A biography for Alexander Paynehasn’t been written yet.
“Each one of my movies becomes easier to get off the ground.”
“If 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.”
“The most heinous shift in American films is that they reinforce good things like 'couples' and 'relationships.'”
“But it's just that the whole country is making generally lousy films these days and has been for quite a while. That's the big problem that we all have to think about.”
“There is an audience out there for literate films - slower, more observant, more human films, and they deserve to be made.”
“I think cynicism lasts. Sentimentality ages, dates quickly.”
“The biggest fear I have is to die with regrets, and of course that will come true.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The actors are the greatest executors of tone in a film. They're the most important cinematic component.”
“You just never know when you're living in a golden age.”
“I like actors who, when you see them on screen, you sense a person, not just an actor.”
“The best cinema is about ethics.”
“A pitfall of making a comedy with a studio-and it's also an American cultural thing-is that I get tired of being encouraged to go always for laughs.”
“A book suggests a whole world and story that I could have never thought of in a million years.”
“Jesuits encourage an intellectual rigor in a way that I like.”
“I'm so not interested in producing, other than doing my own work, producing my own films. I only do it as favors, for other people to get their films made.”
“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.”
“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.”
“There's a bizarre insistence on how a story should be. 'The protagonist must be sympathetic!' they say. Whatever that means. I never engage in that discussion. I never use that word, 'sympathetic.' I just know 'interesting.'”