By Victoria Melkonyan
“The good news is that anyone can learn how to make a movie in about one week,” award-winning U.S. director Alexander Payne told students hoping to break into the film industry at Yerevan’s TUMO educational center last Thursday. “Just start shooting!”
Payne was in Armenia to serve as jury president for the international competition at this year’s Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival (GAIFF).
As part of the program, TUMO students had the opportunity to ask Payne about his creative inspirations, personal experiences in the film industry, and advice for emerging creatives.
“The technical part of filmmaking is the least important part. The important part is the humanity and the spirit of the filmmaker,” he said in response to a student’s question about his preferred filmmaking methods.
Payne’s belief in the significance of a filmmaker’s personal drive was a recurrent theme throughout the conversation.
“A great example I saw two days ago was the Armenian film “1489.” [Director Shoghakat Vardanyan] didn’t go to school to learn how to become a filmmaker. She was living something, had to express herself, had a telephone… and she made a film because of who she is as a human being and as an artist,” he said. The award-winning documentary captures Vardanyan and her family’s heart-wrenching experience following the disappearance of her brother, Soghomon Vardanyan, during the 2020 Artsakh war.
Payne also described his directorial process, telling CivilNet, “It has to do with the sensitivity of the filmmaker… All of these things are fragile decisions arrived [at] day by day over the course of a year.”
Aside from his role on the jury, Golden Apricot presented Payne with “Parajanov’s Thaler,” an honorary achievement award the festival gives every year for “outstanding artistic contribution[s] into world cinema.” He was also presented with a hand-woven ceremonial carpet.
In his nearly four-decade career, Payne has had his films nominated for Academy Awards a total of 19 times, including two wins for best adapted screenplay.
Payne’s invitation to Armenia this year comes on the heels of a successful awards season and widespread critical acclaim for his 2023 film “The Holdovers.” That film, his newest, was screened in Yerevan alongside a number of his other films as part of a retrospective.
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