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

More quotes by Alexander Payne

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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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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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What is filmmaking but groping in the dark?
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The kindest thing a director can do is look with open eyes at everything.
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I'm hoping one day I can make one really good film.
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The best cinema is about ethics.
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In real life, I myself am kind of a rambling guy. I like to travel.
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There is an audience out there for literate films - slower, more observant, more human films, and they deserve to be made.
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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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I think cynicism lasts. Sentimentality ages, dates quickly.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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I mean, look, I love movies, not just the ones I make... In fact, I don't like the movies I make very much.
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.
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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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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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