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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.

Alexander Payne

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Alexander Payne
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: February 10
Film Director
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Writer
Omaha
Nebraska
Find
Directing
Mean
Editing
Writing
Material
Definitely
Materials
Movie
Actors
Means
Harvest

More quotes by Alexander Payne

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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.
Alexander Payne
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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.
Alexander Payne
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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.
Alexander Payne
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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.
Alexander Payne
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A book suggests a whole world and story that I could have never thought of in a million years.
Alexander Payne
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Acting is a lot easier than people think it is.
Alexander Payne
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I still have energy and some degree of youth, which is what a filmmaker needs.
Alexander Payne
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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.
Alexander Payne
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What is filmmaking but groping in the dark?
Alexander Payne
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The actors are the greatest executors of tone in a film. They're the most important cinematic component.
Alexander Payne
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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
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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
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Somewhat dramatic things happen, and you don't even always notice them — that's what life is.
Alexander Payne
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The best cinema is about ethics.
Alexander Payne
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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.
Alexander Payne
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I never wanted money worries to slow me down or make me take a job I didn't want.
Alexander Payne
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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
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I want all of my films to belong to me.
Alexander Payne
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You just never know when you're living in a golden age.
Alexander Payne
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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.
Alexander Payne