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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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Alexander Payne
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: February 10
Film Director
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Writer
Omaha
Nebraska
Level
Levels
Making
Archetypal
Film
Wasting
Great
Epic
Think
Cinema
Thinking
Potential
Films

More quotes by Alexander Payne

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I never wanted money worries to slow me down or make me take a job I didn't want.
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I think a badly crafted, great idea for a new film with a ton of spelling mistakes is just 100 times better than a well-crafted stale script.
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The better a novel is, in literary terms, the more you can't be faithful. The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies.
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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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I still have energy and some degree of youth, which is what a filmmaker needs.
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In the moment of making films, I want to share my observations of life, not of other films.
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Each one of my movies becomes easier to get off the ground.
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I definitely in filmmaking more and more find writing and directing a means to harvest material for editing. It's all about editing.
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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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The actors are the greatest executors of tone in a film. They're the most important cinematic component.
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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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I want all of my films to belong to me.
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I like actors who, when you see them on screen, you sense a person, not just an actor.
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I think that Peter Jennings is the only decent one of the big three.
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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.
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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.
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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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The kindest thing a director can do is look with open eyes at everything.
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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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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.
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