Inside ‘Pavements’: How Alex Ross Perry Made an Unprecedented Music Film as Ironic — and Sincere — as the Band Itself
When Alex Ross Perry set out to make a film about Pavement, he wanted it to be as absurd as some of the ’90s slacker band’s lyrics. For the indie director, known for “Listen Up Philip” and “Her Smell,” that meant pushing the very boundaries of what a film could be.
“Pavements,” premiering on Wednesday in the Horizons section of Venice Film Festival, is a documentary-musical-biopic hybrid that imagines a world where Pavement has achieved Rolling Stones-level success. The film follows the group on its 2022 reunion tour, tracks the progress of Perry’s “Slanted! Enchanted!” musical that also premiered that year, takes the audience inside a pop-up museum dedicated to the band and pitches a tongue-in-cheek biopic starring “Stranger Things” breakout Joe Keery as lead singer Stephen Malkmus and Nat Wolff as guitarist Scott Kannberg, aka Spiral Stairs. If it seems like that’s a lot for one film, that’s because it is — but Perry tells Variety that was always the plan.
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“The idea was like, what would you make if you made a Pavement movie? And my answer was, I would make every kind of rock movie,” Perry says over Zoom alongside his editor and producer Robert Greene and Spiral Stairs himself. “That, to me, felt both like a high-wire artistic gimmick and a justifiable exercise in breaking the band’s legacy up into different shapes and trying to put it together as a means of achieving some ecstatic truth.”
Greene adds that the goal was to deliver a project that felt like flipping on one of Pavement’s five records, released over a short seven-year span between 1992 and the band’s 1999 breakup.
“The band uses all these super self-aware references to other bands and other kinds of music and is super ironic in that way and also deeply sincere at the same time,” Greene says. “And when Alex brought the idea, it was like, that’s exactly what we could do here. We could be ironic and sincere, exactly like what it feels like to listen to a Pavement record.”
The band was first approached in 2019 by its longtime label, Matador Records, with the concept of making a film back before discussions of a full reunion tour even began. “We were like, ‘Yeah, fine, but we don’t want to be in it,'” Kannberg recalls with a laugh. (The lyric “You’ve been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life” from the band’s 1997 song “Shady Lane” comes to mind.)
Once Perry came on board, the band had been tapped for two 2020 reunion shows at Primavera Sound to mark its 30th anniversary — but then the pandemic happened, and plans were pushed. But it was during what Perry describes as the “COVID vacuum” when the magic really happened and he was able to fully develop his unique approach to the film. Pavement also strangely blew up on TikTok with the “Brighten the Corners” B-side “Harness Your Hopes,” bringing newfound recognition from Gen Z and reigniting love from older listeners. By the time Pavement played its reunion tour in 2022, the band meant something totally different in the cultural zeitgeist.
“When we started talking, these guys hadn’t seen each other in 10 years and they were going to do two shows. And by the time we were filming, there were 40 shows booked and indisputably the biggest tangible success of their career, in a weird way,” Perry says. “Some of these gimmicks that I thought of in 2020 — what if Pavement had a museum, what if Pavement had a musical — were 75% more probable by the time we did them because Pavement meant something so different by 2022.”
One of the most entertaining gimmicks in the film is the biopic of the band, which is presented in meta fashion as the audience sees Keery method-acting as Malkmus and scenes are presented with “for your consideration” pasted over top of them. In addition to Wolff as Spiral Stairs, Fred Hechinger plays all-purpose member Bob Nastanovich, Logan Miller is bassist Mark Ibold and Griffin Newman takes on drummer Steve West.
Perry thought a “treacly, cliché, paint-by-numbers, cookie-cutter Pavement biopic was a funny thing to explore,” and immediately had Keery as Malkmus in mind. Without him involved, Perry says he would have scrapped the concept entirely.
