We interview with Pavements director Alex Ross Perry and producer/editor Robert Greene about their “definitive Pavement movie,” which had its World Premiere at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.
At some point in this interview director Alex Ross Perry and producer/editor Robert Greene, they talk about realizing that they were making the “definitive Pavement movie.” This is the perfect way to describe what they’ve achieved with their Pavements, which has just had its World Premiere at the Venice Film Festival and will continue its festival run in New York and London. Self-described as a “documentary that may or may not be entirely true, may or may not be totally sincere, and may or may not be more about the idea of the band—or any band—than a history of Pavement,” Pavements is the rare music documentary that, instead of telling us about a band, embodies the band’s essence with its existence.
Perry and Greene take full advantage of the medium to deliver an odyssey of a documentary that, as unconventional and insane as it is, is the perfect film to explore a band that you either already adore or is about to become your new obsession. That band, Pavement – consisting of singer-songwriter-guitarist Stephen Malkmus, guitarist Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg, bassist Mark Ibold, drummer Steve West, percussionist Bob Nastanovich, and, in their first songs, original drummer Gary Young – was highly influential in the US lo-fi indie music scene.
Pavements puts together four things – some of which took place, some of which nearly did – celebrating “The World’s Most Important & Influential Band”’s reunion in 2022: a reunion tour, a museum exhibition in Tribeca, a rock biopic called Range Life, and a stage musical. Astonishingly, the filmmakers managed to combine all this footage together in a way that not only makes sense but is consistently entertaining, all while “showing, not telling” you who Pavement are. At the Venice Film Festival, we spoke with Alex Ross Perry and Robert Greene about how the movie took shape, what they like about Pavement, why fans are important in Pavements, and more. Read the interview below!
Alex Ross Perry & Robert Greene on the Venice Premiere of Pavements and their approach to the film
Thank you for this incredible film! I watched it at one of the press screenings, and it was so funny, because you could immediately tell which audience members were Pavement fans, as we were the ones laughing the loudest! What was the premiere like?
Alex Ross Perry: It was pretty fun! I didn’t know what to really think: I don’t know the ecology of this festival [Pavements was Perry’s first film to premiere at the Venice Film Festival]. I’ve mostly been seeing disgustingly wealthy, middle-aged European people everywhere I went, so I was pretty surprised to get into our room and see hundreds of people under the age of forty! I didn’t know that there were any of them here! [laughs] That was rewarding.
Robert Greene: It’s an amazing place to premiere a film. That theater [Sala Darsena] is incredible, and the fact that people give you a standing ovation before you even show them the movie… It really makes you feel like, “Oh, just the fact that we’re even here is a celebration!” And we had several members of the band [in attendance]! They had seen multiple versions of the film, but not the final one. Having them experience that in that cinema was really special.
You’ve mentioned just now that there were multiple versions of the film. How did you even approach putting this film together, given all the material you had and all the subjects that this movie explores?
A.R.P.: Well… I just let Robert do it! He really wanted to do it by himself this time. Usually, we sit in an editing room together, but this was too emotional for him – to have the fulfillment of his lifelong dream to make a narrative fiction hybrid about his favorite band since he was eighteen years old. He just requested to basically be alone with the material for a year and a half.
R.G.: The emotion was that I just didn’t want Alex talking to me the whole time because he’s a millennial, so you can’t really trust his ideas about Pavement, you know? [said with irony] They’re corrupt by the “evil poptimist movement that came after Pavement;” he’s got a broken sensibility and doesn’t really understand what Pavement really is. I was like, “Just you stay in New York, make several other movies, and I’ll be here meditating and thinking hard about what it means to be a Pavement fan and do a lot of split screens”. [laughs] No, that’s all actually true, but the truth is that we wanted the movie to be about the ideas of the music. It sounds like you’re a Pavement fan, right?
I am, yes!
R.G.: So you know that [the band] is deeply silly, deeply ironic, deeply sincere. And then, as Alex likes to point out, there’s a punk song, but the punk song is a “punk” song. Then there’s a country song, but it’s not a country song; it’s a “country” song. But somehow it’s still all emotional, and deeply felt. Malkmus [as in Stephen Malkmus, main songwriter, lead singer, and guitarist of Pavement] is making fun of everything and, at the same time, is somehow also saying a lot about life and what it means to grow up.
