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" 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

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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. "

Alexander Payne

" 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 want good talking. I'm much more interested in framing, composition, and orchestration of bodies in space, and so forth. "

Alexander Payne

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

Alexander Payne

" What is filmmaking but groping in the dark? "

Alexander Payne

" Jesuits encourage an intellectual rigor in a way that I like. "

Alexander Payne

" I think that Peter Jennings is the only decent one of the big three. "

Alexander Payne

" There is an audience out there for literate films - slower, more observant, more human films, and they deserve to be made. "

Alexander Payne

" The most heinous shift in American films is that they reinforce good things like 'couples' and 'relationships.' "

Alexander Payne

" 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. "

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. "

Alexander Payne

" 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. "

Alexander Payne

" You begin a film more with questions than with direct intentions. It's more of an exploration and discovery. "

Alexander Payne

" The best cinema is about ethics. "

Alexander Payne

" In the moment of making films, I want to share my observations of life, not of other films. "

Alexander Payne

" You look at how many years you have left, and you start to think: 'How many more films do I have in me?' "

Alexander Payne

" 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 American cinema. Me personally. "

Alexander Payne

" 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. "

Alexander Payne

" Omaha, like Rome, is built on seven hills. "

Alexander Payne

" I mean, look, I love movies, not just the ones I make... In fact, I don't like the movies I make very much. "

Alexander Payne

" There's a bizarre insistence on how a story should be. 'The protagonist must be sympathetic!' they say. Whatever that means. I never engage in that discussion. I never use that word, 'sympathetic.' I just know 'interesting.' "

Alexander Payne

" 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. "

Alexander Payne

" Well, that's what life is - this collection of extraordinarily ordinary moments. We just need to pay attention to them all. Wake up and pay attention to how beautiful it all is. "

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

" When you watch a movie, you don't want to feel like a machine made it. You want to feel a soul. "

Alexander Payne