Her Smell Director Alex Ross Perry Is Making Quite The Movie About The Indie Band Pavement
Even if you're not a fan of his off-kilter films, you can never accuse Alex Ross Perry of not being daring or creative. This can also be said of acclaimed indie rockers Pavement. So what happens when these two creative forces collide? Apparently, a pseudo-documentary that blends the band's real experiences with surreal fiction.
At least, that's what we can interpret from Ross Perry's cryptic explanation to The New Yorker. The publication profiled Perry about his latest Pavement collaboration, the gonzo off-Broadway musical "Slanted! Enchanted!" and he revealed that the show was just one part of a larger project he and the band are cooking up. The film, which is in its early planning stages, is described by The New Yorker's Hannah Seidlitz as "a mélange of biopic, museum footage, bits of 'Slanted! Enchanted!,' tour doc, farce, and paean." That sounds about right for Pavement.
If you're looking for an idea of what this film could look like, you're in luck! Perry explained that he wants this currently-untitled project to be a mixture of the different films centering around legendary musician Bob Dylan. After all, no two movies about him have been the same.
"You take the Todd Haynes Bob Dylan movie, the Scorsese documentary, the Pennebaker documentary, and the movie Dylan himself directed that everyone hates [1978's "Renaldo and Clara"], and put them all in a blender," he elaborated.
No place to shove your sharpened heel
If you haven't become tired of the increasing number of musician biopics in our current film landscape, you're probably lying. It seems like every musician with a story has been getting a biopic, the results of which vary greatly from film to film. You can arguably even say this about non-musician biopics. For example, do we really need to see a dramatized version of how "Tetris" was distributed throughout the world?
However, this idea with Pavement sounds like it could result in something extremely cool. In particular, combining fact and fiction until the lines between each other blur has a lot of potential as a criticism of the modern biopic. Of course, we don't know anything about the movie other than what Perry has divulged, but given Pavement's penchant for sharp social commentary, it's not entirely outside the realm of possibility.
We likely won't be able to see this Alex Ross Perry and Pavement film for a while. However, the wait will probably be worth it when it finally does roll around.