"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."
-Alexander Payne
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"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.'“
-Alexander Payne
posted in Movies
Other Quotes by Alexander Payne
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"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."
-Alexander Payne
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"You just never know when you're living in a golden age."
-Alexander Payne
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"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."
-Alexander Payne
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"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."
-Alexander Payne
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"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."
-Alexander Payne
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"The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder."
-Alfred Hitchcock
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"This film cost $31 million. With that kind of money I could have invaded some country."
-Clint Eastwood
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"Usually when you see females in movies, they feel like they have these metallic structures around them, they are caged in by male energy."
-Bjork
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"I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians."
-Francis Ford Coppola
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"I live very normally, I go out with my friends, we go to the movies, I queue, we go to restaurants."
-Catherine Deneuve
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"Over the years all these vampire movies have come out and nobody looks like a vampire anymore."
-Johnny Depp
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