A Quote by Alexander Payne

Cinema really lends itself well to big, archetypal stories, you know, classic old stories and you need kind of a weird, big terrain like the Japanese plains for Samurai movies or the West. You need that for these giants to walk around.
I don't know that movies are important. But I know that stories are important. Movies may disappear. They've only been around, for God's sake, for the last hundred years... I think that it's the need to tell stories, and that people need to be told stories. It's the old sitting around the fire, you know.
People need stories...we use stories to teach, to learn, to make sense of the world around us. As long as we need stories, we will need books.
Samurai films, like westerns, need not be familiar genre stories. They can expand to contain stories of ethical challenges and human tragedy.
I'm not the greatest reader. I feel like I have a bit of dyslexia or something, and that's probably why I became a filmmaker. I have the need to communicate, the need to tell stories; and the need to understand stories led me to movies.
I love how 'Game of Thrones' has resonated with so many people around the world. I feel like it has really tapped into our need to hear stories about the human condition, love, death, good, evil... For me, it really is a modern version of the old Greek theatre or cave men sitting around fires telling stories.
We need more female directors, we also need men to step up and identify with female characters and stories about women. We don't want to create a ghetto where women have to do movies about women. To assume stories about women need to be told by a woman isn't necessarily true, just as stories about men don't need a male director.
I never imagined people like Thanos and Warlock would be drawn into films. They're weird characters in weird stories. Luckily, the twisted kids who read those weird stories are now the twisted adults who are making movies.
Japanese train signs, station signs, are really representative of the Japanese mind to me, because it always has the station where you are, the station you were previously at, and the station that is the next station. When I came to New York, I was very confused. It just doesn't say where I was and where I was going. But I realized after a while probably most people don't need to know what station you were previously at. But I think it's just some weird Japanese mentality that we need to know, we need to connect the plot.
A lot of my stories are inspired by Japanese folklore or literature or movies: I've done stories based on Kabuki and Noh plays, and on Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo' movies.
I didn't really know how to write jokes, so I just told weird, long stories about being tall and beautiful and wealthy in New York. I'd tell them very seriously, but I kind of looked like a drag queen at the time with big wigs and crazy 12-inch platform heels.
I'm not someone who is driven by big external stories. I like big emotional stories.
For example, Michael Mann's film Collateral - there is certain kinds of stories that lend themselves to digital photography. Some things are very raw stories that digital photography kind of lends itself to.
One thing we need to learn from the West is how professional they are about their work. A 7:30 A.M. call time means just that. That's something we need to imbibe from them. And people in the West need to learn from us how we work with our stories.
I used to write stories. Handwriting stories in school were a big deal for me. That's kind of what I did.
I turn a lot of stuff down - big, big movies, the kind I wouldn't want to go to the cinema to see.
I feel that I'm a spiritual person in that I feel like telling stories is a spiritual exercise and I think that it's something that we need as a culture and as humans. We need for people to put stories up in front of us that we recognize ourselves so that we can see - you need to be able to see something in a finite form in order to identify with it sometimes because your life sprawls before you in this kind of way that you can't capture.
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