Pavements director Alex Ross Perry on portraying the band’s chaos and contradictions

With its blurring of documentary, fiction and musical film genres, Pavements is a conceptual counter to bland rock docs and legacy biopics – and nearly as contradictory as the band it celebrates.

Pavements is a film about music that chafes against the perimeters of even that loose definition. Part rockumentary, part fictional film, part musical – sometimes all at the same time – it documents the story of US indie icons Pavement. It’s directed by Alex Ross Perry, a prolific independent filmmaker whose work has varied from psychological thrillers (Queen of Earth) to screwball black comedies (The Color Wheel) and – perhaps most famously – Elisabeth Moss-starring dramas about fictional punk rock stars (Her Smell). Approached by the band because of his ability to bring a fresh, non-traditional approach to projects, the result is a knowing, playful, experimental film that seemingly treats traditional music biopics and creaky documentaries – with their well-trodden dramatic beats and predictable narrative arcs – with disdain. 

The film has three key dramatic strands running through it: there’s Range Life, a fake, cheesy film starring Jason Schwartzman and Stranger Things’ Joe Keery. This component features a lot of exaggerated behind-the-scenes footage of Keery slowly going mad as he tries to become Stephen Malkmus. Then there’s Slanted! Enchanted!, a musical made with a different cast and, again, featuring fake behind-the-scenes footage of its making. For an extra dose of metatextuality, that musical actually exists – it had a Broadway run back in 2022 but was created solely in service of this movie. The overriding joke, ultimately, is that Pavement – introduced in the film as “the world’s most important and influential band” – are so successful that, of course, they would have all these productions made about them. Finally, there is the more straight-up documentary strand – archive footage, interviews, glimpses behind the curtain – which overlaps with the other two representations to tell a heightened story of the band’s legacy. There was even a fake-but-kind-of-real Pavement museum built as part of the film, which contains spoof items such as Apple and Absolut Vodka adverts from the period when the band supposedly sold out.

To help us make sense of it all and tease out the film’s meanings, we caught up with its director. Here, Alex Ross Perry talks us through a film that sets out to capture the essence of a group of passive-aggressive, press-averse artists who were always more interested in quietly making some of the most enduring alt-rock of the 90s than playing the music industry game. 

What was the initial aim for this film? 

All I wanted was for people to see this and say, “I’ve never seen a movie like this before.” Pavement fans, non-fans, music documentary junkies – for them all to say, “I have genuinely never seen somebody approach their subject like this.” And because that’s been the response, I feel extremely positive and validated. The consensus is that it’s shambolic, sloppy, messy and contradictory, which is to say we nailed what they are about. 

Would you call this film a satire of music documentaries and biopics?

Look at the Pavement music video for Gold Soundz. It’s one of their best songs and was voted by Pitchfork as the best song of the 90s [note: it wasn’t – this is a joke from the film]. That music video is five guys wearing Santa Claus suits throwing an uncooked chicken around. Is that a satire of music videos of the 90s, or just an irreverent, who-gives-a-fuck approach to how to represent yourself at a time when their peers were spending millions to make these incredible videos? They took the opposite approach, which isn’t to say it’s a spoof. It’s just like: why would we do the thing other people are doing when we can do something totally different and weird? And this movie is kind of that. 

Do you dislike those conventional music films? Pavements seems to hold them in contempt, almost.

There’s a line where Stephen Malkmus says, “I’m always inspired by things that sound like shit to me, whether that’s The Eagles with [influencing] Range Life or classic rock with Silence Kid.” I’m also inspired by things that look like shit to me. I’m not better than them, I’m not spoofing them, I’m just inspired by them. I’m inspired by documentaries on Netflix that are cookie-cutter with not one original filmic idea. I’m inspired by horrible biopics with the worst writing and the most pedestrian acting you’ve ever seen. I think these movies are bad, I don’t think they need to exist, but they do, and I watch them for whatever reason. I’m kind of sending those up, but only as much as Pavement would mock or satirise their peers or contemporaries by taking potshots in the lyrics, or making videos and interviews that take a playful and ridiculous approach to the whole enterprise of marketing yourself as a band. And we take a playful and ridiculous approach to the whole enterprise of making a legacy film. 

