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'm attracted to short screenplays. Nobody really wants a film to be over two hours, or at least I don't.
I want all of my films to belong to me.
I don't feel despair because I am able to make the films I want to make, and that gives me hope.
I don't want all of American cinema to be big cartoons that are just made to be digested by the entire world.
I never wanted money worries to slow me down or make me take a job I didn't want.
In the moment of making films, I want to share my observations of life, not of other films.
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.