Wave to the Camera

Grant Sharples interviews the filmmaker Alex Ross Perry about “Pavements,” his unconventional new feature about the band.

By Grant SharplesJune 7, 2025

• Film

• Music

NINETIES INDIE ROCKERS Pavement have only one Gold record to their name, and they earned it just last year for B-side-turned-TikTok-hit “Harness Your Hopes,” originally recorded for their 1997 full-length Brighten the Corners but ultimately discarded, instead relegated to its less-than-ideal fate on Spit on a Stranger, one of two EPs released the same year they broke up (for the first time). Chart anonymity be damned, the Stockton, California, band have constructed a legacy rife with their own sonic traits: sad yet funny, byzantine yet simple, prestigious yet unbothered. But Pavement is an unconventional band with an unconventional story. That’s precisely why director Alex Ross Perry’s new movie about the alt-rockers, Pavements, is likewise unorthodox.

Perry, known for his hybridizations of heartfelt sincerity and winking cynicism, eschews typical narrative structure to incorporate a musical theater production named after the band’s debut LP (real), a biopic starring Joe Keery as front man Stephen Malkmus and Jason Schwartzman as Matador Records founder Chris Lombardi (fake), archival footage (real), and a museum exhibit (also real) showcasing ephemera throughout Pavement’s history (real and fake; it’s up to viewers to distinguish authenticity from artifice). He flouts the built-in limitations intrinsic to both fiction and nonfiction to carve his own paean to one of indie rock’s most influential exports. Much like Pavement’s music, Perry’s film tactfully blends raw emotion with calculated humor. To use Perry’s own words regarding the aforementioned musical theater production, he throws “spaghetti at the wall” only to stand back and realize that his marinara-fueled mess is a canny meditation on art versus commerce and on how notions of success have shifted over time.

Malkmus, guitarist-vocalist Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg, bassist Mark Ibold, drummer Steve West, and multi-instrumentalist/boisterous hype man Bob Nastanovich never quite struck major success in their most active period, at least not by standard definitions. They were popular, but rather than headline festivals, they were instead slotted during the Lollapalooza daytime set to get pelted with mud by an ungrateful audience. In 2025, Pavement have accrued a level of cultural cachet that nets them mentions in blockbuster movies and a wave of younger artists like Momma and beabadoobee who (literally) sing their praises. “I was dressed for success / But success it never comes,” Malkmus sings in the opening couplet of Slanted and Enchanted highlight “Here.” Over a quarter of a century later, Pavement struck RIAA Gold.

Ahead of the film’s nationwide opening on June 6, I spoke with Perry about his history with Pavement, their 2022 reunion tour, the blurred lines between fact and fiction, the proper balance of sincerity and irony, the possibility that wider audiences will get to see the fake biopic Range Life: A Pavement Story, and the reason “Grounded” is the best Pavement song.

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GRANT SHARPLES: Did the band or Matador give you any stipulations or frameworks that you needed to adhere to, or did they just give you free rein?

ALEX ROSS PERRY: The thought exercise initially was, “You should talk and think of some ideas. It’s really only up to Malkmus, like no one else in the band is going to say yes or no to anything. He knows that a movie is a good idea. He’s not interested in anything cookie-cutter. He doesn’t want a documentary filmmaker. We’re not even looking for other people who have just made a documentary or who have done the band-documentary thing, like this industry we’re all aware of, where some filmmakers just have, like, two documentaries a year, all edited by their assistants, or whatever. He’s not interested in that, and he thought it would be worthwhile to find someone who would approach this like a screenwriter, not like a documentary filmmaker.” And I talked to him, and he just said, “We just can’t make a movie talking about how great we were, and how great the nineties were. Let’s just not do that movie.” So that was all I had to build off of.

With Pavement in particular, they’ve always toed the line between irony and sincerity. Did that lead you to experiment with structure and form in that way, like with the musical, the museum, and the fake biopic? Were you trying to mirror their musical idiosyncrasies through the film?

