Alexander Payne Quotes
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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.
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Jesuits encourage an intellectual rigor in a way that I like.
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My flag is always flying. My shingle is always out. I'm always looking for movie ideas.
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I think cynicism lasts. Sentimentality ages, dates quickly.
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I like actors who, when you see them on screen, you sense a person, not just an actor.
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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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The hardest part of this whole movie-making endeavor is finding ideas.
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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.
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If you're trying to recreate life, the life that you best know is the one you grew up with.
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I still have energy and some degree of youth, which is what a filmmaker needs.
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I always wanted 'Sideways' to be like a great 1960s Italian film.
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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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You look at how many years you have left, and you start to think: 'How many more films do I have in me?'
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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.
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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.
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A book suggests a whole world and story that I could have never thought of in a million years.
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Life mixes tones all the time.
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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.
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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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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?
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Each one of my movies becomes easier to get off the ground.
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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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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.'
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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!