The worst thing for people to say about your movies is, "Yeah, it was pretty good, but it was too damn long.".
Alexander PayneI definitely in filmmaking more and more find writing and directing a means to harvest material for editing. It's all about editing.
Alexander PayneA book suggests a whole world and story that I could have never thought of in a million years.
Alexander PayneIf you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things you did that you'd forgotten about, you'd weep, looking at that day.
Alexander PayneIn a general sense, to convert any short story, novel, play, or opera into a movie, you have to re-rig it. Even though they're all narratives over time, they're very different forms.
Alexander PayneI love comedies. I take comedy very seriously as a form. It's a serious form, involving a certain way of looking at life, specifically the painful aspects of life. 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