"Alexander Payne couldn't stop reading 'Sideways' when he first opened the novel five years ago. The director was on a plane back to the States from the Edinburgh Film Festival, where he had just shown his second movie, 'Election.' 'I was with this chick I was dating, sitting in first class on Virgin,' he recalls over breakfast, relishing the story. 'And she got all pissed off at me later: 'You never talked on that plane ride!'" John McMurtrie speaks with the director in the San Francisco Chronicle.