Payne’s Price: $10 Million Not Enough to Lure Director to Magical Realism Epic ‘100 Years of Solitude

MORELIA.– Alexander Payne, two-time Oscar winner for Best Adapted Screenplay for Between cups the The descendantshas made a small space in his agenda, which includes leading the Mexican Feature Film Jury within the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM) to offer a conversation yesterday with the public and talk about his interests.

What does cinema mean to him and why has he become so interested in Latin American culture to the point of speaking perfect Spanish, since he was born in Nebraska, United States of America?

When I started University aged 18 I had already studied French, Spanish, Modern Greek and Latin. I love learning languages, I have interest and talent, but when I started university I was determined to master a language, namely Spanish. Every semester I took Spanish classes, then literature, and as a history student I specialized in the Latin American part. Then I studied for a year in Spain, in Salamanca, then I went to live in Medellín to do research for my thesis on human history and I was with a Colombian woman for 10 years,” he said with a mischievous smile when asked by Excelsior.

The director behind the film Those who waitwho won an Oscar nomination for Paul Giamatti and an Oscar for Da’Vine Joy Randolph, used the stage to talk about his love of movies, make the audience laugh, portray everything he knows on screen, and celebrating that community and complicity. created in a movie theater and not on a television screen. Likewise, being a man interested in Latin American literature, he was forceful in stating that he preferred to stick to the images he had made in his head of literary classics such as One hundred years of loneliness the Pedro Paramorather than seeing them modified.

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They have just made a series of One hundred years of loneliness… I can’t even see it for 10 million dollars! A great literary work works only through literary instruments and is an infinite proof of why each reader has his own mental images and there is nothing more infinite than the work of Gabriel García Márquez, and the Infinite cannot and should not be translated into the finite,” Payne said, prompting a response from the audience.

Yesterday I was talking to Rodrigo Prieto (and he said to me) ‘Are you going to see Pedro Paramo? So I replied: ‘Maybe.’ Three or four previous versions have already been done and he’s a friend of mine, so maybe I’ll go see him, but I’m going to see him like this (he covers his eyes with his fingers and opens them very little to see like little children)”, said Payne, causing laughter from the young people who gathered to listen to him.

Last Sunday evening, Payne unveiled an armchair with his name, a tradition that FICM does with its special guests, and received the UNAM Film Archive Medal. Payne, brother, you are already Mexican.

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