Some of the considerable appeal of Pavements — the unconventional new movie about indie rock icons Pavement, now streaming on MUBI — is derived from how it sidesteps music documentary tropes in ways that mirror the band’s own subversion of rock stardom.

The film combines footage from the band’s 2022 reunion tour, snippets from a fake biopic called Range Life, interviews with actor-musician Joe Keery as he goes method in his portrayal of Stephen Malkmus, performances from a Pavement jukebox musical staged in New York, and scenes from a pop-up Pavement museum blending real and artificial artifacts from the band’s history, where younger indie rock musicians played Pavement’s music in loving tribute—an experience drummer Steve West calls “very emotional.” Somehow, extreme sincerity and self-protective irony coexist onscreen just as they do in Pavement’s music, resulting in a viewing experience that manages to be both amusing and profoundly moving at times.

One person who deserves credit for striking that balance is Robert Greene. An accomplished documentary filmmaker in his own right, Greene has also worked as the editor on multiple films for Pavements director Alex Ross Perry, including Her Smell, in which Elisabeth Moss plays a troubled alt-rocker. Greene, 49, has been obsessed with Pavement since college, so when the opportunity came along to work on this project, he leapt at it.

“They were my favorite band for the longest time,” Greene says. “So it’s this weird ‘dream come true’ situation where I got to work with the band that rewired my brain creatively. I’ve directed and edited many films at this point, and I really do think it all comes down to the first time I heard them in college. It kind of changed the way I think about storytelling and sound and ideas, how you can be ironic and sincere and funny and moving and all these things. You don;’t have to stick to one thing. It can be slippery. It can be emotional. And the moment you can see it, it should slip away — all these things that are intrinsic to Pavement very much have seeped into my filmmaking.”

The film editing gig led to Greene working closely with West and guitarist Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg on the film’s soundtrack, which involved West digging through multiple years’ worth of tour and rehearsal recordings and mixing them into shape from his Virginia home studio. As Greene points out, the resulting two-disc set collages together elements from the film in ways that show off not just what Pavement were but what they’ve become, several decades removed from their original run.

For West, the difference between the current situation and Pavement’s 2010 reunion tour was palpable — and not just because of the addition of Rebecca Cole on keyboards, which, as he notes, makes Pavement literally a different band this time around. “With the 2010, it was more like 10 years after the breakup, and you’re kind of still dazed, like… ‘What’s the point?’ or whatever,” West says. “But now it’s morphed into something different, and everyone comes with a really great attitude.”

Pavements captures that more mature element of the Pavement story without shortchanging the shifty, shambolic qualities that have always been crucial to the band’s ethos. The movie pulls off a remarkable trick, and Greene had a lot of fascinating things to say about it in a recent video chat. “It’s really funny to say that you captured the essence of a band whose essence was literally impossible to grasp,” he says, but that’s exactly what he and his collaborators achieved.

Read excerpts from our interview below.

I don’t know very much about film editing, but this film strikes me as a very unique editing situation. Is that a fair assessment?

ROBERT GREENE: Yeah, I mean, certainly. Alex is a great collaborator because he just stays out of things he’s not involved in. It was very much, “OK, we’ve shot this insane stuff. Now go make something, and we’ll talk about it.” That was the process. And so I was really free to explore the Pavement id as much as possible. To me, going as deep as possible into my interpretation of what the band feels like.

And so what does that mean? It means that idea of contradiction. It means that idea of combining irony and sincerity. And literally with the split screen technique, you can combine irony and sincerity on the screen together at the same time. As a producer of the project, one of my early observations was that our director of photography, Robert Kolodny — we’ve worked together for many years; I’ve edited his films, he’s been the DP on my films — Rob really had an eye for capturing the emotion of the band at this stage in their lives. Once I knew that we had a note of sincerity to play, which is “Look at these guys coming together,” then all the meta stuff that Alex had conceived of could play against that and, and we could create that feeling that is exactly the experience that I have when I go to the shows or listen to the records.

And then that extended out into the making of the musical. Once we saw the sincerity part of the band coming back together in their late 50s and trying hard to learn these songs again and be ready for this big thing that was about to happen to them, which is the massive tour they went on, [it related to the musical]. Because the musical is meant to be an elaborate, really complex, beautifully rendered joke, basically. But the moment that you see how seriously the actors took it, it adds this whole other layer to it.

In some ways you could say for a lot of us Pavement fans, we weren’t ever sure, like, is Pavement a big joke? Like, “Is Crooked Rain sounding like the Eagles one elaborate joke?” Like, “What is this band?” in some ways. And that’s why we love it. But then when you know them and you see how sincere they were about creating what they created… So in other words, we could use these entry points into understanding the psychology of the music, which is why I think the film feels differently than a lot of other musical films. I think a lot of films about music, they care about what happened, not the psychology of the creation and the creative process.

That’s a good way to put it. In this film, what happened is very secondary, and it feels like the psychology is very — it’s more of a vibe than historical recollection, you know?

