Alexander Payne
Alexander Payne
Alexander Payneis an American film director, screenwriter, and producer, known for the films Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants, and Nebraska. His films are noted for their dark humor and satirical depictions of contemporary American society. Payne is a two time winner of the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and a three time nominee of the Academy Award for Best Director...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth10 February 1961
CityOmaha, NE
CountryUnited States of America
I like action films, not exclusively, but I like Samurai films. I like Westerns. Not so much war pictures, but a few. I like kinetic cinema.
I never wanted money worries to slow me down or make me take a job I didn't want.
I mean, look, I love movies, not just the ones I make... In fact, I don't like the movies I make very much.
I like voice-over in films, and most of my films have been voice-over films.
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.
I like to think of film-making not just as an act of personal self-aggrandisement but rather as an act of public service.
I think cynicism lasts. Sentimentality ages, dates quickly.
In the moment of making films, I want to share my observations of life, not of other films.
If you're not making epic, archetypal films on some level, I think you're wasting a great potential of cinema.
The biggest fear I have is to die with regrets, and of course that will come true.
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 like actors who, when you see them on screen, you sense a person, not just an actor.
If you have your movies so that everyone understands everything, I think that's probably not a very good movie.
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,