Yeah, exclusively. There’s nothing that makes less sense than a film portrait of a subject that seems to have not been inspired by that subject’s ethos, aesthetic, or general feeling at all. I don’t understand this. There’s hundreds of good, credible documentaries that do the job and tell the story and cut it together nicely. But it doesn’t seem like, at any point in the process, the filmmaker, the producers, or anybody said, “Let’s just have weeks of conversations about what feeling this artist or subject evokes, and what is a version of that feeling in a movie?” That’s a fun challenge. It’s not easy. That’s easy enough when you’re adapting a comic book or a novel; something about it already has a narrative. There’s what happened, but we have to make a movie here. Why do people make these things that don’t have any interest in being the correct meeting of subject and storytelling format?

With all these different formats you’re playing with, were you concerned at all about viewers’ abilities to follow the narrative threads? What were you prioritizing artistically?

Prioritizing what I wanted to do was just a series of things that felt both simple in what we were doing on the day and unnecessarily complicated in how we approached it, which to me was my movie version of Pavement’s music. Malkmus is a very complex writer with a very complex approach to lyrics and melodies. And then on the stage, he’s just like, “Hey, we’re here. We’re going to play some songs.” I wanted to make something like that, where we were doing tons and tons and tons of work and building something that was highly complex and incredibly considered and thoughtful, in the reality of how we were making it, in what it means to stage a moment like this for a film, a fiction film, a documentary film, whatever, and then you get there and not stress and not overthink it. Part of that is spending nine months curating and designing a museum. On the day, we had seven or eight cameras there. I’m telling none of them what to do.

I just don’t have to call the shots. That’s boring. Every single cameraperson is a documentary veteran who’s been told, like, “Just get the moment. You follow Malkmus. You stay over here. You’re on this. Just get whatever.” The images are not artfully composed. It’s meant to look like the news. So who cares? We’re doing the musical. I’m not leaning over the cameraman’s shoulder and saying, “Get this shot, and get this shot,” because you can’t do that for a month. That’s not what making a documentary is. It’s about creating these scenarios. So the thing that I was focused on was, like, I want to make a documentary about three things that aren’t real. I want to make a documentary about the ribbon-cutting of a museum, about the rehearsing and creating of a Broadway show, and about the making of a biopic, so I need to make all those things. So I made those things, and then our movie was being made over my shoulder, and that was really great because I wasn’t checking the frame, looking at a viewfinder, talking to an actor about what they need to do. It was more like structuring this entire day as this open-ended experiment of playful creativity. There are two or three cameras rolling at all times. Let’s just do our thing, and something those cameras get will be in the movie. That was a really fun way to work because I don’t think it’s really ever been done like that on a movie of this kind.

Why do you think Pavement’s story is an important one to tell?

We talked about this 100 times from the very beginning. If [a documentary] only works for the die-hard fans, it’s worthless. It has to work for the best friend or the partner of the die-hard fan sitting there watching it. You can come to this movie with no awareness of this band. Ultimately, what the movie is about is the bygone cultural moment in which Pavement lived and thrived from December 1989 to December ’99 and what those 10 years represented, both concurrently and now in hindsight when it comes to examining issues of art, cultural integrity, publicity, fame, money, and the convergence of all these things. I’m fascinated by the way people consume the things they love, in the way people, a generation later, repackage, reinterpret, and resell the things they love. To me, this band is the most perfect vessel for the exploration of that incredibly relatable and compelling concept that has nothing to do with the content of those five CDs [the full-length albums in the band’s discography]. It has everything to do with the way we used to consume things and get our news and the way we used to view celebrities, if they were ever even close to celebrities, and how, once you get older, you want the same things over and over again. The movie’s about all of that. It’s about all of that through the 10- and now 30-year journey of Pavement. But to me, the possibilities for exploring this huge cultural story through the band were exactly what we needed to make.

I like that you mentioned that it needs to work not just for die-hard fans but also for their friend or partner. What’s your relationship with Pavement’s music? What’s your history with them?

I’ve been a fan since probably around the time Brighten the Corners came out. That was when I was glued at all times to alternative radio, modern rock radio, call it what you will. I did not see them between that album’s release in 1997 and the band’s breakup in ’99, and then I saw them in 2010 on the first reunion tour, which is depicted briefly in the film, at Central Park in New York by myself. Like a lot of bands that had broken up before, I got to see them and the Pixies chief among them. Getting to see them when they first reunited felt monumental to me and like I could finally put that to rest. It was the exact resolution I wanted. I finally got to see them, and the Pixies never stopped. Now, I wouldn’t go. I’ve seen them. But the fact that Pavement then walked away again for another 10 years gave them this mystique that made their return much more appealing to me than it would be for most other artists.