There are several lyrics in “Wowee Zowee” [the band’s third studio album, released in 1995] that are about making fun of Spiral [Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg, guitarist, songwriter, and occasional vocalist of Pavements] for getting married, for example! [laughs] But it’s all buried in this weird, slippery poetry. We were just after that. The band got involved in different stages; it was really their reaction to the different stunts that Alex was trying to lead the way in pulling off that helped us figure out how those stunts could relate to who they are.
Because they’re kind of opaque, at the start of this process: they’re just normal dudes, so they’re not the easiest to dive into. I remember at the beginning of the process, I was like, “Wait a minute. I don’t know that I want to know Malkmus anymore that I already know him.” I think of him as a genius, a poet, and this great guitar player who wrote some of my favorite songs of all time. But is he more of a jerk than I think he is? Is he more boring? Is he more exciting? I didn’t know if I wanted to know more. What I liked was that, as I got to know the band more, I liked them more. The rest of the band really loves Malkmus, and I found myself feeling those real affections.
Every documentary, in some ways, is a process; it’s about the making of something. But you’re also trying to capture the full feelings that you have about the [film’s subject]. Those include Alex’s thoughts about structure, stunts, writing, creating character, and your relationship with the band – including mine. And then, the band itself, the fans, and all these other people. So that’s what we were trying to get in there.
A.R.P.: I could never have told you what the finished edit of this movie would necessarily be – certainly not beat by beat, because it didn’t exist. There are fifty credible versions of what we shot that could be edited and screened and released completely believably as fine documentaries. The complication is making four or five of those [versions] at the same time. That was the idea. I could never have said that there needed to be a balance – for example, that we’d need to see the rehearsals X amount and the musical Y amount, and then the actors too – and neither could Robert. He was just trying everything. What if we move this here? Oh, now it’s too far away. Now we don’t see a musical for 25 minutes. You know, this and that: it’s just exploration, noodling around until it gets there.
Fan Culture and Cultural Storytelling in Pavements
I love that you both mentioned the fans several times, as I really felt that the film was made with them in mind. Among other things, it contains a rock biopic, a musical, and an exhibition – in the press notes, you even mentioned liking the David Bowie Is Exhibition, which is such a great example of something with so much material that really got through to the fans. It feels like the film is not only a celebration of the band, but also of their fans.
Alex Ross Perry: For me, as a fan of cultural storytelling, it’s the celebration of going to a museum exhibit to see the work and the life of an artist you love. I have had that experience many times, and I desperately wanted to have that experience as a creator. I know what my takeaway from the Bowie Exhibit was, the two times I went, and it’s different than yours and than everybody else’s. The most important thing somebody saw could be something I don’t even remember, and vice versa, which becomes this kind of amorphous creative project, which [the Bowie Exhibition] has been for four years. That, to me, is a wonderful parallel for how I like to think Pavement could be seen by at least some of their fans: this big, ambitious, incredibly poppy and accessible, but also very conceptual and music critic friendly thing that’s one of a kind. And the movie just had to also be one of a kind.
Robert Greene: The label, Matador Records, gave us a lot of trust. I don’t think any other label, or any other band, would let us do the stuff that Alex had conceived of. Early on, I realized I didn’t really want to make the film for people who will never like Pavement; I wanted to make it for Pavement fans, or people who could conceivably become fans. But fan service is an interesting thing, when you talk about Pavement, because we couldn’t do anything close to the normal, boring thing. Some of the things we did in the movie were very obvious and some not so obvious: even the font choice is a reference to some other thing that was made. With Teddy Blanks, our brilliant graphic designer and title designer – he’s did a lot of things, including the Barbie font! – we thought deeply about what we wanted to reference, even in the font choices.
And Pavement fan service is this, actually. It’s a celebration, it makes fun of, it’s deeply felt: it’s all those things at once. If you’re a fan of the band, you’re a fan of ideas. You’re a fan of this thing that is five, and now six people together, who are greater than the sum of their parts. It does this magic thing that’s inexplicable, with Malkmus at the head. We had to serve the smartest fans, I think! [laughs] To do that, we had to make the smartest film.
Alex Ross Perry & Robert Greene on Gary Young and Realizing They Were Making the “Definitive Pavement Movie”
How did you decide how much of Pavement’s first drummer Gary Young to include in the film?
