109 Quotes by Alexander Payne

I spend a long time casting, but once I’ve cast a film there’s a reason why I selected those people. So I’m hands-on in selecting the cast, hands-off to see what they do with their characters, and hands-on again to offer suggestions.

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.

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.

I think if you watch most of my films with the sound off, you could still tell what’s going on.

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.

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

Life mixes tones all the time.

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.

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.