109 Quotes by Alexander Payne

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.

If you're not making epic, archetypal films on some level, I think you're wasting a great potential of cinema.

If you have your movies so that everyone understands everything, I think that's probably not a very good movie.

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.

You would own the negative after seven years. The company would actually own the film. It's kind of a financial and moral thing about owning your own creative work.

I definitely in filmmaking more and more find writing and directing a means to harvest material for editing. It’s all about editing.

I never wanted money worries to slow me down or make me take a job I didn’t want.

Joe E. Lewis said, ‘Money doesn’t buy happiness but it calms the nerves.’ And that is how I feel about a film being well-received.

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