How did you decide where and when the archival footage would be implemented with all these other moving parts in the story?

It was Robert Greene, the film’s editor and producer. It was his instinct. We are making what we hope to be the definitive Pavement movie. There’s not another one coming in five years. No one’s going to make another one in 10 years. The conceit of this movie was that some bands get five or 10 movies, [such as] the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or Metallica. So this one has to be all of them. Then it was up to Robert as the editor and the world’s biggest Pavement fan to find on the dial how much ABCD story of the band told through archival we needed, versus using archival to enrich, comment on, contradict, support, or undercut some of the fictional moments we were doing, cutting from musical theater nerds learning the lyrics to Malkmus saying, “I don’t really think too much of lyrics; I don’t really listen to lyrics,” [while] showing a very silly, corny biopic scene where everyone says something, and then we cut to the footage of Spiral [Stairs], saying, “Yeah, it was the first time we stumbled when we put out Wowee Zowee,” and then you cut to Bob [Nastanovich] saying, “Oh, it’s our best record,” which is exactly what you’re seeing in the scene. Now, of course, you wouldn’t have those thoughts the week the album comes out. You have those thoughts years later. But using archival is a way of both saying to people who watch these corny biopic scenes, “You see, this is based in reality, but this is not reality.” That’s what we wanted.

When you say “the definitive Pavement movie,” how do those visions differ between you and the other people involved?

They just didn’t care. I don’t think [the band] had any vision for what their definitive movie is. As totally modest, normal, down-to-earth, working-class guys, even up to the very end of the process, they were saying, “This just feels like a lot of hoopla for us. This just feels like there’s just so much footage of us in this. Do you really need all of that?” We were like, “Yeah, that’s the thing. That’s what the fans want. That’s what we’re doing here.” And they said, “Okay, we’ll trust you, but we still feel like there’s way too much of us in the movie.” It’s like, alright, well, that’s wrong, but that’s your opinion.

For me, it had to feel conclusive. There’s really not much more to it than that. The whole concept was “This is the greatest and most influential and most important band in our lives,” as we say in the movie. Now, in the world that we live in, that is not true, but in the head of Robert Greene editing this movie and 100,000 other insane Pavement fans, that is true. The movie has to exist within that world where they are the most important band because to some people, they are, but it also has to then invite [nonfans] in. How does that person see it? Don’t you see how someone could think this is the best and most important band? That was the process of editing, making the movie three hours, and then two and a half, and, ultimately, two hours and five minutes because how much fan service, how many asides, how many tidbits, how many EPs, how many singles can you focus on before it gets to be the didactic, boring version that fans would watch? And maybe they think they want that, but no one really wants that.

You said that the band thought there was too much of themselves in the movie. Is that how the film was condensed into its current form?

There were 25 more minutes of their rehearsals for the tour. Those are all on the Blu-ray for the fans to sit in that rehearsal space and watch them. It was 10 more minutes of them on the tour, 10 more minutes of them doing three 2022 shows and 10 more minutes of archival. There’s the subject who looks at a rough cut of their own movie and sees their own face for two-and-a-half hours and says, “Yes, this is great. This is what I want. Let’s just make this moment even better, so that it looks the way I remember.” It is not a subject [where] I could imagine spending four years collaborating with the subject who says, “Yeah, I don’t know. This seems kind of ridiculous. It didn’t really happen that way. Do we really need so much footage of this? Do we need to show that moment?” I like the subject who’s like, “Are we really worthy of a movie that you have been making for years?” It’s not that we cut anything out. We just cut everything down to the essentials.

Also, I’m just curious: will we ever see a full version of [the film’s fake biopic] Range Life, or is that purely its own kind of fictional, metatextual thing in the documentary?