Did you ever get a sense that Pavement themselves were altering their behaviour for the cameras? There’s a scene where Malkmus is giving Spiral Stairs [guitarist Scott Kannberg] shit for his backing vocals – is that just him?

Little snippy asides are about as dramatic as we got. This is just how Malkmus talks. It’s not like he was going to censor himself for the camera. He really seemed to have an unbelievable lack of awareness or interest in the fact that a documentary camera was filming him, which was fascinating. They’re really conflict-avoidant, and Malkmus will just throw a funny, witty little insult. But I didn’t really want any information about them personally. Some people say the movie doesn’t get into who these guys are outside the band or what their lives are like. I literally don’t even know the answer to that in some cases. I’m just not curious about it. I like preserving the classic pre-internet mystique. 

For the actors working in the biopic and musical, what direction did you give them? Did they approach it sincerely?

They were really just fucking around. Nobody took that experience seriously at all because we were just having fun. Any time there was ever an attempt of, like, “in the script, it says this…”, I was just like, dude, I don’t know. I don’t have the answers to this. That’s not what we’re doing. Read the lines. The point isn’t the content of the scene – the point is the existence of the scene and that we’re filming it.

Malkmus said he didn’t like an early cut of the film and that it was embarrassing, but maybe what he had been screened was a prank. Is that accurate?

That is accurate to his recollection. What he saw was the 60-minute scripted film. It’s bad on purpose, in the same way an entire album that he might write ripping off The Eagles would probably be bad. It’s pitched at this level of Hollywood buffoonery that I learned these five guys are immune to because they don’t watch any of those kinds of films. They don’t know the beats we were satirising and parodying because they’ve never bothered to watch one, and they were incredibly confused by it. Mostly because not one single person in this band reliably checks their email and saw my crystal-clear email explaining what the screening was. How anybody could think I’ve been working on a movie for two years – a documentary about the band – and then what it ends up being is a 60-minute scripted film is beyond me. But a lot of things are beyond me, including being an adult who doesn’t check your email. 

Did you have to make many changes?

There’s one scene that everybody saw that day that was universally despised and later entirely cut from the film. And I said, “You know, when I sent you guys the script, why didn’t anybody say anything about that scene?” Every single person said, “I didn’t read it.” I said, “Well, maybe next time someone is making a movie about you and they send you a script and say, ‘This is what we’re filming,’ maybe crack it open and take a look at it so that when you watch what they filmed, you don’t say, ‘What is this?’” In moments like this, I think, boy, 30 years of shit just falling through the cracks. That really must explain a lot. 

That said, was it strange that the band got big again while you were making a film about a group who were always cast as the cranky outsiders who kinda blew it?

In 2020, when I did my interviews with everybody, the tone – mostly because this was a question I was exploring – was: could Pavement have been bigger? Was there money left on the table in that career? And every single person said, “Absolutely, the band could have and should have been bigger.” Circumstances didn’t work out. Malkmus made some choices that were very true to himself, but very counterintuitive towards pushing the band to the next level. By the time we’re premiering the movie, every speculative future for the band had been realised bigger than anyone could have ever anticipated. They had their biggest hit ever thanks to a bizarre TikTok trend, combined with nostalgia for the era and a younger generation responding to a truly pure and authentic group of musicians who never did the corny album, never did the cringy video, never sold out, never did anything impure to their own artistic vision. 

So, we were no longer making a film about “wouldn’t it be funny if Pavement were the biggest band in the world?” We were making a quasi-documentary, quasi-fictional film, literally capturing the band returning to the spotlight and becoming bigger, more acclaimed and more successful than ever. In the museum we made in 2022 [for the film], we put up gold and platinum records based on the notion that nothing was funnier and more improbable than Pavement having that level of sales and recognition. They now have those. So what was once farce has now become fact.