Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
If you have your movies so that everyone understands everything, I think that's probably not a very good movie.
Alexander Payne
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Alexander Payne
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: February 10
Film Director
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Writer
Omaha
Nebraska
Good
Think
Thinking
Understands
Movies
Probably
Movie
Everyone
Everything
More quotes by Alexander Payne
The actors are the greatest executors of tone in a film. They're the most important cinematic component.
Alexander Payne
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
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
I don't feel despair because I am able to make the films I want to make, and that gives me hope.
Alexander Payne
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
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
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
I think cynicism lasts. Sentimentality ages, dates quickly.
Alexander Payne
I'm attracted to short screenplays. Nobody really wants a film to be over two hours, or at least I don't.
Alexander Payne
Each one of my movies becomes easier to get off the ground.
Alexander Payne
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
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.
Alexander Payne
A pitfall of making a comedy with a studio-and it's also an American cultural thing-is that I get tired of being encouraged to go always for laughs.
Alexander Payne
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
I like voice-over in films, and most of my films have been voice-over films.
Alexander Payne
I always wanted 'Sideways' to be like a great 1960s Italian film.
Alexander Payne
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
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
I think if you watch most of my films with the sound off, you could still tell what's going on.
Alexander Payne
Somewhat dramatic things happen, and you don't even always notice them — that's what life is.
Alexander Payne