Alex Ross Perry: That was tricky. There’s another movie that’s all about Gary [Louder Than You Think, 2023], which goes into the Gary story, and another film about Pavement was also made twenty years ago [Pavement: Slow Century, 2002] by Lance Banks, who’s one of the creative collaborators on our film. That movie gives people a very literal Pavement movie experience, and we didn’t want to replicate that. [How to include Gary] was a hard thing for me to figure out, personally, because I didn’t talk to him before he died [in August 2023].
In my initial conception, during my interview period and as I was building up the idea of the biopic and rock biopic, there was no need [to talk to him], because he was around at a time when the band was probably the least well known they ever were. His element of that story had nothing to do with anything that I was attempting to build, except for wanting to include pieces of his narrative in the museum, which was great, because he gave weird stuff out to people. If I’d known what the movie would be, ultimately, yeah, there would have been scripted Gary scenes, or at least the illusion of them. But that really just emerged from Robert realizing very early on in his joyful, solitary editing which kind of movie we were going to make.
He just called me at some point was like, “Okay, we have to realize we are making the definitive Pavement movie”. That was never something I said, or thought, or wanted to do. I just didn’t think about it. But then Robert was like, “This is the only Pavement movie that’s ever going to get made after this. We’re making the definitive one. We don’t need anyone else to open that memory back up. This is the movie, and we need to do that.” That was ultimately probably the right call. It was just a funny thing to realize, literally halfway through the process.
Robert Greene: The thing is, this is a band about ideas. It’s a band about protecting ideas, in a way: they’re really excited about ideas. I think their first idea was that the only guy in Stockton who could record their songs [when the band was formed, in 1989] was Gary Young. He had his own idea, which was, “I am a badass rock and roll drummer, and these nerd kids [Stephen Malkmus and Scott Kannberg, who were 23 years old at the time] are making noise rock”. But if you listen to those first couple of records, and definitely “Slanted and Enchanted” [Pavement’s first studio album, released in 1992], Gary is such an important part of what makes that sound.
To me, it was that the people and the ideas are always bigger than the “dumb” version. Those early records that are noise records sound really good, because he recorded them like he would record a local punk band, or a local heavy metal band. That’s the secret: it’s better than what Spiral or Malkmus could have ever even thought about doing. If you think about it, it’s a band of sounds, of music, of ideas. Gary was important to that. And also, the band members are really protective of him. I think [if we decided to tell Gary’s story in detail in the film too], they would have been like, “You’ve left something out.” But it was great for us that there was this really great other documentary already covering his whole life.
Alex Ross Perry & Robert Greene on Pavement Songs They Like
We don’t have much time left, but here’s what I really want to ask you: What’s the first song that got you into Pavement, and what’s your favorite Pavement song now?
Robert Greene: I love that.
Alex Ross Perry: The first one, for me, was “Stereo,” just on the radio. At the time, I was listening to the radio… probably eight hours a day. And my favorite now… That’s a tough one for me, at the moment.
“Give it a Day” has long been a favorite that I fought to include in the musical. That’s my “Harness your Hopes:” [a song originally recorded for the album “Brighten The Corners” (1997) but that was only released years later on the CD of “Spit on a Stranger” (1999) and then became very popular in 2017] the B-side that I think should be huge. I saw them eight times while filming this movie, and they played it the last time I saw them. I was like, I can’t believe I finally got it.
R.G.: My first favorite was probably just hearing “Silent Kid” or something. But then, “In The Mouth a Desert” is my favorite song of all time. But I will say, the one regret of the whole process [of editing Pavements] is that somehow I couldn’t figure out a way to get “Easily Fooled” in there, which is a B-side [of Wowee Zowee], and it’s named three different things. There was a mythical version that was recorded – I’ve only ever heard it on tape – which now you could find one of the reissues. I was like, “It’s a song about fooling people. How could we not get this in the movie?” But that was because every single bit of the songs we use are actually making the narrative go forward. I’m using the songs in the edit to be a propulsion of story, so it just never fit. It’s a little funny because I love that song.
Thank you so much for speaking with us!
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Pavements had its World Premiere at the Venice Film Festival on August 4, 2024. The film will be screened at the New York Film Festival on October 2 and at the BFI London Film Festival on October 17. Read our review of Pavements!
Header credits: Poster of Pavements (Courtesy of the Venice Film Festival) / Alex Ross Perry, Robert Greene and producer Craig Butta on the red carpet for Pavements at the Venice Film Festival (A. Avezzù, La Biennale di Venezia – ASAC)
