No More Absolutes: Alex Ross Perry on Pavements

There is no one way to make a film. In Pavements (2024), Alex Ross Perry experiments with several. While the ’90s indie band Pavement were preparing for an international reunion tour, the writer-director staged three tributes to them, reframing the slacker icons through the new millennium’s commercialized nostalgia trips: the museum retrospective, the jukebox musical, the Hollywood biopic. The sprawling amount of material actually created for these tributes criss-crosses with truth-twisting all across Pavements, in which irony spirals around sincerity in a crooked double helix. Juxtaposing archive videos with new footage from the 2022 tour and those various productions, Perry makes a fizzing, irreverent image of the band and its influence. Carbonating the truth with fast-and-loose “what if”s and an often hilarious commitment to the bit, that picture is an inventive one, to say the least.

Zapping back and forth from past to present, from fact to fiction, a faithful account of Pavement’s history is shredded with the cut-and-paste verve of ’90s zine culture in Robert Greene’s frenetic but deft editing. As in montages of news headlines—where "Gold Soundz" wins Pitchfork's best '90s song in 2022—the Pavements 1933-2022 exhibition finds torrents of sight gags creating alternative realities: Pavement’s indifferent frontman Stephen Malkmus sells out and loans his face to one of Apple’s late-’90s “Think different” ads, while the band’s colorful Wowee Zowee cover art is entrusted to an Absolut Vodka campaign. Each props up Pavements’ central provocation: that this band is the most important and influential in the world. It’s a hyperbolically absurd statement for any group that isn’t, say, The Beatles, but that surrealism counts for half the fun.

Pavement formed in 1989 in Stockton, California, an area Malkmus describes as having “second-hand distance” from the more famous cities of the Golden State. That neither-near-nor-far distance from somewhere like buzzy Los Angeles doubled up as cool critical distance from the American mainstream. Keeping culture’s hit parade at arm’s length, Pavement knew how to roll eyes at it too. 1994’s “Cut Your Hair” loosely mocks chart-topping success as little more than another puzzle to solve, or a career (“career, career, career, career, career”) to stick at, but it was that track which was awarded some popular attention—one of the few ironies in the band’s ambivalent relationship with fame. (Another, this time in 2020: the shock phenomenon of Pavement becoming huge on TikTok.)

Though some ephemera in the exhibition is faked, both the exhibition and the Slanted! Enchanted! musical were real—open to the public—for four dates. And while performing Pavement favorites in the museum and the theater, both Gen Z’s lo-fi bands (from Snail Mail to Soccer Mommy) and Broadway stars (American Idiot’s Michael Esper and Jagged Little Pill’s Kathryn Gallagher) harmonize, in one way or another, with twenty-first century authenticity. That stuff feels real. Yet when Perry—acting as a version of himself, wearing sunglasses inside like an ersatz Jean-Luc Godard—says “I believe these songs can transcend their musical form” in one scene, it beggars belief. A filmmaker of independent dramas about sardonically cynical aesthetes, Perry is known for writing characters who would not be caught dead enjoying such heartfelt renditions of Pavement’s lackadaisical tunes. This one had to be a joke. But Pavements marks a turning point in the director’s’s sixteen-year-long filmography: less time, now, for insufferable assholes, more time for genuinely nice guys. 

Cute Dawson from Dawson’s Creek (1998–2003) becomes one of the minor heroes in Perry’s epic essay on video stores, Videoheaven (2025), and here Malkmus—who self-identified as a brat in the ’90s, and whom Kim Gordon once thought obnoxious—has, inevitably, mellowed with age. In the Range Life biopic part of Pavements, television star Joe Keery plays a version of Joe Keery playing Malkmus; there is something sweet about his misunderstanding of Pavement’s legacy and their thing of goofing around. He tries way too hard. He takes things way too seriously. Watching videos to revise for his role, he nods with deeply funny, studied self-recognition as, in “Shady Lane,” Malkmus sings about “the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life.” 

Much like its tricksy subjects, Pavements refuses to be any one thing—the clue, in that plural of the title. I spoke with Perry about an aversion to hagiography, the pleasure of controlled chaos in hybrid documentaries, and how Barbie and Bergman were two surprising paths into the Pavement expanded universe.

MUBI: Pavement’s record label since Slanted and Enchanted [1992], Matador, instigated this project. When was that? How much was Malkmus involved? 

ALEX ROSS PERRY: Matador approached me with this project in the spring of 2020. There was not much going on then, of course, and people were looking for things to do during that downtime. I came up with this prismatic approach to telling Pavement’s story. I discussed ideas with Matador before getting on a call with Malkmus. They told me: Don’t talk about the band. Don’t say that you’re a fan. Don’t say that he’s a genius. He doesn’t want to hear it. It’ll just be off-putting for him. 

