Alexander Payne

“As the years go by and I make more films, I am increasingly interested in capturing place as a vivid backdrop for my films.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Hollywood films have become a cesspool of formula and it's up to us to try to change it... I feel like a preacher! But it's really true. I feel personally responsible for the future of Ameri...”

“The actors are the greatest executors of tone in a film. They're the most important cinematic component.”

“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 importa...”

“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.”

“I don't want all of American cinema to be big cartoons that are just made to be digested by the entire world.”

“In a sense, 'Schmidt' is the most Omaha of my films. But have I gotten it right? I'm not sure. Did Fellini get Rome right? Did Ozu get Tokyo right?”

“I like to think of film-making not just as an act of personal self-aggrandisement but rather as an act of public service.”

“Anytime you cast a movie and you need someone famous in the lead part, you're a prisoner of whoever happens to be famous in the six-month window in which you're trying to get a film financed...”

“'Independent' means one thing to me: It means that regardless of the source of financing, the director's voice is extremely present. It's such a pretentious term, but it's auteurist cinema....”

“I don't think so much about verbal comedy. I always think about visual comedy. I was raised watching silents, and I'm always thinking about how to make cinema, not good talking - although I...”

“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, like 'Jaws' or 'The Godfathe...”

“You just never know when you're living in a golden age.”

“I'm hoping one day I can make one really good film.”

“The hardest part of this whole movie-making endeavor is finding ideas.”

“I guess maybe I try to make movies that are closer to real life than are many Hollywood movies. But I still try to stay within a commercial narrative, a contemporary American vernacular.”

“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.”