Alexander Payne Quotes

My partner, Beth Alexander, and I want to produce smaller films, but commercially viable films that will enable me to make the kinds of movies I want to make.

Studios never put pressure. They know the kind of films I want to make.

Maybe I'm more suited to making small independent films.

The quality of mainstream cinema has changed. A lot of independent voices feel they can leave everything behind and make independent films.

The Weinsteins believe in test screenings. I don't. I don't think good films are made that way. Call me crazy, but I'd like to think you need a singular vision to make good art.

I just want to make good films on my own wherever I can.

I always say that AMC hires filmmakers, and they let them be filmmakers.

We need more extreme movies in Sweden. Personal projects that are necessarily made for a bigger audience. I think it creates a creative lock-up to have the audience as a goal.

That's why I'm really trying to produce my own stuff. This film was so good, because I produced it myself, and developed it, and made it with New Line, which is a smaller studio, so I was in control of a lot of stuff that I wasn't in control of for my other films.

I don't make deals, I make pictures.

I want to make my own movie.

As a director, my job is to spend money, and the producer's is to save money. Masoom, Bandit Queen and the first Queen Elizabeth have been my most uncompromised films.

If you can get your movie made the way you want to get it made, no matter what the end result is going to be, if people are going to see it, that's awesome.

I'll put it this way: with the kind of films that I do - creatively driven, with interesting directors and writers - I don't feel the need to work with the super established, top-tier directors that are out there.

The kind of work I do and the films I believe in, I had to take charge of making that kind of cinema.

I like to produce my own movies.

I could never work in that kind of commercial environment where the stars have a lot to say, where the producers kind of push you around and tell you who to cast and who not to cast. I'm just not interested in that at all.

I always say that I'm a filmmaker, not a factory. I don't have to churn out films every six months.

The thing I love the most about low budget films is the creative freedom.

Try to produce your own films, avoid directing for hire.

My good films were independent and my bad films were not.

I'd love to do more independent films.

I don't want to be a director. I want to direct. There's a difference.

It's nice when you're working in Hollywood and there's a movie you'd like to see that no one is making anymore. You make it yourself.

You don't always just have to do an indie movie to feel like you're controlling it with a few people that you really have connected with, creatively. You can do it on a bigger scale.