Biographie

Often sets his films in and around Omaha, Nebraska.

Frequently films scenes at natural history museums.

Frequently casts Phil Reeves.

Frequently uses actual people in roles of minor characters in his movies (reallife policemen for policemen, real life restaurant servers for servers, real lifeteachers for teachers)

Frequently incoporates telephone monologues as a dramatic device.

Everytime he was nominated for the Best Director Oscar, Martin Scorsese was nominated in the same category alongside him: first in 2005 when Payne was nominated for À la dérive (2004) and Scorsese for L'aviateur (2004), then in 2012 when Payne was nominated for Les descendants (2011) and Scorsese for Hugo (2011) and finally in 2014 when Payne was nominated for Nebraska (2013) and Scorsese for Le loup de Wall Street (2013).

Is on the short list of directors who has final cut rights to his films.

Directed 9 actors in Oscar nominated performances: Jack Nicholson, Kathy Bates, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, George Clooney, Bruce Dern, June Squibb, and Paul Giamatti, and Da'Vine Joy Randolph. Randolph won for her performance in The Holdovers.

His father is of Greek and German ancestry, and his mother is of Greek descent. His paternal grandfather, a Greek immigrant, changed the family surname from "Papadopoulos" to "Payne".

A serious film buff and scholar, Payne paid to have the silent 1917 Chaplin/"Little Tramp" film short The Adventurer (1917) restored and shown at the Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, Italy in 2013, where he also introduced it, in Italian and English. He had also shown the film over 40 years before on his own 8mm projector to his friends back in Omaha, Nebraska when he was growing up.

[on Reese Witherspoon in Élection (1999)] She inhabited that role fully, but she can do all these other roles. You see a woman in her, not a girl. She's going to be interesting for a long time.

[on Reese Witherspoon]: She has such intelligence and humor, so it was a joyous leap of faith. Working with her, I kept thinking of Holly Hunter, she is an actress who is equally at home in character roles and in leads and in comedy and in drama.  Reese has that kind of range, as an actress and as a human being.

[on casting] They [the studios] go through that process where they think you have to find the most famous people possible and then they go down the line. That's a game I'm increasingly uninterested in - unless the most famous possible person also happens to be very correct in the part, like Jack Nicholson.

When studios entrust big Hollywood blockbusters to strong, intelligent directors, like Steven Soderbergh or Sam Raimi [Spider-Mans 1 and 2] or Alfonso Cuarón [the latest Harry Potter], I say 'God bless 'em', because those films will have legs and might stand the test of time. But if they rely on just product, like two examples from this year, Van Helsing (2004) and La femme-chat (2004) - I'm glad they tanked.

I want all of my films to belong to me. There is an audience out there for literate films - slower, more observant, more human films, and they deserve to be made. Which is why I want À la dérive (2004) to succeed, to encourage other film-makers.