A new clip has been shared of Joe Keery and Jason Schwartzman in a new film about the band Pavement called Pavements.
The film premiered today (September 3) at the Venice Film Festival and the first clip was shared exclusively today with Vanity Fair where you can watch the clip.
The film was first announced in 2022 from Alex Ross Perry – the filmmaker who directed the Pavement musical Slanted! Enchanted!, which premiered in New York in 2022.
Perry explained to the New Yorker at the time that the band’s label, Matador Records, reached out to him about a film collaboration in 2019. The unorthodox project was set to combine elements of biopic, tour documentary, footage from the musical and its creation, and more.
Speaking to Vanity Fair ahead of the film’s premiere, Perry gave more of an insight into what fans could expect, adding: “You’re only going to get to make one Pavement movie. This isn’t Scorsese getting to make his fourth and fifth Dylan film. So why don’t I just make every Pavement movie that I, as a fan, would ever want to watch — or hate-watch.”
In the clip, viewers see footage of a young Pavement complete with a voiceover from Stephen Malkmus. A re-enactment follows, with Stranger Things star Keery in character as Malkmus. In the clip, he takes a call from Matador Records bosses Chris Lombardi and Gerard Cosloy, played by Jason Schwartzman and Tim Heidecker respectively, who talk to them about performing on Saturday Night Live, hosted by Quentin Tarantino.
Perry explained to Vanity Fair that while the scene didn’t happen in real life, it represented similar real-life situations the band found themselves in.
“Every music biopic is blending the relationship between history and fiction…If you think the scenes in these movies happened, you’re a fool,” he began. “This is a composite scene. We don’t need to show the seven things he turned down, so we just combine them all into turning down the biggest thing that never got offered.”
Perry also released a statement at the Venice Film Festival today about what fans can expect from the film.
He said: “The music documentary has run out of gas. The musician biopic seems doomed to be a part of our lives forever, the lowest form of highbrow storytelling. Yet, against my better judgement, I love all of these movies that are rarely very good and seldom qualify as cinema. I love-to-hate clichéd storytelling in phoney baloney biopics. I will watch any archival documentary that invites me to revel in the aesthetics of a bygone era that I miss dearly.
“With Pavements, I wanted to explore my dubious passion for all of this and make a film in a directing style free from the pressure of ‘the shot’ or ‘the take.’ My goal was to not direct scenes or shots but to shape entire experiences and allow them to be documented naturally— such as the opening of a museum or the opening night of a musical—creating storytelling that unfolds in public yet is all done for a film. Only the nonsense biopic scenes would be filmed ‘normally’; true to that genre, the images are unremarkable, and the coverage is endlessly traditional.
“Pavements is four or five films rolled into one because I wish that all musical biopics and standard-issue documentaries were 30 minutes long. I’d watch more of them that way. There has never been a band like Pavement, and I hope there has never been a film like Pavements. It both is and is not. It presupposes that an iconic band deserves all the cultural victories typically afforded to much more financially successful artists. But what I learned while making the museum and the musical, and thus the film, is that Pavement deserve these tributes. It is time to ask questions about how stories about musicians are told and sold and for us as the audience to demand more innovation in our biographical portraits.”
Meanwhile, Pavement’s Malkmus first shared details of his new band – The Hard Quartet – recently along with details of their self-titled debut album.
Their debut is out October 4 via Matador Records. You can pre-order and pre-save here.
