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“False Histories. Corny Music Biopic”: Alex Ross Perry on Pavements
Pavements “I always was hoping that it was music for the future. I mean, I think everyone who’s not that successful in their time tries to think that,” says Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus early on in Pavements, a new hybrid music documentary about the band. The group was certainly successful during their heyday in the ’90s, at least in indie rock terms—a perfect discography that drew near-universal critical acclaim, multiple tours including major international festivals and a hit on MTV—but their stature and popularity has only grown since they broke up in 1999. Beginning in 2002, Matador Records slowly re-released every record in comprehensive deluxe sets and also released a greatest hits compilation timed to their first reunion tour in 2010. When the group reunited again in 2022 for two years of sold-out international dates, they returned on the heels of the unplanned viral success of their 1999 B-side “Harness Your Hopes,” which brought them a younger generation of fans and, per co-founder Scott Kannberg, “breathed new life into the band.” Their most recent shows were often filled with as many teenagers as original Gen X fans; both demographics likely equally appreciated the Malkmus reference in Barbie.
A legacy documentary about the group was almost a foregone conclusion, but—befitting Pavement’s irreverent image, as well as their decidedly undramatic history—that film doesn’t hew to the traditional talking head-style music retrospectives littered across streaming services. Instead, director Alex Ross Perry takes a kaleidoscopic approach to the band by chronicling their career through different artistic mediums, each with their own stylistic bent. Alongside a semi-standard archival account of the band’s past, Pavements incorporates the rehearsals for and musical numbers from Slanted! Enchanted!, an original American Idiot-esque jukebox musical staged by Perry at New York’s Sheen Center; scenes from Range Life, a satirical fake biopic about the band starring Joe Keery as Stephen Malkmus, including behind-the-scenes footage of Keery undergoing Method-style preparation to play the indie rocker; and, finally, the creation and presentation of “Pavements 1933-2022: A Pavement Museum,” a touring, hagiographic pop-up exhibit in the vein of David Bowie Is composed of real and fake artifacts from the band’s career, also assembled and crafted by Perry. Pavements also sets out to refute Beavis and Butthead’s “They need to try harder” thesis through Perry’s elaborate methodology—even the most sarcastic of stunts require a lot of back-end labor—and featuring the band at their most rehearsed as they set out to go on tour in the present day.
I spoke to Perry about how the project arose, his “jaundiced opinion” of music biopics and documentaries and how the band feels about the movie.
Filmmaker: How did this project come about?
Alex Ross Perry: The band got to the point of reuniting for the first time in over a decade. They had the choice every artist and celebrity with a certain stature has: “When do we tell our story? How?” These days, you’re just leaving money on the table if you have that fanbase and choose to create nothing from it—no documentary, no official film or ancillary quasi-autobiography. So, somewhere along the line—I don’t know when or where—those conversations between Matador [Records] and the band existed and somebody decided: “Good idea or not, this is just what people do. Let’s figure out what that would look like.” They went to some producers they had worked with and companies they liked. One of those producers, Danny Gabai from Vice and Pulse Films, thought of me, and said [to the band], “What we’re hearing from you is we don’t want a traditional documentary. We don’t want the talking heads in front of a backdrop with all the young fans talking about how great it was to have their mind blown. You want outside-the-box, something that feels more screenwriter-y than documentary-ish.” Danny brought it to me with that as the prompt, and this caveat that “We’re talking about this with you because in a way Stephen Malkmus, the character, feels not unlike a fictional character that you might have created and put into a movie.” And I said, “That is correct.”
Filmmaker: Did these conversations happen before you did the “Harness the Hopes” music video for them?
Perry: Well before. The music video came about because of this process as a way of soft-launching the collaboration. It’s not that the movie was taking longer than we thought, it was just taking time to raise money and get it together. The video felt like a good way of putting me in creative conversation with the band and releasing a proof of concept of the meta-ness that the movie is going to be. This was peak pandemic—July, August, September 2020. I think we made the video in January 2022; it was released shortly thereafter [in March 2022] and the reunion tour was happening at the same time. By May we had filmed their rehearsals, their reunion and the first show.
