When Alex Ross Perry set out to make a film about Pavement, he wanted it to be as absurd as the '90s slacker band's lyrics. For the indie director known for “Listen Up Philip” and “Her Smell,” that meant pushing the boundaries of what a film could be.
'Queen of Earth' | Anatomy of a Scene with Director Alex Ross Perry | The New York Times
“Pavements,” which premieres Wednesday in the Venice Film Festival’s Horizons section, is a hybrid documentary-musical-biopic that imagines a world in which Pavement has achieved Rolling Stones-level success. The film follows the group on its 2022 reunion tour, tracks the progress of Perry’s musical “Slanted! Enchanted!” that also premiered that year, takes audiences to a pop-up museum dedicated to the band and presents 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 that seems like a lot for one film, that’s because it is — but Perry tells Variety that was always the plan.
“The idea was, if you were going to make a Pavement movie, what would you make? And my answer was, I would make any kind of rock movie,” Perry says over Zoom with his editor and producer Robert Greene and Spiral Stairs themselves. “That felt to me both like an artistic gimmick on a tightrope and a legitimate exercise in breaking the band’s legacy into different forms and trying to piece them together as a way to achieve some ecstatic truth.”
Greene adds that the goal was to deliver a project that felt like turning on one of Pavement's five records, which were released over a seven-year period between 1992 and the band's breakup in 1999.
