Alexander Payne Quotes

Usually with me, the ideas I have for movies just sort of pop into my head. I've read a bunch of screenwriting books over the years and, to be honest, they're mostly pretty crappy.

When I go into making a movie, personally, I don't try to bring other pieces of movies with me.

Once a month the sky falls on my head, I come to and I see another movie I want to make.

I have more of a vivid imagination than I have talent. I cook up ideas. It's just a characteristic.

The seed of an idea laying dormant in an old sketchbook is fed the missing ingredient from a new experience. Trying to share some of these experiences, some of the wonders, is one of the reasons why I do books.

As I get on and films take four years to complete, I tend to have a hankering for very short projects so you can move on to the next idea. It's the ideas I'm interested in. What comes out of your head.

Whenever I finish a movie, I usually go through a period where I think I'll never have another idea. And then, somehow, you get another idea.

I have a creative mind, so if I listen to the song, I have an idea, I thought of five or six months ago, I'll bring it back into the playing field. I can tweak ideas or make them better. Just come up with something and then we go from there.

I've never been able to develop a movie over several years, and keep coming back to it and adding to it. I get excited by the spark of an idea, and if I can't go make that, there's another idea that comes along that I get excited about. It has to happen quickly, in order for it to happen, at all.

Everything's a film idea if this is what you do.I've always been secretly confident that I'd never run out of ideas,because I've never had any. I just live my life, see things theway I do, and I'm just looking for a notion to hang it all on.

I keep on having ideas and developments. Some happen and some don't, but I still always have a way of telling a story.

You could write all the IDEAS of all the movies, my own included, on the head of a pin.

Go looking for an idea and it'll show up. Begin now.

I absolutely adore the alchemy of a bit of an idea.

Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop… suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head.

Knowledge is the stuff from which new ideas are made. Thus, the real key to being creative lies in what you do with your knowledge.

Who wants to put together something that will bear some relationship to the vision or memory or experience or story or idea or dream or whatever.

The toughest question has always been, "How do you get your ideas?" How do you answer that? It's like asking runners how they run, or singers how they sing. They just do it!

I sometimes don't try to invent something. I wait for some kind of a direction - and it happens. I get an angle, for instance, and it just appears, and I say, 'Oh my God - that's it!'

I pick up inspiration from everywhere and it all manages to keep stored in my brain somewhere.

When the ideas are coming, I don't stop until the ideas stop because that train doesn't come along all the time.

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

I keep drawing inspiration from people every day. All of a sudden, something strikes me so hard and dramatically, and then a dream comes - I sit down, cut it off and make a script out of it.

For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.

The hardest part of this whole movie-making endeavor is finding ideas.