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Alex Ross Perry’s new Pavement movie Pavements is premiering today at Venice Film Festival, and the first clip from the film has emerged online. We’ve been hearing for a while that the movie is an unconventional hybrid documentary/biopic and that it involves some elements like a pop-up museum featuring real and fake artifacts (which actually did briefly open in New York), a musical featuring the band’s songs (which also was staged in New York for real), and a big-budget Hollywood biopic. This scene goes a long way toward explaining how the movie is going to work, as do new comments from Perry.
“You’re only going to get to make one Pavement movie,” Perry tells Vanity Fair. “This isn’t Scorsese getting to make his fourth and fifth Dylan film. So why don’t I just make every Pavement movie that I, as a fan, would ever want to watch — or hate-watch.” In today’s scene, we get footage of a young Pavement hanging out with a voiceover from Malkmus talking about how the band used to be prideful little fucks, followed by a dramatic reenactment in which Joe Keery, in character as Malkmus, takes a call from Matador Records bosses Chris Lombardi and Gerard Cosloy, played by Jason Schwartzman and Tim Heidecker respectively. The Matador guys are excited to tell Malkmus that Pavement have been offered to perform on an episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by Quentin Tarantino, but Malkmus is nonplussed.
Did this actually happen? Perry says no, it is an invented scenario that represents lots of similar real-life situations. “Every music biopic is blending the relationship between history and fiction,” he told VF. “If you think the scenes in these movies happened, you’re a fool. This is a composite scene. We don’t need to show the seven things he turned down, so we just combine them all into turning down the biggest thing that never got offered.” It certainly feels true to the spirit of the band, and Keery especially nails Malkmus’ personal affect.
Perry’s artist’s statement from the Venice Film Festival website also provides some insight into his goals here, and it’s got me super excited to watch this film:
The music documentary has run out of gas. The musician biopic seems doomed to be a part of our lives forever, the lowest form of highbrow storytelling. Yet, against my better judgement, I love all of these movies that are rarely very good and seldom qualify as cinema. I love-to-hate clichéd storytelling in phoney baloney biopics. I will watch any archival documentary that invites me to revel in the aesthetics of a bygone era that I miss dearly. With Pavements, I wanted to explore my dubious passion for all of this and make a film in a directing style free from the pressure of “the shot” or “the take.” My goal was to not direct scenes or shots but to shape entire experiences and allow them to be documented naturally— such as the opening of a museum or the opening night of a musical—creating storytelling that unfolds in public yet is all done for a film. Only the nonsense biopic scenes would be filmed “normally”; true to that genre, the images are unremarkable, and the coverage is endlessly traditional. Pavements is four or five films rolled into one because I wish that all musical biopics and standard-issue documentaries were 30 minutes long. I’d watch more of them that way. There has never been a band like Pavement, and I hope there has never been a film like Pavements. It both is and is not. It presupposes that an iconic band deserves all the cultural victories typically afforded to much more financially successful artists. But what I learned while making the museum and the musical, and thus the film, is that Pavement deserve these tributes. It is time to ask questions about how stories about musicians are told and sold and for us as the audience to demand more innovation in our biographical portraits.
The video is not embeddable, so if you want to see it you’ll have to go to Vanity Fair.