GREENE: Totally, but it’s also: Stephen Malkmus is a brilliant thinker. The way his brain works is why we all love the music, right? Like, brilliant lyricist, songwriter, whatever. But as an editor, he’s so — basically, he contradicts every sentence he says. He says one sentence, immediately undercuts it or contradicts it, and then immediately undercuts or contradicts that next sentence. So he’ll say, like, “Well, I was walking around the Whitney looking at the postmodern art, and I was inspired. Not that any of that stuff means anything.” And he just undercut what he just said.

But me as an editor, I could just cut him off at the insightful thing that he said and not let him contradict himself. And have him say — he did say all that, of course. Like those are all taken from interviews and podcasts and this and that. But it gives the fans some deeper sense of what the intention was in the band. And the guys, they’ll lean into mystery, and they don’t really want to talk about the intention. So I was able to pull that out of the edit. That was very satisfying to me as a fan, and I think other fans felt it too, based on the reactions that we mostly got from the film.

There are all these different components that you’re stitching together: the live footage, the stuff with the the fake biopic, the musical, and the museum pop up. How much guidance did you have from Alex? How much of that was in the script in terms of, “It’s gonna be in this sequence,” or whatever?

GREENE: The editing structure is 100% me. The way we work is Alex wrote and conceived and directed the stunts. That means he wrote the fake biopic. He wrote the musical. He was very instrumental in the museum. He did all that stuff, and then he gave that to me, and I created the structure of what you see. And then he gave great feedback on that process throughout the process. The split screens were things that we talked about from the beginning. He and I were right on the same page about that. But then, how I use that, what I was undercutting…

Basically, I’m the superfan, right? This is a superfan’s movie. It had to be, right? Because it’s not like we’re inspecting the lives of Steve West and Mark Ibold to see what makes them tick. That’s not even what the movie is even interested in. The band wasn’t interested in that. Alex and I were not interested in that. No one was interested in that. Matador [Records] wasn’t. What we were interested in is a movie about ideas. And I think I understand in my bones the ideas of Pavement in a way that just made me uniquely suited to be the person who could just pull it together. And essentially we made our own art project about this band that I love, right? Like that’s what it was. And so, yeah, I was fully in the driver’s seat for the structure. And Alex is great in that way.

He was editing another documentary, a film called Video Heaven, which just came out at the IFC Center. He’s working with another editor at the time, so he was already deeply enmeshed in what it means to make a documentary. But this is a totally different process than editing a fiction film, and the editor has much more creative leeway. And I’m already a creative partner for him anyway. So it was made literally in my basement right here, with the help of a really great assistant editor named Beatričė [Bankauskaitė] who was in my other office, and we just pounded it out over about a year of editing.

Let’s talk about the soundtrack as well. It really mirrors the movie in that it has that mixtape vibe to it.

GREENE: Yeah. We were inspired by the Monkees’ Head soundtrack, things that felt like experiences in and of themselves. The concept that Alex came up with from the beginning was just like, it’s called Pavements plural, right? Not to get too brainy about it, but it’s like, this band was so slippery and so hard to pin down, right? So they are the great vehicle for this concept that there’s multiple versions of all of us. And if you want to take that to like the Marvel Cinematic Universe version, there’s multiple universes that we could all exist in, right? That’s what any kind of multiverse bullshit story is always about — like, yeah, we contain multitudes. It’s a great cliche for a reason, right?

And so the idea of the movie is to take all these different universes and mesh them together, and maybe you’ll get some deeper understanding of what the band really was. Then we just extended that to the soundtrack. Imagine a stitched-together mixtape of all the different interpretations of the band. Hopefully it plays as one continuous thing, where you can sit down and rock to it.

But the real foundation is not the little snippets that you get. Hopefully those are fun and funny. But the foundation is the band performing. I think it’s a new band, basically. I think the way they play these songs now is completely different. And I love this version. There’s a lot of takes on the Pavement live experience or whatever. I think these versions of these songs, the live or the rehearsal versions, which we watched them like work over again and again and again — the exact opposite of the slacker ethos, right?

They work these songs again and again and again and again and again, and you hear these mature, totally angular, emotionally resonant versions of these songs that you love. Some of these songs that when they had originally written and performed them, they were in their early twenties. And now they’re performing them 30 years later. I think they’re great versions of the songs. So the soundtrack is full of these mixtape ideas and full of trying to get that multiverse idea across, but it’s really about the music. It’s really about those incredible performances.

I think I agree with you that it’s almost like a new band. I never saw them in the ’90s, but I’ve seen footage, and I went to the 2010 reunion. And then seeing the more recent reunion, they didn’t change the structure of the songs, necessarily, but there was just a different energy animating them.

GREENE: Well, to me, it’s like, as a fan, I did see them many times in the many times in the ’90s. And every time you go, when you go to a Pavement show, it’s like, “What’s the mood of the band? Are they gonna be… what are they going to be into tonight? And how are you going to witness whatever they’re in the mood for today?” And what that did was create this feeling of — it made you feel cool because you’re like, “Good performances of songs doesn’t mean that it’s a good band,” or whatever. Like, I’ve had friends tell me that they thought that the worst show they’ve ever seen in their life was a Pavement show. And I’ve had friends tell me that the best show they’ve ever seen in their life was a Pavement show from the ’90s, right? And I think both are true.

