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 definitely in filmmaking more and more find writing and directing a means to harvest material for editing. It's all about editing.
I mean, look, I love movies, not just the ones I make... In fact, I don't like the movies I make very much.
If you have your movies so that everyone understands everything, I think that's probably not a very good movie.
What is filmmaking but groping in the dark?
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 Godfather.'
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.
To be fair-not that I really care about being fair to anyone, ever-but to be fair, I'm sure that same ratio of bad films to good probably exists in every studio.
If you're trying to recreate life, the life that you best know is the one you grew up with.
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.'
'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. Director-driven, personal, auteurist... Whatever word you want.
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.
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.
When you watch a movie, you don't want to feel like a machine made it. You want to feel a soul.
You begin a film more with questions than with direct intentions. It's more of an exploration and discovery.