So we spoke about storytelling and movies, about non-traditional documentaries. I walked through some of the strange concepts I had, and he was into it. All he wanted was to avoid making what he called “a legacy trap,” or a cookie-cutter documentary in which the subject is narrating history as they see it and crafting their own autobiography. He didn’t want to do that; nor did I. With Pavements, I was trying to forget everything I had learned, then make an experiment in form and content to challenge myself and keep myself engaged. I wanted to start from knowing nothing, because I had become completely bored with what I had been doing.

MUBI: What were the films being discussed on that call? 

PERRY: Some music films dare to be different, whether that’s the Sex Pistols film The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle [1980], or Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine [1998], or Gus van Sant’s Last Days [2005]. Visually, these films have nothing in common. But each has its own playful, fictionalizing approach and each is made by a filmmaker who isn’t some plug-and-play documentary director. These films are so much more than narratives just boringly hitting the prominent beats of a career. They’re islands off the coast of the musician in question, translations of music, visual explorations of the feelings that the music evokes. 

MUBI: Were there other influences beyond music films? 

PERRY: I watched so much Bergman during the pandemic. At that time in 2020, I was watching two Bergman films per week. Then after I watched Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island [2021], I applied to the residency in Fårö. I received that, then wrote the Pavements musical in Bergman’s house. His influence is undeniable. He moves seamlessly between forms, between theater and cinema. So there’s a ridiculous shot of Joe Keery looking up at Malkmus on a movie screen, in a reference to Persona [1966]. Obviously Pavements is an entertainingly goofy, silly experiment, and Bergman is highbrow, but Pavements is inspired by those years of living and breathing Bergman again. 

MUBI: You said in an interview recently that being on set was not fun for you, like it is for other directors, but surely that wasn’t at all the case here.

PERRY: Shooting scripted scenes for the Range Life stuff was boring. Although the museum was essentially also a film set—made by production designers and with movie money—that was controlled chaos, with the public. I would sit at a table, looking at the internet, drinking tea, not knowing what we needed, but knowing we would find it later. Whatever happened, happened. 

What was really fun was when four of us drove around in a minivan one day with Joe. He filmed his own little mockumentary, which is depicted in the film as this months-long process of him getting into character, but all took place between noon and eight o’clock. It was a dream to me: A great actor and talented screen presence gets out of acting the same character in Stranger Things [2016–] and riffs, playing a satirical version of himself, putting his skills on full display. Improvising like this felt almost radical, like experimental theater. We could also have had 45 minutes more of Joe in the film and it would still make people laugh. In the many, many hours of footage we shot for Pavements—tens of hours of rehearsals, the musical, and the museum—every minute we shot of Joe was gold. 

MUBI: Robert Greene’s editing must have been important in a new way with Pavements. He has edited four of your films before, yet you shot hundreds of hours for this, with the film constantly switching channels in this electrifying abundance of old and new footage. 

PERRY: So the difference is I was now in his house, playing in his world of documentary, and Pavement is also his favorite band. He loves them in a way that is beyond how most fans love them. That understanding and appreciation of the band contradicts how I feel about them, vaguely. What I found interesting, he didn’t. What he thought was crucial, I thought wasn’t. That tension became invaluable. By his own admission, he was too close to the subject, not able to make an impartial Pavement film. But because I made the segments that engage with the band playfully, rather than in a laudatory way, he felt able to make, in the edit, another film—a film I didn’t shoot. I had avoided making something about how cool and great Pavement is, and he put that back in, in certain moments, which means that the film is positive and negative. Yeah, electrifying… Sort of like a battery, it has both charges.

MUBI: You had different ideas than Robert had about Pavement. Can you say more about that?

PERRY: Pavement for me was the sort of dorm-room soundtrack for Gen Xers who were watching Kicking and Screaming [1995] and reading Infinite Jest [1996]. There were people for whom David Foster Wallace, Noah Baumbach, and Stephen Malkmus exceeded everything else, and those three became for me this continuum of very serious prophets for Gen-X art. 

Noah told me Greta [Gerwig] put a joke in Barbie [2023] about Pavement, and I said that was funny, because Malkmus and I spoke about Noah’s work and Greta’s work all the time. I assumed that Malkmus and Noah were acquaintances, if not friends, because he spoke about Noah often, and about Greta too. She’s from Sacramento, Malkmus is from Stockton, and he said Sacramento is like Stockton’s bougie sister. He feels a kinship, I think, with her northern Californian, nowhere sensibilities. So we put that Pavement line from Barbie in the film, and had Noah and Greta meet the band and appear on camera.

MUBI: That line from David Foster Wallace to Barbie via Pavement is so interesting, because, yes, the film is silly, goofy, entertaining, but it parallels that line from irony to sincerity that Wallace anticipates in his essay from the ’90s about television.

PERRY: Pavements takes a band from the ’90s and asks audiences to look at that decade as though it in fact means something different than what it meant then, at that time. Then again… There was one idea I had, which was to do a segment with conspiracy-minded music critics delivering galaxy-brained analysis on old Pavement footage. They would say, “I’ve figured it out!”—but what they are saying would be literally wrong. Pavement would say it is wrong.