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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.

Alexander Payne

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Alexander Payne
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: February 10
Film Director
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Writer
Omaha
Nebraska
Really
Attracted
Short
Nobody
Wants
Least
Hours
Film
Two
Screenplays

More quotes by Alexander Payne

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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.
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I don't feel despair because I am able to make the films I want to make, and that gives me hope.
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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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I want all of my films to belong to me.
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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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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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In real life, I myself am kind of a rambling guy. I like to travel.
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Just because I make films doesn't mean I think they're great. I just make them and then when I'm done with them I'm just a filmgoer like I always am. They're all lessons. I'm still in film school, honestly. And this one is just a dry run for whatever the next one is.
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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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I like to think of film-making not just as an act of personal self-aggrandisement but rather as an act of public service.
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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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In a general sense, to convert any short story, novel, play, or opera into a movie, you have to re-rig it. Even though they're all narratives over time, they're very different forms.
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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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A book suggests a whole world and story that I could have never thought of in a million years.
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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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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 like voice-over in films, and most of my films have been voice-over films.
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If you have your movies so that everyone understands everything, I think that's probably not a very good movie.
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I think that Peter Jennings is the only decent one of the big three.
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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.
Alexander Payne