Alexander Payne Quotes

Some day I'll make a film that critics will like. When I have money to waste.

I've been lucky enough to work with some great directors, and I don't want to throw that away by doing one big horrible big budget film.

I've talked about this a lot, but 'The Witch' took four years to finance because there were certain compromises I wouldn't make.

I think Marvel's incredibly supportive of young auteurs and really let them do their thing and support their vision. They give you a sandbox to play in, but it's a pretty massive one.

Sometimes you feel you're making something really special and when it comes out you might still feel that way but for some reason it doesn't get the audience. So many things have to come together to get a creatively successful and financially successful film.

The people who've done well within the [Hollywood] system are the people whose instincts, whose desires [are in natural alignement with those of the producers] - who want to make the kind of movies that producers want to produce. People who don't succeed - people who've had long, bad times; like [Jean] Renoir, for example, who I think was the best director, ever - are the people who didn't want to make the kind of pictures that producers want to make. Producers didn't want to make a Renoir picture, even if it was a success.

To make great movies, there is an element of risk. You have to say, 'Well, I am going to make this film, and it is not really a sure thing.'

There's a few movies I wanted to do, and I didn't get to do them partly because they wanted me to be part of the horse and pony show, getting the money, and I'm just not doing that. There's a few movies that people wanted me to do, but they were too safe.

I don't want to sell my soul to Hollywood - to just make run-of-the-mill stuff.

The only reason why I would like to be accepted? Because if your movies don't do well, after a while you don't get to make any more movies.

No film should try to follow a trend, and do what film people think the public wants. There's no such thing as knowing what the public wants.

And I'm not anti-sequel, but I just feel like there are very few ideas that are meant to be continued.

I realized I probably wouldn't make another film that cuts through commercial and creative things like 'Godfather' or 'Apocalypse.'

The only folk I can judge are people like Woody Allen who I think is a genius, largely because I think he has beaten the system. He has his own company, and his films are all his own ideas. It's his direction, and so it comes out the way he imagined it.

I offer originality: you don't know what my films are like until you go to them. I think that's the reason I've been getting all this attention.

I want to do something that is unique, that has its own legs. But it's very hard because if you start veering off, if you get too crazy, then people won't know what to make of it. I want to please my audience, too. I want people to like what I do.

I didn't want to make a game unless I felt in the position to make something new and different.

Since childhood, I'd dreamed of making a film, but producers in France and Germany wanted to make commercial films with chinoiserie. I refused.

What's so great about DreamWorks is that it's run by filmmakers who believe that if it's not broke, don't fix it.

I don't see many explosions or ten-car crashes in the course of my life, so I don't put them into my movies. I would love to live in a society where 'My Dinner with Andre' made $100,000,000. Then I would be in the mainstream. I could do that stuff easier than I could do 'Meatballs.'

With an independent film, you have a little more freedom, and you also have less money, so you're sort of struggling to get it done, to get something that works. With a big studio, everything is there for you, and it's easier.

There was a time when a studio executive would really love something and have no proof at all that it would work and just do it because they believed in it. That's how 'Star Wars' happened.

I've told people before that I don't want to be a part of a genre; I want to be my own genre. I want to create it.

There's no room for being a visionary in the studio system. It literally cannot exist. You give Terrence Malick a movie like Transformers, and he's f***ed. There's no way for him to exist in that world... Lars Von Trier's dangerous. He scares me. And I'm only going to work now when I'm terrified.

All of my films have been very hard to understand at the script stage because they're very different. At the time I did them they were not conventional. The executives could only think in terms of what they'd already seen. It's hard for them to think in terms of what has never been done before.