No, there’s one or two more scenes of it on the Blu-ray. Beyond the ones we’re including, there’s maybe 10 more minutes of it. It’s designed to be bad when you write a bad movie because you’re adhering to every cliché of every bad biopic you’ve hate-watched, and you shoot it in a very boring, flat, traditional way, and then you cut it together. Surprise, surprise. It’s no fun to watch. But people watch them and they get nominated for awards. So I guess I’m wrong, but we’re putting a few more scenes on the Blu-ray just for fun. But the extent of it was always meant to exist in the background. I promise you don’t want to watch it.

What was the fake biopic’s purpose in the film itself? Why did you feel it needed to be included?

Because the movie is about the way that that sort of cultural snake eating its own tail is inevitable now. Part of my initial pitch to the band and Matador was, “It’s unlikely to the point of impossibility that this band would ever actually be put into the Hollywood machine and be given this kind of treatment. What would it look like if that happened, which is to say a very undramatic, low-key, low-stakes, low-sales, commercially unremarkable but artistically unimpeachable career? What would you do if you had the assignment of rendering that in only the most cliché story beats? Could it work not for two hours, but just for 30 minutes?” In my research, where I talk to all the band members, Matador, touring managers, everybody, about the era of putting out Wowee Zowee, having it flop after the escalating success of the two previous records, and everyone’s stories about Lollapalooza, all the things Malkmus did to make it difficult, the struggles they were having with getting press, the bad fallout from Wowee Zowee not having good singles on it. I was like, “Well, this is when you’re watching one of those bad movies.” There’s always a 30-minute segment in it that’s really good, where it’s the rise to fame or a big fallout. All these movies, for whatever reason, are able to unite their performers’ narrative around a totemic concert: [Queen at] Live Aid, Elton John at Dodger Stadium, [Bob Dylan at] Newport Folk Festival. For some reason, this is always there. I was like, “Well, when you Google Pavement, at least in 2020, the first thing that comes up is Lollapalooza mud.”

I was like, “That’s just a ready-made plot beat in the shittiest version of the worst movie. We’re going to do that as though this is a completely realistic and rational way to tell the story of these five completely ordinary music-nerd, college-radio-loving guys who just liked playing music, and then one day, something so insane happened to them that everybody remembers it.” If they remember anything about Lollapalooza ’95, that’s one of the things they remember. That’s a great thing for a bad movie. The problem is, oftentimes these movies put that big concert at the end of the film, but this is directly in the center of their career. So it’s really tough if you were actually trying to write that movie, but fortunately, I didn’t have to actually write that movie.

It’s interesting too because, for a Pavement fan, that moment has always been mythologized, but to the band, it didn’t seem that important. They just shrug it off backstage. It speaks to that dramatization of these peaks and valleys in the band’s career that those movies typically adhere to.

Yeah, and again, it’s easy for me to say this because this is the movie I made, but I don’t want to see an actor performing a concert that there’s documentary footage of. I just don’t. It’s boring. I’m happy to see the actor preparing to do it. I’m happy to see the crew filming it. I’m happy to see the documentary footage that miraculously exists of the time. But just like Malkmus says early in the movie—he’s talking to Schwartzman at the sound check for their first reunion show—and he says it doesn’t really matter, like this is nothing new; we’re just recreating this.

That’s what I feel: you’re not doing anything new. You’re just recreating something. As Malkmus says, it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter to recreate a famous interview or a famous concert or a famous recording session, but it’s fun. People take this way too seriously, and Pavements, the whole thing was they don’t take it all seriously. They don’t take themselves seriously. They certainly don’t take marketing seriously. They don’t take music videos seriously. They just want to have fun. They don’t want to belabor an expensive music video. They want to get a friend and just fuck around for the day and make something that feels goofy, and the movie had to be that. The problem is that’s a hard thing to do spread out over four years. It’s very easy to do when you have one day, but we had to find some influence in the way that they cared so deeply about being a good band and cared not at all about the hoopla and the machinery around what succeeding as a band meant in the nineties.

Because you’re talking about succeeding as a band in the nineties, a measurement of success then and, to a certain extent, now is playing Saturday Night Live. Is it true that Pavement was invited, or is that just for Range Life?