Filmmaker: Did the multi-faceted approach for the film—the musical, the museum, the fake biopic—arise from filming the rehearsal and reunion or was that part of the initial conception?
Perry: That was the first idea. I did all these interviews with everybody in February of 2021, about six months after this had been conceptualized and approved by Malkmus through phone calls. I was asking a lot of people the same questions: “If your story was being told through objects, what objects? Do you still have them and, if not, do you have pictures of them?” I see here I have a document dated May 2020, which suggests something we never did where I wrote “Edward Munch-style docudrama, dialogue-free, about the agony of the artist. False histories. Corny music biopic, 20-to-30 minutes of the Hollywood version.” A lot of these are based on Malkmus ideas, and I have a lot of his text messages in this document. I say, “I cannot create the experiences that will inform this, but I can create the semiotic dressing in which we present it,” which I think became the museum. This very early document doesn’t contain any reference to the musical, but this was completed in May of 2020 and it looks like by September of that year, I have documents talking about the musical. The idea was very quickly, “This movie ought to be all of these things.” Shooting those rehearsals in advance of the first shows, we knew that there was more of the movie to make, but every element was hard, complicated and, in some cases, expensive—except showing up where they were and filming them, which was extremely time-sensitive, but by no means difficult or expensive.
Filmmaker: Can you remind me when you staged the musical?
Perry: The first weekend in December 2022 there was a friends-and-family invited dress rehearsal, with maybe two shows Saturday, then a Sunday matinee. We put two shows on sale and sold them out immediately, then added another so that everybody could run through it with lower stakes. One of those days, we performed it privately with just the cameras to make sure we had all the images. When you’re watching, hopefully it doesn’t faze you that you see a shot with the audience in it from the back of the room, then it cuts to the reverse angle where the cameraman is clearly on the stage, where he was not in the previous shot. We needed to, at some point, put a dolly in front of the stage that would block every single person’s view. We need that footage, so we have to do the show. There’s a huge amount in the movie of this private performance, but that’s just the way concert films work.
Filmmaker: Let’s talk about Range Life, the fake biopic. Was the referent for that something like Bohemian Rhapsody?
Perry: Well, I’ve never seen that movie but, even just from a trailer clip on the Oscars, I feel like I’ve seen enough. Those movies have no style. In order to make a piece of pabulum that would reach $100 million worth of people, the movies look like nothing, even if they’re made by compelling filmmakers. Their aesthetic is entirely linked to recreating whatever era they take place in as best as possible. Even when those movies get recognized for a performance, they’re never recognized for the direction, because there just isn’t any. Filming those scenes, which we only did for a few days, was really boring because it was the most traditional form of filmmaking possible, just coverage: his line, his line, wide shot, insert, close up. It was extremely boring, as I imagine making one of those movies would be, but there was just no attempt made to stylize it, because the best trick any of those movies can pull is a long Steadicam walk to the stage or something—which, of course, comprises 50% of Her Smell and was not something I felt was compelling enough to repeat. So, this rule for all that was, “It doesn’t matter what this looks like, we just have to make it.” I have no thoughts on the image. It just has to be a traditional Netflix streaming TV movie, and the only thing I care about is, “What is our B-camera capturing? What moment of the actors interacting before the camera rolls might we steal from this scene as a way of justifying this moment’s inclusion in the final film?”
Filmmaker: Did you see A Complete Unknown?
Perry: I did.
Filmmaker: It’s funny because I was just revisiting Pavements before we got on the phone, and a lot of Joe Keery’s take on Malkmus reminded me of Chalamet’s Dylan.
Perry: Obviously we didn’t know that when we shot that two years ago, but there’s been no shortage of good-natured japery among me, Joe and the other guys concerning some of that movie’s press, which is not a knock against any of the people who spent years making it. The inclusion of Range Life within Pavements is my commentary on the idea that, more often than not, in these films people seem to respond more to the actor’s performance than the filmmaking, the screenwriting, the aesthetic. That’s why I sent Joe a headline [reading] “Chalamet learned harmonica for four years,” and I crossed [“harmonica”] out and [wrote], “Joe Keery learned how to be a slacker for four years.” It becomes like a competition of who can Method the hardest. The audience doesn’t want to know all the work the screenwriter did to create a narrative true to the artist’s spirit and aesthetic. The audience wants to know: how long did this actor learn how to play an instrument? How much can I trust this performance?
Filmmaker: Yeah, when I saw A Complete Unknown with my parents, my dad left the theater in awe that Chalamet was actually doing the singing.
Perry: I will watch these movies if I’m even vaguely interested in them. I watched most of the Bob Marley movie on someone else’s screen on an airplane while listening to something else. I’m just disinterested in a lot of the figures chosen for this treatment, and I’m also disinterested in boring screenwriting. A musician biopic featuring a Baby Boomer-minted subject tends to combine two things I’m disinterested in, which is why I avoid them. Also because they’re often, in the case of something like Bohemian Rhapsody, seemingly quite poorly made or heinously reviewed.
Filmmaker: Many elements of the film superficially play like joke thought experiments: “What if Pavement songs were in a jukebox musical?” “What if Pavement was celebrated in a Bowie-esque museum exhibit?” But each element’s presentation lies on a spectrum of sincerity, with something like the musical as a very earnest exhibition of the group’s music, and the biopic a knowingly sarcastic dig at the band’s image. At the same time, the fact that you commit so hard to all of them—merely by taking the time to cast, rehearse, shoot and/or edit together each segment—negates any accusation of flippancy. Similarly, Pavement has always taken hits for their aloof affect, but no one becomes a touring band for ten years, puts out five studio albums and then reunites twice as a joke.
Perry: Well, if I’m attempting to do something meta and clever, I’m only doing so with the protection that [comes from] a lot of Malkmus’s writing and positioning of himself as a reluctant rock star. He would write songs called “Shoot the Singer” or “Our Singer” or, in the case of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, have two hit songs—“Cut Your Hair” and “Range Life”—that are entirely meta-commentaries on the lived experience of being in a successful band. As such, I felt like we had permission to similarly make a movie that held a mirror up to our process the same way he held a mirror up to his own. That’s not to say—you can look at a decade’s worth of interviews, and I did, and say, “Man, this guy really committed to the bit.” He is clearly a deeply brilliant, articulate and thoughtful artist, and his bit for his entire life is, “If you’re interviewing me, I’m going to act like I don’t know what you’re talking about and I don’t want to be here. I’m gonna act ungrateful and like there is no intentionality behind my work.” And that is a very funny bit, to me, that he has done forever. As he says a few times in the movie, “I try to see myself up there and think of what the singer would do.” It felt like the movie had permission to follow suit in that way.
Filmmaker: After watching so many ’90s interviews with the band where the line of questioning is always, “You seem like you don’t give a shit. Do you even want to be successful?,” it makes me much more sympathetic to Malkmus’s dismissive posture. After all, they’re doing these interviews on MTV, which inherently indicates some baseline professional acumen. If they really didn’t care, they wouldn’t do them at all.
Perry: By 1989, 1990 when the band is formed—certainly by ’92, when they’re really out there—MTV is a decade established. It doesn’t represent the counterculture anymore. It is mainstream music promotional entertainment. Something designed to be an alternative, like Spin magazine, is, by the time the band is functioning, as much of a mainstream staple as Rolling Stone, albeit a mainstream staple that markets itself as the alternative to Rolling Stone. But these things were just undeniable, you had to do them, and it was the last time that it would matter to fight it versus embracing it. By the 2000s, that sellout narrative of, “Well, this band wouldn’t want to do interviews”—it’s more that by then a band of this size would have no home on MTV, no home in the pages of Rolling Stone until a new generation of sort of indie-ish musicians rejuvenated that. At this time, a band of this size, with independent distribution and not very humongous sales, would have been covered and taken seriously by all the music press. They could sell 200,000 albums, be on MTV and be seen as big enough.
Filmmaker: The structure of the film is both fascinating and potentially challenging. Could you talk about the conversations you and producer-editor Robert Greene had about making every aspect of the film legible to an audience?
Perry: This is, in some ways, my first exploration of a form-breaking movie that is both fiction and nonfiction. While I always saw a cohesive movie that somehow contained the actual documentary, the reunion tour, a musical, a scripted film and news reporting of a museum, the key word is I somehow saw it. I could never have told you how, except for the earliest discarded idea that these disparate segments would play out one after another, Mishima-style. The musical, in my earliest imagination, was the beginning of the movie, and it was a 25-minute straight medley of 40 Pavement songs telling a very consolidated version of young guys in an industrial blue-collar town who use music as their ticket out of town. And that is true: That is their story. That is a very simple version of what Spiral [Stairs, moniker for Scott Kannberg] and Malkmus did, but that is literally what happened, and I felt like that was the fodder for a classic, crowd-pleasing Billy Elliot-style musical. I thought starting the movie that way, we both give people the narrative context for who the band was and overdose you on songs. Then I felt like we could tell the New York-era—Crooked Rain, Malkmus working at the museum—through [the museum piece] for 20 minutes. The Wowee Zowee era, which I viewed as the most dramatically compelling and the most cliché, in a way, would be the biopic middle part of the movie. Then the final act of the film would be the reunion.
But: if somebody’s favorite part is over and they have another 90 minutes of the movie, you sold them a bum deal. If somebody only came for the musical, they’re sad it doesn’t come back for 90 minutes. If somebody despises that and sit through half an hour straight of it at the beginning, they’re probably going to leave. This is all bad for the movie. Then it became, “That doesn’t matter. I don’t really have a clear vision for this anymore.” The benefit of shooting it in bits and pieces for over two years is that every piece we filmed was so far removed from the next piece of filming, and certainly the edit, that it helped clarify how you wanted to continue working. The rehearsals were so compelling, and then at the museum, which was the next major thing we did, it became clear that whatever we film on the day with our news reporter will only be as compelling as the actual documentary of this thing being built, which is short—only about five minutes in the movie. But we now know from filming the band: [from] day two of rehearsal to taking the stage again is a dramatic arc. If everything else we film here on out has a version of that arc, we have a structure. Now we know the musical is not what we’re making: We’re making a documentary about making a musical, where we arrive at a musical at the same point in the story that the band takes the stage. By then, you have everything you need to know to understand the lengths that these performers in one strand, the band in one strand, the musical cast in another strand, Joe and the famous actors [in another strand], have gone through to get to the point where it’s showtime. Once we have that multifaceted structure, I said to Robert—who kept saying, “I neither need nor want your input on this edit, because I have been editing a Pavement movie in my head for 30 years”—our structure must mirror the greatest filmmaking structural miracle of the last decade, which is Dunkirk. Let’s just do that, where you have different temporal strands that take place over different lengths of time, and somehow watching that film, they climax at the same time.
Filmmaker: I do like that Dunkirk and Mishima seem to be the two big influences on this film.
Perry: Well, you’re either doing it all at once or one after the other. Even though I’m inspired by it and like the film, I actually don’t remember how the Todd Haynes Dylan movie structures itself. You could convince me that everything’s cut together and the Cate Blanchett part is just a 20-minute short in the middle—I honestly don’t remember. I’ve again used Bob Dylan, who I’m really not a fan of at all, as a comparison point for this only because he has so many films made about him. If you take the Baz Luhrmann Elvis movie—a movie that I basically enjoyed but didn’t need to watch 130 minutes of—if it was like the best 20 minutes, and a documentary about the insane lengths this actor seems to have gone through to play this part, and the shittiest Elvis musical comedy movie, and his comeback show that everyone loves… Not only is that a better sit for me, but human beings are multi-dimensional. If you’re trying to consolidate someone’s life or career in two hours, isn’t the only way to do that to acknowledge that this person was many things to many people at many different points in their life? Pavement’s interest in telling their story on film was motivated by the desire to create that piece of work and their basic lack of interest in micromanaging it, in a way that no other artists, celebrity, estate would ever be OK with.
Filmmaker: One of the framing jokes in the film is that Pavement is “one of the world’s most important and influential bands.” Was there any sort of internal imperative or pressure to explain the group to non-fans?
