Alexander Payne Quotes

What is filmmaking but groping in the dark?

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think cynicism lasts. Sentimentality ages, dates quickly.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The best cinema is about ethics.

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

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

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.

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 want all of my films to belong to me.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

This is how good movies get made and always have: from the gut instinct of the financiers, not just by committee and research.

I've always approached screenplays and so forth with, "How would it really happen?" Not "What's the movie version?" but "What's the real-life version?" Then I just follow my nose.

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

What science-fiction premises do is it gives you a "what-if" prism to look at the contemporary world with a wack on the side of the head.

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.

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.

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

Acting is a lot easier than people think it is.

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

In a general sense, to convert any short story, novel, play, or opera into a movie, you have to re-rig it. Even though they're all narratives over time, they're very different forms.

The worst thing for people to say about your movies is, "Yeah, it was pretty good, but it was too damn long.".

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

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.