call it love. The film served as a way for me to try to gain distance from all that by turning it into a comedy. A couple of my closest friends still prefer Martin to my feature films so far because, despite its primitiveness or perhaps because of it, they feel I am more naked here.
Q: Fifty minutes is an uncommon length for a film. Did you ever feel pressure to lengthen Martin or shorten it? Do you ever wish you could release a forty-minute feature?
AP: While I was making The Passion of Martin at UCLA Film School, I was very aware that it would be probably the only time in my life I would be completely free as a filmmaker and have no imposed guidelines of any sort. The film’s odd length is a result of that. I wanted the film to be exactly the length it wanted to be. Later of course, I found that its duration—too short for a feature, too long for a short—hindered its being accepted into certain festivals, and more than a few times I was encouraged either to cut the film down or shoot additional scenes. But that was out of the question—what steps would you take if your child was too short or too tall? As for commercial feature films, well, I do wish we still had B pictures that could be around sixty-two minutes like in the old days. Films are best when they are exactly the length they want to be, and I dislike prejudice against either short films or long films based solely upon perception of their length. The Canadian short Ryan gives you the world in thirteen minutes, as does Paths of Glory in eighty-eight, Godfather II in two hundred. These are all perfect films.
Q: Anything else to add?
AP: I must add that The Passion of Martin is very much inspired by the landmark Argentine novel El Túnel (The Tunnel) by Ernesto Sábato. I wonder whether it is as widely read today as it was twenty-five years ago, when I was in college. It is to Latin American letters what The Stranger is to European—the terse, jolting, existentialist post-war novel that can be read as a monstrous comedy.
click here to see where to watch or .
Ready to Watch Wholphin, Season 3, Episode 2?