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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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Alexander Payne
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: February 10
Film Director
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Writer
Omaha
Nebraska
Notice
Dramatic
Happen
Happens
Even
Always
Things
Life
Somewhat

More quotes by Alexander Payne

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My flag is always flying. My shingle is always out. I'm always looking for movie ideas. The hardest part of this whole movie-making endeavor is finding ideas. That's the real goal.
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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.
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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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The kindest thing a director can do is look with open eyes at everything.
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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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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.
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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.
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Comedy is a wonderful device for distance that allows us to look at what we're talking about with some degree of distance and hopefully with a bit more perspective and honesty. With many exceptions, a movie with no jokes is far less appealing to me.
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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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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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I want all of my films to belong to me.
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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.
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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.
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You just never know when you're living in a golden age.
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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.
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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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The actors are the greatest executors of tone in a film. They're the most important cinematic component.
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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.
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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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The best cinema is about ethics.
Alexander Payne