“Well, that’s what life is – this collection of extraordinarily ordinary moments. We just need to pay attention to them all. Wake up and pay attention to how beautiful it all is.”
― Alexander Payne
“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.”
― Alexander Payne
“Omaha, like Rome, is built on seven hills.”
― Alexander Payne
“I never wanted money worries to slow me down or make me take a job I didn’t want.”
― Alexander Payne
“The actors are the greatest executors of tone in a film. They’re the most important cinematic component.”
― Alexander Payne
“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.”
― Alexander Payne
“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.”
― Alexander Payne
“But it’s just that the whole country is making generally lousy films these days and has been for quite a while. That’s the big problem that we all have to think about.”
― Alexander Payne
“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.”
― Alexander Payne
“I mean, look, I love movies, not just the ones I make… In fact, I don’t like the movies I make very much.”
― Alexander Payne
“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.”
― Alexander Payne
“I think that Peter Jennings is the only decent one of the big three.”
― Alexander Payne
“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.”
― Alexander Payne
“You just never know when you’re living in a golden age.”
― Alexander Payne
“When you watch a movie, you don’t want to feel like a machine made it. You want to feel a soul.”
― Alexander Payne
“There is an audience out there for literate films – slower, more observant, more human films, and they deserve to be made.”
― Alexander Payne
“The best cinema is about ethics.”
― Alexander Payne
“In the moment of making films, I want to share my observations of life, not of other films.”
― Alexander Payne
“Jesuits encourage an intellectual rigor in a way that I like.”
― Alexander Payne
“The most heinous shift in American films is that they reinforce good things like ‘couples’ and ‘relationships.’”
― Alexander Payne
“What is filmmaking but groping in the dark?”
― Alexander Payne
“You begin a film more with questions than with direct intentions. It’s more of an exploration and discovery.”
― Alexander Payne
“As the years go by and I make more films, I am increasingly interested in capturing place as a vivid backdrop for my films.”
― Alexander Payne
“I definitely in filmmaking more and more find writing and directing a means to harvest material for editing. It’s all about editing.”
― Alexander Payne
“I don’t think so much about verbal comedy. I always think about visual comedy. I was raised watching silents, and I’m always thinking about how to make cinema, not good talking – although I want good talking. I’m much more interested in framing, composition, and orchestration of bodies in space, and so forth.”
― Alexander Payne
“I think if you watch most of my films with the sound off, you could still tell what’s going on.”
― Alexander Payne
“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.’”
― Alexander Payne
“If you’re trying to recreate life, the life that you best know is the one you grew up with.”
― Alexander Payne
“In a sense, ‘Schmidt’ is the most Omaha of my films. But have I gotten it right? I’m not sure. Did Fellini get Rome right? Did Ozu get Tokyo right?”
― Alexander Payne
“I like actors who, when you see them on screen, you sense a person, not just an actor.”
― Alexander Payne
“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.”
― Alexander Payne
“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.”
― Alexander Payne
“I’m hoping one day I can make one really good film.”
― Alexander Payne
“I think cynicism lasts. Sentimentality ages, dates quickly.”
― Alexander Payne
“I still have energy and some degree of youth, which is what a filmmaker needs.”
― Alexander Payne
“You look at how many years you have left, and you start to think: ‘How many more films do I have in me?’”
― Alexander Payne
“The biggest fear I have is to die with regrets, and of course that will come true.”
― Alexander Payne
“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.”
― Alexander Payne
“I want all of my films to belong to me.”
― Alexander Payne
“My flag is always flying. My shingle is always out. I’m always looking for movie ideas.”
― Alexander Payne
“The hardest part of this whole movie-making endeavor is finding ideas.”
― Alexander Payne
“A book suggests a whole world and story that I could have never thought of in a million years.”
― Alexander Payne
“Life mixes tones all the time.”
― Alexander Payne
“The kindest thing a director can do is look with open eyes at everything.”
― Alexander Payne
“When you’re a houseguest and you leave, it’s nice to straighten something up or send your hosts a useful gift. And when you leave the planet, it’s nice to have made a positive contribution.”
― Alexander Payne
“I like to think of film-making not just as an act of personal self-aggrandisement but rather as an act of public service.”
― Alexander Payne
“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.”
― Alexander Payne
“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.”
― Alexander Payne
“I always wanted ‘Sideways’ to be like a great 1960s Italian film.”
― Alexander Payne
“The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That’s why so many bad novels can become good movies, like ‘Jaws’ or ‘The Godfather.’”
― Alexander Payne
“Each one of my movies becomes easier to get off the ground.”
― Alexander Payne
“’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.”
― Alexander Payne
“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.”
― Alexander Payne
“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.”
― Alexander Payne
“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.”
― Alexander Payne
“The best actors are always the ones who’ve directed as well, as they understand all the problems you face.”
― Alexander Payne
“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!”
― Alexander Payne
“I like voice-over in films, and most of my films have been voice-over films.”
― Alexander Payne
“I don’t want all of American cinema to be big cartoons that are just made to be digested by the entire world.”
― Alexander Payne
“I don’t feel despair because I am able to make the films I want to make, and that gives me hope.”
― Alexander Payne
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