Alexander Payne’s new film Nebraska is a father-and-son road trip. An aging and agitated Woody (Bruce Dern) believes he’s won a million dollars in a sweepstakes scheme, and convinces his discontented son David (Will Forte) to drive him from Montana to Nebraska to collect the winnings. A visit to Woody’s childhood home along the way reveals sobering truths about their family.

Payne is a native Nebraskan who lives half of the year in Omaha, and Nebraska is his fourth movie set in his home state. Payne first saw the screenplay to Nebraska years ago, but it took him nearly a decade to make the film. “Film is so large an undertaking,” he tells Kurt Andersen, “even small films are large undertakings, and they need to be well thought out and well planned, beginning with the screenplay. Everything stems from the screenplay — the interest of financiers, the interest of actors, what you’re going to shoot … and so you end up spending a lot of time thinking about it.” That deliberative style has paid off: although Payne has only made six movies, he’s earned six Oscar nominations and two wins (for The Descendants and Sideways).

Dern was always Payne’s first choice for Woody. The godson of Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson, Dern had a privileged upbringing in Chicago, but elements of his family life shaped the performance. “I never saw my father laugh, he never shed a tear. He was kind of a stoic.” At one point in the movie, Woody visits his childhood home, a moment Dern calls “the hardest scene I’ve done in my career.” That’s a career that includes movies with Elia Kazan, Alfred Hitchcock, and Sidney Pollack — but Dern calls Payne “the best director I ever worked for.”

Forte, known for eight seasons on Saturday Night Live and the spin-off MacGruber movies, was an unlikely choice for the somber role of David, but Payne was won over by his audition. Forte confesses that Woody’s “loser” son is “closer to who I am in real life than anything I’ve ever done.”

June Squibb plays Woody’s hilariously foul-mouthed wife Kate. Some have said that the rather low-profile actress steals scenes from Dern, who has relatively few lines for a starring role. Dern protests, telling Kurt, “You gotta get up pretty early in the morning to steal a scene from me.”

Kurt spoke with Alexander Payne, Bruce Dern, Will Forte, and June Squibb at Film Streams, a nonprofit cinema in Omaha, Nebraska.

Special thanks to Bob Coate of KIOS.

Left to right: Kurt Andersen, June Squibb, Bruce Dern, Will Forte, and Alexander Payne
at an event in support of Film Streams’ Ruth Sokolof Theater (Credit: Chris Machian)