Alexander Payne

• "You just never know when you're living in a golden age.“
• "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.“
• "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.“
• "The biggest fear I have is to die with regrets, and of course that will come true.“
• "Hollywood films have become a cesspool of formula and it's up to us to try to change it... I feel like a preacher! But it's really true. I feel personally responsible for the future of American cinema. Me personally.“
• "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.“
• "I don't feel despair because I am able to make the films I want to make, and that gives me hope.“
• "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.“
• "Even if we die at 100, we're still dying young. I want at least 700 years. There's a lot of travelling and books to read and movies to see. I'm not going to squeeze it all in in 85 years.“
• "I mean, look, I love movies, not just the ones I make... In fact, I don't like the movies I make very much.“
• "Each one of my movies becomes easier to get off the ground.“
• "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.“
• "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.“

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