As a fan, I remember going and feeling like, “OK, cool. We are in whatever vibe you want to be in, and we get to see what you feel like doing or not.” And that is completely unique. Like, you could never imagine David Byrne, who’s just like a super temperamental artist, showing up: “Well, what mood am I in tonight?” No, he’s like, “I’m going to give the best show possible.” And I think they wanted to give the best show possible, but their version of the best show was one that undercut your expectations of what a “good show” is like. That was the ethos. The ethos was like, “We’re not gonna do the bullshit version of anything,” right? And that includes just giving you a “good” straightforward rock show.

I don’t think that works now, and I think what the band has discovered, with this new version of themselves, is like, “We actually just really, really love what you wrote, and we really, really love that you performed it with such passion.” And it’s not nostalgic because they’ve reconsidered the songs. Like, yes, there’s an element of nostalgia to it, but it’s like, yeah, there’s an, I think you’re right. I think the words you’re using are right. It’s like a new energy, a new vibe, a new purpose behind them. And I really think we capture that in the soundtrack. Because I think you get those — those rehearsal sessions are them basically alone in a room, just working out the sounds. It’s like a studio record in a sense, but they’re doing them live, and they’re doing the best versions. You can compare it to all kinds of moments in rock history where a band’s just working through things in live sessions and creating the sounds and stuff. And it turns them into these beautifully straightforward, angular, incredible rock songs, which I just love. I love hearing them this way.

So as I look through the tracklist here, does the soundtrack basically follow along with the sequence of the film?

GREENE: Yeah, more or less. I edited the soundtrack together, so I get a “produced by” credit, which is very cool. What that really means is that I stitched together these multiple things into this order and it kind of follows along. It certainly starts with the same sounds that [the movie] starts with. One of the most fun things I did during the film was taking the Pavement sounds and just stitching them into these transition elements throughout the film. And every Pavement fan knows these sounds. These are the sounds in between songs that they would just randomly add. They’re the sort of musical equivalent of Malkmus contradicting himself. So like they finish this fucking badass song and then you hear “doot doot doot doot doot doot.” And it’s just like, “That kind of ruined the vibe, but in the best way possible,” right?

So I was able to take all that stuff and turn it into transition sounds. And so we use that kind of element throughout the soundtrack, which was super fun for me to do. And then, yeah, it’s just giving snippets. I wanted the soundtrack to basically feel like the experience of the movie, which feels like the experience of the band. So that’s the only goal. And I feel like, with all this stuff, it’s like myself as a fan interpreting that. So hopefully when fans hear this, they can feel that too. And it’s just like it’s cool that the band sort of gave over a little bit of authorship of something that they’ve released to a fan who’s collaborating with them, because that’s all I really am as a fan.

You mentioned working on the soundtrack with the band. What was the band’s input?

GREENE: I worked really closely with Westie, really closely with Scott. I think the rest of the band were aware of what we’re doing and were listening along the way. And certainly Bob had some input. Steve West and Spiral were the two that — I talked to them most directly, and essentially we went through and talked about which tracks would be the best for it. And we agreed that it’d be really cool to hear reinterpretations of some of these early, early tracks, and that’s a lot that makes up the soundtrack.

And then some of the stuff was just like killer performances from the movie that we could hear the full versions of them. Like “Grounded,” for example, which, we’ve made a music video for “Grounded” that’s gonna come out as well, which is really nice. They were totally down. We were all like, “Yeah, the Monkees’ Head, it should be its own experience.” It should be something that pops and moves in its own way. And then they just, I think they’d come to really trust me over the course of making the film and seeing how the film got better and better and better. And so when I was like, “Hey, let me run with this,” they were like, “Hell yeah, do it.” And then they really dug what I came up with.

Anything else you want to add about the soundtrack?

GREENE: You get some stuff that’s not in the movie, which I think is cool. Stuff like Kathryn Gallagher’s performance of “Give It A Day.” I love it so much. Kathryn Gallagher is a great performer and is able to do things with her voice that are absolutely incredible. And she turns “Give It A Day” into this rock anthem that you get to hear a bit from. Or, like, we have on there Joe Keery singing “Range Life,” which is hilarious because he’s singing it as if he’s really bored — a grotesque, over-the-top version of a very bored, sad Malkmus on tour. Which, by the way, is not how Malmus really felt. I mean, maybe partly, but he probably felt the same way about any tour, right? But it’s like Joe Keery doing his emo version of Malkmus singing “Range Life,” and we added all this booing. I think it’s so stupid, very funny, and ridiculous. So I’m really happy that some of the stuff that’s not in the film actually got to be heard in the soundtrack, which adds some texture and layers to it.

Pavements is now streaming on MUBI. The Pavements soundtrack is out now via Matador.