EXCLUSIVE: Alexander Payne has sharply criticized a report from earlier this year that the script for his five-time Oscar-nominated film The remainswhich he directed from a screenplay by David Hemingson, was a plagiarism.

“It was the stupidest thing in the world,” Payne told us at the Sarajevo Film Festival when we asked him about the Variety report that appeared on the eve of the Oscars earlier this year.

In the piece Lucas Screenwriter Simon Stephenson charged The remains Screenplay of the plagiarism from his Black List screenplay from 2013 Frisco.

“It was irresponsible of diversity to report on it without having read the scripts and compared them myself,” Payne claimed. “Do you think The New York Times would have done that?”

He added: “I haven’t heard anything more about it and I wish him (Stephenson) well, but it was just baseless. I mean, I wasn’t even paying attention to it because crazy allegations keep coming out of all corners and it didn’t even bother me, but then it just kind of kept coming up and I thought, ‘Well, that’s stupid.’

“I have since spoken openly about the film for which I stole the idea. The remains and it was a French film from 1935 (Marcel Pagnol’s comedy-drama Merlusse). That’s where I stole it – not from that guy.”

Payne, who took part in a master class in Sarajevo on Sunday, where he Choice sequel and a western film he is working on with Hemingson, said that he and his Choice Writing partner Jim Taylor was still in the early stages of putting the film together. “Jim and I are still conceptualizing it,” he told Deadline, confirming that Reese Witherspoon, who plays lead character Tracy Flick in the 1999 title, is still involved in the project.

When asked if the film was still being prepared at Paramount+, he said: “All I know is that the deal was made for Paramount+, so for streaming, and I don’t want that anymore. I like theatrical films. You know, everyone gets dollar signs in their eyes when they hear about streaming, and I’m more interested in theatrical films.”

Payne joked about the Western with Hemingson: “We’ve got about 20 bad pages behind us.”

While Payne admitted that there has always been a battle in the cinema market for more human films – the kind of films that Sideways And The descendants However, he added that the current system is “turned on its head” when it comes to determining which films are successful at the box office.

“In the 1970s, when I was growing up, the car chases were the B movies,” Payne said. “Now they’re making all the Roger Corman movies. They cost $200 million and make a billion. And what used to be the A movies are now the shrink-wrapped arthouse movies. So the whole world is upside down. But every year a few of them get to come out.”

On television, Payne directed the pilot for the HBO series Hung upwhere he served as executive producer.

When asked if he would consider returning to television, Payne simply said: “I wish someone would offer me a great show to direct, because then I would do it. But when it comes to making things up, I still lean towards films.”