“It just wouldn’t have been worth doing because he’s exactly the guy in the real world, in Hollywood, who would be getting an offer — like when we were doing this, New York Magazine’s website ran fan-casting for a Sublime biopic, and they put Joe in it,” Perry says. “He has too much integrity as an actor to take an offer like that seriously, but he has exactly the right amount of creative curiosity to play that part in quotation marks.”
In fact, Perry says “all these guys are up for these roles for real,” revealing that Wolff was “supposed to be” in James Mangold’s Bob Dylan movie “A Complete Unknown.”
“The whole time we were shooting, every one of them had to at some point duck out to audition for the ‘SNL’ movie, which none of them got,” Perry adds with a laugh. “It just all made perfect sense.”
While the biopic may be pure parody, the “Slanted! Enchanted!” musical portion of the film is where the sincerity shines through. Perry wrote and directed the jukebox musical — his first foray into musical theater — which premiered off-Broadway in 2022 and starred Michael Esper, Zoe Lister-Jones and Kathryn Gallagher. In “Pavements,” viewers are taken behind-the-scenes of Perry’s process adapting the band’s songs into the medium alongside composers Keegan DeWitt and Dabney Morris, breaking down the tunes into such meticulous detail that it’s almost comedic. Despite musical theater seeming almost antithetical to Pavement’s ethos, the show debuted to glowing reviews. This didn’t surprise Perry.
“What’s a great musical but great melodies and great lyrics? And those are there,” he says. “You can’t see those as clearly in a concert hall because you’re there for a rock show, but when you take these elements apart and you put them back together, it’s like, ‘Oh, these are perfect melodies and perfect lyrics.'”
Kannberg, who attended the musical’s premiere with the rest of the band, says seeing his music translated to the stage gave him a fresh perspective on the songs, even after all these years.
“It had been so long since I listened to Steve’s lyrics and they really stood out, how great they were, and the musical performances made that happen. So I concentrated more on that then, ‘Oh, this is ridiculous,'” he says. “It kind of made sense to me that, yeah, there should be a musical of these songs because they’re great songs. It’s like, why not? Why shouldn’t there be a Pavement musical?”
Now, as the film prepares to premiere at Venice, Pavement is still riding the high of its second act — “Harness Your Hopes” went viral on TikTok once again earlier this year, and the band is playing a headlining slot at Chicago’s Riot Fest next month. Oh, and last year, Malkmus was also name-dropped in a little movie called “Barbie,” which is mentioned in “Pavements” with a sweet scene of the band meeting director Greta Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach.
“I would have never in my wildest dreams been like, ‘We’ll get a Malkmus joke in a billion-dollar Hollywood movie,'” Perry laughs. “Like, I never would have even gone that far, but we got that before we finished, so it really helped us out a lot.”
Reflecting on the entire filmmaking process, Perry says: “We said, what if we made a movie where Pavement were so iconic and important to culture at large that they not only get a doc about their reunion, but they get a museum, a musical and a biopic? And by the time we finished this thing, five days ago, they are that, and they’ve been that for two years. And it’s a joke without a punchline now, because that exactly happened in tandem with us making this movie.”
Perry, Greene and the band will be in attendance at Venice, with Greene and Kannberg both bringing their teenage daughters (who are huge Pavement fans).
“I mean, it’s pretty surreal. I knew watching it people would dig it and I don’t know the film world at all,” Kannberg says. “But yeah, I guess when they show the movie in the theater there, I’ll start crying.”
For Perry, premiering at Venice has given him confidence that he accomplished his intention of making a “cinematic film” as opposed to just another rock doc.
“Your Venices, your Berlins, they play films — they don’t play these self-generated, autobiographical, promotional pieces of marketing,” Perry says. “There’s a lot of stuff in this movie that I’m quite proud of … and getting to play here is like, I don’t think other people making this movie would have gotten it this far in a serious presentation.”
Greene adds that premiering at Venice is “just a perfect, unpredictable thing for this film.”
“Everything about this started out as, ‘I don’t know, who the hell knows if that will work but let’s do it, why not?’ And then it becomes this other thing,” he says. “I think going to Venice is just the final step of that.”
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