Perry: Honestly, the pressure came from Robert. Lance Bangs’ Slow Century has footage we use that he provided us, [as well as] the footage he didn’t use, and he’s a partner on the film as well. I was of the opinion: “That already exists. If somebody needs to watch that, they can just get it.” Of course, Robert’s like, “That was put out 20 years ago. You can’t assume a 21-year-old fan is going to have seen that or even knows how to track down a DVD of it. We need to do exactly what that movie did, differently and within our own structure.”
I’ll watch literally any streaming music retrospective documentary about artists I barely care about, just because I enjoy the way these things are made and love reveling in stock footage. These things typically run 90 to 100 minutes; I could cut them down to 30. That’s kind of what we do here with the archival. Still, at the very end of editing, one of Matador’s partners said, “I think you could cut everything out up to the first half hour. Everybody knows all this stuff already.” And I was like, “Well, I agree, but we’re not going to do that.” When I was pushing back on how heavy the movie was with that stuff, Robert said, “We’re making the definitive Pavement movie. Despite what you’re saying about their comparisons culturally and the lessons we’re taking from the preponderance of Bob Dylan media, we have to acknowledge this is not a band that’s gonna get five movies. They’re gonna get the one.” It’s kind of amazing that after Slow Century we’re doing another one; it’s only because it’s been so long and the band changed so much in their reputation that we’re doing this. There’s not going to be another movie. So, we have to do everything in this that five other Pavement movies would do. Would the movie be 25 minutes shorter without that narrative of the band? Does the semiotic trickery of the musical, the biopic, the museum, make sense without having told that story? Probably, but then the movie is more of an experiment than the definitive movie about a definitive band, and we needed it to be both.
Filmmaker: I rarely have this criticism, but I think if you excised the traditional documentary parts, this would be an exclusively fans-only proposition, whereas now it can at least somewhat connect with curious audiences.
Perry: It’s a tough line to walk, because you have to be responsible for the psychopath maniac fans who are going to see it anyway and find fault with it no matter what, and their husband, wife, partner, significant other who they’ve dragged along who’s like, “I’m seeing some movie about my partner’s favorite band and I’ve always zoned out when they talked about Pavement.” You have to make the movie for both, and I know this because the abundance of so-so documentaries that my wife and I watch are often chosen based on one or the other of us having an interest in the subject matter and the other one not. We have watched ’90s fashion films where I’m completely lost and she’s like, “You don’t remember how significant this collection is?” I’m like, “I don’t know what any of this is!” Watching Unzipped, I was like, “This is working for me because of Ellen Kuras’ cinematography and the ’90s mood that’s being evoked.” She’s like, “This is working for me because I can’t believe I’m getting inside visuals on things I only experienced from the outside.” Then we’ll watch a documentary about a musician where I’m like, “This person is hugely significant and crucial to me,” and she’s like, “I don’t know who this is. let’s find out.” If it’s a great movie, we’re both satisfied, and if it’s fan service, I’m like, “I love that,” and she’s like, “I could have not watched that.” That’s the way it is.
We’re making all of this for a fan base that is rabid, but also a fan base that has changed radically even in the five years we were making the movie. When we started, there was no “Harness Your Hopes.” The conceit that this is the most important band was a narrative flight of fancy by the time the movie was completed, that was almost so much of a given to most of the audience that it’s not even a joke to posit that this band is that significant. Everybody agrees on one thing: the band could have been bigger. Why didn’t they ever cross over and have that moment where the public at large saw them the way music critic nerds saw them? By the time the movie was finished, that wasn’t a question anymore, because that exact thing had happened in real time while we were making the movie. That was not a foregone conclusion.
Filmmaker: When did the use of split screen come about?
Perry: It’s sort of necessary because of the surplus of images, but also, if you look at the very collage-based nature of their album artwork, which was made by Malkmus, and the way that that layered torn-off pieces of paper with writing on them, the lo-fi zine aesthetic was very central to the early identity of the band’s visuals. That inspired me and Robert; it felt very allowable that we could create a similar kind of collage-montage, layers-upon-layers representation of the band’s style in the filmmaking language.
Filmmaker: What has been the response from the band?
