Alexander Payne Quotations

I think cynicism lasts. Sentimentality ages, dates quickly.

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.

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.

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.

I definitely in filmmaking more and more find writing and directing a means to harvest material for editing. It's all about editing.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

'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.

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.'

I think if you watch most of my films with the sound off, you could still tell what's going on.

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.

You just never know when you're living in a golden age.

What is filmmaking but groping in the dark?

My flag is always flying. My shingle is always out. I'm always looking for movie ideas. The hardest part of this whole movie-making endeavor is finding ideas. That's the real goal.

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

I never wanted money worries to slow me down or make me take a job I didn't want.

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

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

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

I like actors who, when you see them on screen, you sense a person, not just an actor.

I like to think of film-making not just as an act of personal self-aggrandisement but rather as an act of public service.

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

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.

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.

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!

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

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. My goal is always what Chuck Jones wanted his Warner Brothers cartoons to be, which was if you turn down the sound, you could still tell what's going on. I think if you watch most of my films with the sound off, you could still tell what's going on.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

As the years go by and I make more films, I am increasingly interested in capturing place as a vivid backdrop for my films.

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

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

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

I still have energy and some degree of youth, which is what a filmmaker needs.

I want all of my films to belong to me.

I'm hoping one day I can make one really good film.

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

Omaha, like Rome, is built on seven hills.

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

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

The hardest part of this whole movie-making endeavor is finding ideas.

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

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.

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.

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.'

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.

Comedy is a wonderful device for distance that allows us to look at what we're talking about with some degree of distance and hopefully with a bit more perspective and honesty. With many exceptions, a movie with no jokes is far less appealing to me.

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

I spend a long time casting, but once I've cast a film there's a reason why I selected those people. So I'm hands-on in selecting the cast, hands-off to see what they do with their characters, and hands-on again to offer suggestions.

Adult movies with any artistic credit are released in the last quarter of the year and expected to gird for battle for Globes and Oscars. So the films aren't being seen just for themselves, but rather in a competitive context.

When I'm introduced as a two-time Oscar winner, I'm happy that a film of mine has found an audience and some acclaim because that keeps me in business. A filmmaker's greatest concern is the ability to make future films, so it helps keep me in business.

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

All three parts of filmmaking [writing, shooting, editing] contribute to rhytm. You want the script to be a tight as possible, you want the acting to be as efficient as possible on the set, and you have enough coverage to manipulate the rhythm in the editing room, and then in the editing room you want to find the quickest possible version, even if it's a leisurely paced film. I definitely in filmmaking more and more find writing and directing a means to harvest material for editing. It's all about editing.

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 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.

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.

The best cinema is about ethics.

Acting is a lot easier than people think it is.

Somewhat dramatic things happen, and you don't even always notice them — that's what life is.

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.

Cinema really lends itself well to big, archetypal stories, you know, classic old stories and you need kind of a weird, big terrain like the Japanese plains for Samurai movies or the West. You need that for these giants to walk around.

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

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

To be fair-not that I really care about being fair to anyone, ever-but to be fair, I'm sure that same ratio of bad films to good probably exists in every studio.

You would own the negative after seven years. The company would actually own the film. It's kind of a financial and moral thing about owning your own creative work.