One of the promises that director Alexander Payne made before he began filming "The Descendants" was that he would showcase a Hawaii that had never been seen before — unless you lived there.
Payne’s mantra is always "sense of place." Wherever he has filmed, he has spent a lot of time getting to know the people, where they live and the culture that governs their lives. His goal is always to re-create on screen what he found in person.
He spent six months here, much of it exploring Oahu, as he prepared to shoot his adaptation of the novel by Hawaii author Kaui Hart Hemmings.
"I think he has a gift of observation and listening and soaking it all in," Hemmings said. "It was all about wanting to get it right. There are many versions of right. There are many versions of Hawaii. But this particular story and this particular world — the details make the painting."
Payne held no preconceived ideas about Hawaii, said veteran location manager Jim Triplett, who worked closely with the director after he arrived in the summer of 2009.
"He spent quite a bit of time here scouting for the film and trying to get the flavor of neighborhoods," Triplett said. "He very much wanted to understand the inner workings of the city."
Production supervisor Renee Confair Sensano, who also took the director around Oahu, said one of the early quests was to find a house that would best fit the story of the main character, Matt King, a member of the kamaaina elite of Hawaii.
They looked at more than 100 homes and spoke with some of the residents, Sensano said. It wasn’t good enough to simply find an old house. It had to be the kind of old house with the kind of furnishings King would have, she said.
Payne found what he wanted on Old Pali Road in Nuuanu.
"I said, ‘Alexander, if you shoot in Nuuanu, it rains and we will have weather days,’" she said. "He said, ‘If it rains it is real, and we will shoot in the rain.’ Other directors would say, ‘No, we need a place that is more tropical and full of sunshine.’"
Payne’s desire for realism had no boundary. When they found a second home in Nuuanu for another scene, it came with a goat in the front yard that winds up in the finished film. When Payne needed extras for a scene populated with the descendants of old missionary families, Triplett introduced him to their real-life descendants at the Outrigger Canoe Club, where Payne found several people for the film.
And even as Payne sought to paint an authentic portrait of Hawaii’s upper crust, he remained true to whatever he found on set. At one scene at Kapiolani Park, a bunch of tree trimmers arrived as the production prepared to film, Triplett said.
Every director he’s worked with would have had Triplett find a way to get the tree trimmers to leave, he said. But Payne went ahead with filming.
The director also sought to capture the sounds of Hawaii, from a chirping gecko to wild chickens and pidgin phrases. After listening to staffers during a tour of Straub Hospital, Payne’s casting director, John Jackson, asked whether he could hang out in a break room to listen to the way people spoke, said Kim Gennaula, who led the tour and has a bit part in the movie.
"They went to great lengths to immerse themselves in the people here," she said. "We spent two hours one day in the break room at the hospital because he wanted to hear workers talking pidgin."
