Every day, the drama of life unfolds without fanfare or headlines. Without, as director Alexander Payne likes to say, any emphasis at all.

When Payne first read "The Descendants," the story of a troubled kamaaina family by Hawaii author Kaui Hart Hemmings, he was moved by the quiet drama set in Honolulu. The truths revealed in the story were universal but appealed to Payne because they were set in an exotic location.

"The Descendants" is the story of Matt King, a detached Honolulu attorney suddenly forced to deal with a failed marriage, his wife in a coma and two rebellious daughters. But King, who is played by George Clooney, is no ordinary man. He’s a descendant of Native Hawaiian royalty and a haole banker whose status among the landed elite entitled him to wealth and standing long before he was born.

It is an emotional story at once rich with possibility and daunting in its challenge to get right "a world I could never have thought of in a million years," Payne said during a recent visit to Hawaii.

"Being granted a temporary passport into Hawaii society was interesting to me," he said. "There’s a whole distinctive social fabric to life in Hawaii that appealed to me. I love films with a distinctive sense of place."

Critics have found "The Descendants" much more than simply interesting. They’ve called it Oscar-worthy. Hawaii audiences will have a chance to judge for themselves when the film from Fox Searchlight Pictures opens here Wednesday.

"I always think that the true audience for my films are the people who live in the places where I shoot," Payne said. "I made ‘The Descendants’ for the people of Hawaii, and if other people like it for the story, that’s great."

The 50-year-old Payne employed the same attention to detail — "a documentary approach to fiction film," he said — that brought Santa Barbara’s wine country to life in his 2004 film "Sideways." The film brought Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay.

He spent six months living on Oahu before "The Descendants" began filming in March 2010, often driving in random directions to see what he could discover about the Hawaii not found in tourist brochures.

The experience left Payne feeling confident about what he created, but the director hopes the drama will have a greater impact on audiences than the backdrop.

"I would hope viewers in Hawaii, after a while, would forget it’s set in Hawaii and just get into the story," Payne said. "The beautiful shock of recognition is great for a while, but then the story has to kick in."

There are things he captured on camera that will resonate with people who live in Hawaii. Anyone who has spent time in the islands will recognize King. He’s the kind of hapa-haole that locals often view with mild contempt: old-money values, private school connections and exclusive club memberships.

But those same audiences will also recognize subtle localisms, too — from the glass fishing floats displayed in local homes to the gecko that chirps during one quiet scene.

"I was proud of that gecko," Payne said. "My sound guy got it. I told him not to come back from Hawaii without gecko sounds."

This is the fourth film Payne has adapted from a novel, and he likes the format.

"It is so nice to do adaptations because at least someone has sort of been through it before and kind of thought it out," he said. "Even if I disagree, then at least I have a strong reaction in my disagreement. And I need strong opinions to make a film."

Although the initial adaptation was done by the writing duo of Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, the director decided to handle the final version himself. For Payne the story hung on two unusual acts of love: King’s decision to invite his wife’s lover to come to the hospital and the decision by the lover’s wife to come instead.

"I thought that was very beautiful — love, when it is difficult," Payne said. "That’s what made me want to dig into this story. When I was beginning the adaption, I thought those were two great moments. And I would say they are done, in the film, fairly nonemphatically. You could really have made more of a meal of those moments, but I wanted them to be as nonemphatic as most of life seems to be to me."