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

Alexander Payne

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Alexander Payne
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: February 10
Film Director
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Writer
Omaha
Nebraska
Sound
Tell
Film
Stills
Still
Going
Films
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More quotes by Alexander Payne

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You just never know when you're living in a golden age.
Alexander Payne
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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.
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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If you're not making epic, archetypal films on some level, I think you're wasting a great potential of cinema.
Alexander Payne
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Each one of my movies becomes easier to get off the ground.
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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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.
Alexander Payne
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If you have your movies so that everyone understands everything, I think that's probably not a very good movie.
Alexander Payne
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The kindest thing a director can do is look with open eyes at everything.
Alexander Payne
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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.
Alexander Payne
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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.
Alexander Payne
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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.
Alexander Payne
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Acting is a lot easier than people think it is.
Alexander Payne
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I'm attracted to short screenplays. Nobody really wants a film to be over two hours, or at least I don't.
Alexander Payne
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I like actors who, when you see them on screen, you sense a person, not just an actor.
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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This is how good movies get made and always have: from the gut instinct of the financiers, not just by committee and research.
Alexander Payne
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I don't want all of American cinema to be big cartoons that are just made to be digested by the entire world.
Alexander Payne
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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.
Alexander Payne
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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.
Alexander Payne