Best 63 quotes of Alexander Payne on MyQuotes

Alexander Payne

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    Alexander Payne

    A book is a book, but a movie is a movie. The more faithful you are, the more you'll come up with Harry Potter #1 and #2, which are like filmed books on tape. They're so petrified of turning off the readers that they make no concessions to the fact that they're trying to make a piece of cinema.

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    Alexander Payne

    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.

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    Alexander Payne

    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.

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    Alexander Payne

    A lot of documentaries have been made very quickly, but I think they're like frogs in an ecosystem: They're harbingers. Film is always two or three years behind, because it takes so long to write a script, get financing, and get it made. It just takes a while. But I think it's coming. It has to.

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    Alexander Payne

    A lot of people get stuck, like, "Oh, if it's made by a studio, it can't be independent." Often they link it to the source of financing, or how it's distributed, but I don't really know how you can. A filmmaker will take his money from anywhere. It doesn't matter.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Alexander Payne

    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.

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    Alexander Payne

    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.

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    Alexander Payne

    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.

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    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.

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    Alexander Payne

    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.

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    Alexander Payne

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

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    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.

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    Alexander Payne

    I'd love to be a director-for-hire and get a nice paycheck and captain one of those big ships, but I think studios mistakenly think I want to write what I direct - which I don't. I write out of desperation, because I never get a script I like, other than "Nebraska." It's a matter of: What's the screenplay? Is it intelligent? Is it human? I don't care what genre, what scale. I'm here for the movies.

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    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. 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.

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    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.

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    Alexander Payne

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

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    Alexander Payne

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

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    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.

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    Alexander Payne

    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.

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    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.

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    Alexander Payne

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

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    Alexander Payne

    I love comedies. I take comedy very seriously as a form. It's a serious form, involving a certain way of looking at life, specifically the painful aspects of life. 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.

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    Alexander Payne

    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.

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    Alexander Payne

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

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    Alexander Payne

    I'm considered to some degree a successful director working in Hollywood, making films my way but using studio financing. But with almost every single one, I get praised up the wazoo by people who never would have financed the films. It's: "Gee, this movie is so new and different - what do you want to do next?" "This." "Oh, that's too new and different.

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    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.

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    Alexander Payne

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

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    Alexander Payne

    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.

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    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. It's where you feel the director, not a machine, at work. It doesn't matter where the money comes from. It matters how much freedom the director has to work with his or her team. That's how I personally define independent movies.

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    Alexander Payne

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

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    Alexander Payne

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

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    Alexander Payne

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

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    Alexander Payne

    I read reviews of critics I respect and feel I can learn something from. Right now there are a lot of bottom-feeder critics who just have access to a computer and don't necessarily have an academic or cinema background that I can detect, so I tend to ignore that and stay with the same top-tier critics that I've come to respect. I like reading a good review - it doesn't have to be favorable, but a well-thought-out one - because I very much appreciate the relationship of directors and critics.

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    Alexander Payne

    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.

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    Alexander Payne

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

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    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.

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    Alexander Payne

    I think about what movie I would like to see. I don't think of them as a correction or palliative. I certainly am irritated by anything that's shot in the Midwest and filled with these noble people. "Oh, they're so good, and they're so honest..." I'm not interested in that. I just think of what's right for a movie.

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    Alexander Payne

    I think cynicism lasts. Sentimentality ages, dates quickly.

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    Alexander Payne

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

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    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!

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    Alexander Payne

    I want studios to be financing director-driven, auteurist cinema, as they did in the '70s. I think it's starting to happen now. Plus, because of how our world has changed politically, I think audiences are demanding more realism. We need to have more stuff in our culture about what is really going on right now.

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    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.

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    Alexander Payne

    Just because I make films doesn't mean I think they're great. I just make them and then when I'm done with them I'm just a filmgoer like I always am. They're all lessons. I'm still in film school, honestly. And this one is just a dry run for whatever the next one is.

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    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.

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    Alexander Payne

    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.

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    Alexander Payne

    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.

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    Alexander Payne

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