No, so one of the things I said to everybody was, if the Pavement story was told through objects, what would those be? That was my way of curating a museum. I was talking to Chris [Lombardi] about Malkmus’s complicated relationship with publicity, and he said Rolling Stone had always been really hard on Pavement. At some point, our publicity girl comes and says, “Hey, good news, someone wants to interview you,” and there’s one of these in the movie. Malkmus said, “No, that sounds pretty cookie-cutter to me.” He turned it down, and she was so happy to have broken through, only for it to be taken away by him. I said, “Was there anything else like that?” And he said, “Well, I could almost see something like him turning down doing SNL because after doing Leno they just didn’t want to do any more TV.” And I could see that. I said, “Chris, you just wrote a perfect scene in a ridiculous, corny biopic.” That scene is in every movie. Management, label A&R, someone comes in with a great offer that is historically viable, and the artist makes a mess of it. Whether anybody like yourself cares to scrutinize it or just accept it as a fact, it’s a matter of historical record. A false record, but nevertheless … Then I started doing the research. If this is summer ’95 during Lollapalooza, what shows are coming up in fall ’95?

Tarantino did host the season premiere. That would be a perfect Gen X pairing. A booker would put those two artists together for sure. I thought, “Well, this makes sense.” The actual musical guest on that episode was Smashing Pumpkins, which is even more ironic and hilarious. We had a line in the movie where Jason [Schwartzman] says, “You know who took that spot you turned down? Smashing Pumpkins.” We cut that out later because we thought it was funnier if it was a joke with no punch line. And one person in 1,000 is going to Google “Quentin Tarantino SNL” to see if Pavement played. Then they’re going to be like, “Oh, not only did they not, but Smashing Pumpkins played instead. That’s really funny.”

That’s remarkably on point. Also, I know we’re coming up on time here, so I just wanted to ask you one more thing. What is your favorite Pavement song?

Well, Robert and I debate a lot. We’re like, is “Grounded” their best song?

That’s my favorite Pavement song.

It’s extremely important, obviously, in the context of the movie. It’s not an original or compelling answer, but we build a real moment around it because, for cinematic feeling, it’s definitely the most valuable. But it’s “Here” that is played 10 times in the movie for different reasons, for the complexity of the storytelling. “Give It a Day” is extremely important. “AT & T” I feel the same about. But “Grounded” is a song I heard them play at almost every show that I attended, and it really hits. If it’s their best song off of their most stubborn, difficult album, the complexity of which nearly derailed the band’s momentum, then it slots in perfectly, and that’s why it’s the only song that appears in the movie in the musical form, the biopic form, the tribute acts of the museum, and both archival and contemporary Pavement. When we have that moment where five different iterations of our story are coalescing around the same song, it’s my favorite because you couldn’t do that with 99 out of 100 songs that have ever been written. I don’t think you could do that with most other Pavement songs, even ones that I probably would gravitate more toward. It’s undeniable, but it’s also a really boring answer.

It’s a boring answer, but it is a viable answer. The fact that we both gravitate toward that song, and I think a lot of other people do too, speaks volumes about it.

Yeah, it’s really simple. It’s a really simple, lyrically short song. Even though it’s over five minutes, there are just not a lot of words in it. But the band easily has 10 stone-cold classic, perfect, catchy hits, and that doesn’t even matter to the grand total of their output because there’s so much more complexity beyond “Grounded” and “Summer Babe,” and “Fillmore Jive” is also of extreme importance to me, and that’s the song at the end of the credits. I heard them play it only twice the whole time we were filming. There was a big moment for it in the musical, which is not even in the movie at all, though. Just goes to show.

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Alex Ross Perry is an American filmmaker and actor who has written and directed a series of feature films centered on unconventional characters and rife with the anxieties and joys of creation. His films have been internationally acclaimed at film festivals such as Sundance, Toronto, Locarno, Berlin, and others. He is most known for Listen Up Philip, which premiered in 2014 at the Sundance Film Festival and later won the Special Jury Prize at the 2014 Locarno International Film Festival, and Her Smell (2018), which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and screened at the New York Film Festival the same year. Besides being a prolific independent filmmaker with many of his fiction feature films internationally recognized, he has also experimented with documentary, nonfiction, and music. His documentary-fiction hybrid, Pavements, is an experimental musical biopic concert film that premiered at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival.