Alexander Payne Quotes

The kindest thing a director can do is look with open eyes at everything.

The best actors are always the ones who've directed as well, as they understand all the problems you face.

I make comedies and I always try ... I don't try but I allow to have at least 5% of the jokes or have some jokes that I know will be understood by only about 5% of the audience. It's that guy in the corner who gets it and laughs. But he has to have his jokes too. That's part of my audience. Part of my audience is the people who will only get certain things.

I want all of my films to belong to me.

When I'm shooting, I don't care who the star is. I have an actor playing a part, and I'm serving the script, not serving anyone's career.

You begin a film more with questions than with direct intentions. It's more of an exploration and discovery.

Anytime you cast a movie and you need someone famous in the lead part, you're a prisoner of whoever happens to be famous in the six-month window in which you're trying to get a film financed.

I guess maybe I try to make movies that are closer to real life than are many Hollywood movies. But I still try to stay within a commercial narrative, a contemporary American vernacular.

My editor and I remain very disciplined. It's just sometimes when you're making a film, you get into the cutting room and you see a scene that's slowing you down in a certain section, but if you remove that scene then, emotionally or story-wise, another scene a half-hour later won't have the same impact. You just get stuck with it.

I don't feel despair because I am able to make the films I want to make, and that gives me hope.

The actors are the greatest executors of tone in a film. They're the most important cinematic component.

I think a badly crafted, great idea for a new film with a ton of spelling mistakes is just 100 times better than a well-crafted stale script.

The most heinous shift in American films is that they reinforce good things like 'couples' and 'relationships.'

In real life, I myself am kind of a rambling guy. I like to travel.

It seems that our politicians see the world in black and white, so why not our artists? Did Woody Allen's 'Manhattan' have to be in black and white? No. But is it fantastic that it was? To see New York like that? Yes!

When you watch a movie, you don't want to feel like a machine made it. You want to feel a soul.

Joe E. Lewis said, 'Money doesn't buy happiness but it calms the nerves.' And that is how I feel about a film being well-received.

Jesuits encourage an intellectual rigor in a way that I like.

'Independent' means one thing to me: It means that regardless of the source of financing, the director's voice is extremely present. It's such a pretentious term, but it's auteurist cinema. Director-driven, personal, auteurist ... Whatever word you want.

The biggest fear I have is to die with regrets, and of course that will come true.

Hollywood films have become a cesspool of formula and it's up to us to try to change it ... I feel like a preacher! But it's really true. I feel personally responsible for the future of American cinema. Me personally.

They say you can do honest, sincere work for decades, but you're given in general a 10-year period when what you do touches the zeitgeist - when you're relevant. And I'm aware of that, and I don't want my time to go by.

My flag is always flying. My shingle is always out. I'm always looking for movie ideas.

That's how I like to do it with actors, have them really go for it and I'll tell them when it's too much. It's always easier to bring it back then to push it further.

I think cynicism is more enduring than sentimentality.

You look at how many years you have left, and you start to think: 'How many more films do I have in me?'

I always wanted 'Sideways' to be like a great 1960s Italian film.

In the moment of making films, I want to share my observations of life, not of other films.

I don't want all of American cinema to be big cartoons that are just made to be digested by the entire world.

If you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things you did that you'd forgotten about, you'd weep, looking at that day.

I'm attracted to short screenplays. Nobody really wants a film to be over two hours, or at least I don't.

Omaha, like Rome, is built on seven hills.

There's a bizarre insistence on how a story should be. 'The protagonist must be sympathetic!' they say. Whatever that means. I never engage in that discussion. I never use that word, 'sympathetic.' I just know 'interesting.'

If you're not making epic, archetypal films on some level, I think you're wasting a great potential of cinema.

I'm so not interested in producing, other than doing my own work, producing my own films. I only do it as favors, for other people to get their films made.

Marketing has supplanted story as the primary force behind the worthiness of making a film, and that's a very sad thing. It's film only as a function of consumerism rather than as an important component of our culture, and that's everywhere around the world.

I think that Peter Jennings is the only decent one of the big three.

Forgiving yourself may be for many people, at least for myself, extremely difficult. And then in a larger context, I will say that I'm constantly astonished by those who pray daily, "Forgive me my sins as I forgive those who sin against me," and beat very loudly the war drum.

A pitfall of making a comedy with a studio-and it's also an American cultural thing-is that I get tired of being encouraged to go always for laughs.

I like action films, not exclusively, but I like Samurai films. I like Westerns. Not so much war pictures, but a few. I like kinetic cinema.

I mean, look, I love movies, not just the ones I make ... In fact, I don't like the movies I make very much.

There is an audience out there for literate films - slower, more observant, more human films, and they deserve to be made.

If you have your movies so that everyone understands everything, I think that's probably not a very good movie.

Each one of my movies becomes easier to get off the ground.

The best cinema is about ethics.

Even if we die at 100, we're still dying young. I want at least 700 years. There's a lot of travelling and books to read and movies to see. I'm not going to squeeze it all in in 85 years.

A book suggests a whole world and story that I could have never thought of in a million years.

If you're trying to recreate life, the life that you best know is the one you grew up with.

I like voice-over in films, and most of my films have been voice-over films.

I get asked, 'How can you have such failures in your films?' Well, what else is life about? There's some sense of constant failure in something. Humor gives you a distance from it.

I could never be a part of an adaptation of a film where there's pressure to not disappoint the immense fan base. In those cases, they often wind up with filmed books on tape, quite uncinematic. Having said that, I'd say all the adaptations I've done are quite faithful to the original. You have to pick and choose which storylines and plot threads, because you don't have the time to kill in the film as they have in novels. All those pages with detours and plots and different storylines. But films add a lot, and you gotta keep it moving.