Alexander Payne is the champion of male middle-class losers. Films such as Election, About Schmidt and Sideways star men who have the rug pulled from underneath them. So Matthew Broderick's teacher in the wonderful high school satire Election is bullied by Reese Witherspoon's monomaniac student Tracy Flick, almost has an affair, gets so badly bee-stung that his face is reduced to a raw burger, and loses pretty much everything. In About Schmidt, Jack Nicholson is left with nothing but repressed anger and an existential crisis when he's forced to take retirement. Sideways features Paul Giamatti as a depressed schlump of a teacher who knows far more about wine than life. Now it's George Clooney's turn in The Descendants, which is already being flagged up as Oscar candy.

Clooney plays a typical Payne guy: a workaholic who wears his trousers too high, he gets everything wrong with his two daughters and all his wealth counts for nothing when he discovers his comatose wife has been having an affair.

I expect Payne to be a roly-poly man, inelegantly dressed, uncomfortable in his skin. In fact, he's tall and lean, with thick, greying hair and probing eyes. Professorial and urbane. The director is hardly prolific – five films in 15 years. It's been eight years since Sideways, which won him an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, but he says he'd rather think of it as four – so much of that time was spent promoting that film, talking to its many fans. In between times, there has been an unrequited love affair with an ambitious movie he once described as his La Dolce Vita. And there's also been a divorce, from Sandra Oh, who starred in Sideways. It might not look like it, he says, but he's been busy with life and movies.

His films are gentle and funny, beautifully acted and unusually wordy for Hollywood (even if the characters have little to say to each other). I tell Payne he doesn't strike me as a very American film-maker. He peers at me and asks why. Well, I say, his men are so disappointed with their lot.

"My response to that is it's not some theme that is personal to me. I have been attracted to those characters because I think I make comedies. I've been inspired all my life by silent comedies, and I think this middle-aged guy who has made all the wrong decisions is my comic archetype." He has an unusual way of talking – formal and thoughtful, as if tackling an academic thesis.

Has he always been attracted to failure? "Hehehe. That's very personal. Well, I… I don't know how to answer that. Is the fact that Chaplin is a tramp, would we ask him, 'Mr Chaplin, why have you always been attracted to homelessness?' Maybe we would. And maybe he'd say the same thing I'd say - unless I'm being disingenuous on some level – that it is a comic archetype that somehow the audience can root for. We're all trying to wake up in this brief flash of life on this planet, unless we're complete idiots, and I root for these characters to grow and wake up, the way I root for myself to grow and wake up."

Payne, a Greek-American, grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and is 50 years old. He says he didn't know he wanted to be a film-maker but he was obsessed with film from childhood. "I'd watch anything, particularly older films. Anything in black-and-white I wanted to see. It's lucky that we had a black-and-white television!" By his teens, he had turned to the new American cinema of Scorsese and Coppola. "I was just going to movies all the time – 1970s cinema defined my idea of what an adult commercial American film is."

What is that? "Just intelligent, human stories told in a modern cinematic vernacular where you say bad words and show breasts, and where acting style more approximates real life and is relatively free of contrivance and device."

After university, where he majored in Spanish and history, he had two ambitions: to work as a foreign correspondent or make movies. When he won a place at film school, the decision was made for him. His first film, Citizen Ruth, released in 1996 and co-written with Jim Taylor (like all his movies, except The Descendants), was about a single mother who ends up fuelling the abortion debate after her fourth child. Occasionally, he has done well-paid hack work (writing Jurassic Park III in 2001 and an early draft of the comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry in 2007), but most of his career has been dedicated to writing and directing his own films – on his own terms. He is one of few film-makers who demand approval at final cut.

In the past he has hinted at a hostility to casting stars. He smiles when I mention a story about pressure being applied on him to hire Tom Cruise for Election. "Yes! That was a terrible casting experience on Election. In the time you go to cast a film, you're a prisoner of whoever happens to be the most famous person of the right age during that six-month window. And if you want to try to reach into the past or the future beyond that six-month window, it's very difficult. So even as a young director, for a little $8m movie like Election, the casting hoops I had to jump through were very dispiriting."

Wouldn't it have been nice to be able to turn down Clooney – to say he was too famous for the part? He smiles again and says Clooney was perfect for The Descendants, but as it happens he did reject him for a role in Sideways. "Tom Church's part as the washed-up actor. He wasn't right for it. People were saying why don't you cast Clooney and Ed Norton, for instance?" Did the studio go mad at Payne for turning him down? "No, let them try."

