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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.

Alexander Payne

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Alexander Payne
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: February 10
Film Director
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Writer
Omaha
Nebraska
People
Characters
Selecting
Spend
Selected
Film
Suggestions
Hands
Casting
Character
Cast
Reason
Casts
Long
Offer
Time
Offers

More quotes by Alexander Payne

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I like actors who, when you see them on screen, you sense a person, not just an actor.
Alexander Payne
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Each one of my movies becomes easier to get off the ground.
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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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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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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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You just never know when you're living in a golden age.
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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.
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I think that Peter Jennings is the only decent one of the big three.
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I'm hoping one day I can make one really good film.
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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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Somewhat dramatic things happen, and you don't even always notice them — that's what life is.
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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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I want all of my films to belong to me.
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The best cinema is about ethics.
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What is filmmaking but groping in the dark?
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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 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 think cynicism lasts. Sentimentality ages, dates quickly.
Alexander Payne
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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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A book suggests a whole world and story that I could have never thought of in a million years.
Alexander Payne