Perry: All along, before the movie existed, their response was, “We don’t really get why we would get a movie. We’re OK with it, but really, what is the appeal?” They were saying this without having played a concert or seen each other in 10 years, and that’s remained their attitude. Now, obviously, we’ve had nice times with all of the band at the New York Film Festival, and most of the band at Venice as well, and other members have attended other screenings. Malkmus has gone to other screenings that are convenient for him in Chicago, and most of the rest of the band has appeared at other events. I think a lot of it is, this is a ’90s mentality. You have to stand there with your arms crossed until someone else says something is cool, then you can admit you like it too. For the last year of finishing the movie, as it went from a three-hour to two-hour movie, if you’re talking to people whose response all along is, “Why us?”—imagine watching a three-hour version, then a month later watching a two-hour-and-50-minute version, then a month later watching a two-hour-and-40-minute version. By the eighth time you’re watching this, all these people were like, “This doesn’t matter. Our story is not interesting. This is too much fuss made over such an ordinary band.” Then, by the time the movie’s acclaimed at film festivals that would never show a music documentary unless it was a real film, and every friend of these people is like, “This is a real film. You really created something very unique,” suddenly everyone’s like, “Yeah, I know. That’s what we wanted all along.”
Spiral is a guy who cares deeply about the band’s position and marketing in the world, and the band’s prominence in the landscape of contemporary and non-contemporary indie history, and Malkmus is not. Malkmus’ position is, he’s not a filmmaker, he doesn’t want to watch cuts, he doesn’t want to look at his face for two hours, he doesn’t want to do press and he doesn’t want to do all the things that he’s been not wanting to do since 1989. He wants to play guitar for fans. That’s all he cares about. This is just this ancillary thing that exists completely outside of his experience of what it means to be this musician. But because the only thing he really respects is hard work—people who work hard, people who go the extra mile, which is a very anti-slacker attitude—as a perfectionist, he cares really deeply about putting in the work. He has acknowledged to me and Robert, “You guys really worked hard on this,” and that’s all I care about. And his family likes it, so it’s fine with him.
Filmmaker: Was he watching cuts?
Perry: No, never.
Filmmaker: That’s what I thought.
Perry: Not a single one. I don’t know how anybody could watch this movie and think anything other than like… You know, fans who are absurdly protective of him are like, “Man, he must hate this.” And it’s like, “You watched the movie, right? He hated everything.” He hated playing the Tibetan Freedom concert. He hated playing at the first Coachella. I’m looking here at my last text message with him: “[Matador co-founder] Chris Lombardi said press has been positive, which is kool,” spelled with a “k.”
Filmmaker: Was the first footage he ever saw from the film at the Nitehawk screening of Range Life?
Perry: I think so. I don’t think we had been screening footage yet because I was very early in the process. It would almost certainly had to have been the first time anybody saw anything. I guess we filmed everything by then, but we hadn’t really started editing anything together. So, they wouldn’t have seen any of their actual documentary material, although there was about 20 minutes of it in the Nitehawk presentation just for fun and audience appreciation. There was not a frame of the musical and museum. It was a 70/30 amalgamation of tour moments, rehearsal moments to get people pumped up, some archival and then a lot of the nonsense and buffoonery of Range Life.
Filmmaker: Do you have a favorite Pavement album?
Perry: If you asked me in 1999, I would have probably said Brighten the Corners just because it was the one that was contemporary to my fandom. But we went out of our way to structure the movie both literally and aesthetically on Wowee Zowee, which Robert claims is his favorite album of all time, and an album I have a lot of appreciation for just because of its deliberate obstinance in completely pumping the brakes on the success of the first two. But also it’s an amazing album; it’s just not a perfect 12-song, no-skips album. We really wanted to look to that for inspiration, so it’s become my favorite, not because of the 18 songs contained within but because of what that album means and represents for this band’s story. Putting that out was the opposite of everything everyone should have done at that time, and that, to me, is worthy of praise.
Filmmaker: It’s kind of funny that Wowee has becomes something of a universal favorite amongst the younger sect. It vaguely connects to Malkmus’ idea of creating music for the future.
Perry: It’s a fun lesson: whatever is a stubborn disaster at the time can easily be seen as an undeniable, default answer for the best album a generation later.