He's tougher than he looks, I say. "Ha! So tough! I'm too fucking nice, that's my problem. People take advantage of me all the time." But he has the final say? "Yeah! It says directed by Alexander Payne and the moment it says 'Alexander Payne and this financier', then we can share the casting. I don't think film-makers should relent on the single greatest component of cinema, which is casting." He pauses. "But it's lovely when a big star happens to coincide with your intentions." So did Clooney beg for another chance or did Payne approach him? "I approached him. He was my first and only choice for this. I'd wanted to work with him for years because I think he's terrific. There aren't too many American stars in whom I detect a real person."

I tell him I think Clooney was good in the film, but nowhere near as good as the girls who played his daughters. In response, he tells me a story. "I used to be friends with an old Czech director, Jiri Weiss, and Down And Out In Beverly Hills had just come out and he said, 'Did you see Down And Out In Beverly Hills?' I said, 'Yes, I did.'" Payne impersonates Weiss's accent. "'Who vas ze best actor in Down And Out In Beverly Hills?' and I said, 'Oh, the dog' and he said, 'Yes, by far ze dog was ze best actor in ze film. Now, vhy vas ze dog ze best actor in zat film? I vill tell you vhy. He does not know how to be anything other than a dog. He is perfectly cast as ze dog.' And that's exactly right." He returns to the daughters in The Descendants. "The older one is a total pro, but the younger one is so young and so natural, and it is like casting a cat or a dog who can learn dialogue. She doesn't know anything but how to be a 10-year-old girl."

In his films Payne tends to juxtapose known actors alongside unknowns or non-professionals – those people who don't know how to be anything but who they are. There are few American stars he'd like to work with, he says, and he names them for me. "I like [Matt] Damon. Did you see him in The Informant? That guy is a disciplined actor. I want to work with Clooney again, I want to work with Giamatti again. I like guys who will do anything, who don't have vanity – somebody who's a real full person, not just an ambitious actor."

He's as criticial of his own work as he is of the Hollywood A-list. He says watching his own films makes him wince; all he can see is mistakes. The only one he can sit through is Election: "Because it's the only one I made that isn't too long. It has a very good rhythm to it. I think it succeeds because of its brisk, metronome pace. And it has a relentless, shark-like narrative drive."

Well, I say, apologetically, I'm afraid I like his movies and think Sideways is great. The cerebral certainties of a second ago vanish. Now he looks diffident and discombobulated. "Is it?" he says, surprised. "It is a good film? It holds up? Thanks a lot. Thank you."

During the making of Sideways, Payne married Sandra Oh, one of its stars, whom he had been dating for three years. Two years later they separated. Did working together cause tensions? "I wouldn't say we split up because of Sideways. That's post hoc ergo propter hoc." Say again?

After which, therefore on account of which. It's a fallacy." Payne has no children, would like some, and says he "might" be in a relationship at the moment.

He returns to an earlier subject – why he thinks Election has stood the test of time better than his other movies. "I think cynicism lasts. Sentimentality ages, dates quickly."

So what about The Descendants? "It's OK," he says slowly and unenthusiastically. It's well-made, it's controlled… and there's very little excess in it." And that's the best you'll get by way of a recommendation. He says it's too talky, again – the bits he likes are when it's purely visual.

Does the cynicism or sentimentality win out in The Descendants? Neither, hopefully, Payne says. "I hope it has emotion. Emotionality and not sentimentality. Sentimentality is a dirty word to me. It implies trying to wring tears from the audience. I don't want to do any of that crap. If you want to be moved, fine. If you don't, fine. I'm not going to force anything out of you."

It's interesting, I say, that he uses the world "controlled" so often when talking about his work. Again, he looks disappointed. That's the thing, he says, he doesn't want to be so disciplined. He wants to let go, be braver, make that epic masterpiece. "I think I've been too concerned with learning how to make the well-made classical film. I'd like to start taking more narrative and visual risks, stretching my idea of what a film can be. As so many people say, you need to know the rules before you can break them. Well, I think I know the rules now, and now I'm interested in breaking them. I just want to spread my wings."

The Descendants is released on 27 January.

• This article was amended on 24 January 2012. The original misheard Alexander Payne's translation of Post hoc ergo propter hoc, rendering it as "After which therefore I encountered which". This has been corrected to, "After which, therefore on account of which".