“Wake up and pay attention.”—Alexander Payne

Today on NPR, Susan Stamberg had this exchange with Alexander Payne, the screenwriter, producer, and director of The Descendants:

In [The Decendants’] powerful final scene, the 10-year-old daughter watches TV on the couch, wrapped in a quilt. Her father enters with two bowls of ice cream. He sits, and pulls the quilt over to cover his legs, too. The older daughter wanders in, and Dad moves over for her, covers her with the quilt, and hands her the ice cream as the credits begin. It’s a coda, Payne calls it, a landing strip, to bring the film in.

“When writing the screenplay, I thought rhythmically the film would need one more scene,” Payne says. “I had no idea if it would work or not.”

Payne wasn’t sure until they actually shot the scene — but it does work. In this almost wordless, two-minute scene, you finally see them become a family through the most ordinary gestures — adjusting a quilt, passing bowls of strawberry and mocha chip ice cream.

“Well, that’s what life is — this collection of extraordinarily ordinary moments,” Payne says. “We just need to pay attention to them all. Wake up and pay attention to how beautiful it all is.”

The interview is titled The Extraordinary, Ordinary Life of Alexander Payne.. Though Payne could be on the winning end of three Academy Awards Sunday (producer, director, screenwriter), he spends much of his time in his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. Pretty ordinary, huh?

Scott W. Smith