Quote

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

Alexander Payne

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alexander Payne
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: February 10
Film Director
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Writer
Omaha
Nebraska
Important
Executors
Cinematic
Component
Components
Tone
Greatest
Actors
Film

More quotes by Alexander Payne

Image
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.
Alexander Payne
Image
You just never know when you're living in a golden age.
Alexander Payne
Image
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.
Alexander Payne
Image
I always wanted 'Sideways' to be like a great 1960s Italian film.
Alexander Payne
Image
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.
Alexander Payne
Image
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.
Alexander Payne
Image
A book suggests a whole world and story that I could have never thought of in a million years.
Alexander Payne
Image
I never wanted money worries to slow me down or make me take a job I didn't want.
Alexander Payne
Image
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.
Alexander Payne
Image
I like to think of film-making not just as an act of personal self-aggrandisement but rather as an act of public service.
Alexander Payne
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Alexander Payne
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The biggest fear I have is to die with regrets, and of course that will come true.
Alexander Payne
Image
The best cinema is about ethics.
Alexander Payne
Image
Acting is a lot easier than people think it is.
Alexander Payne
Image
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
Image
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