Daily Inspiration Quote by Judy Davis

Filmmaking gets romanticized as vision and sensitivity; Judy Davis drags it back to appetite. “A killer in them” isn’t literal so much as diagnostic: the director as someone willing to take, push, outlast, and occasionally wound in pursuit of a frame that reads as truth. It’s a brutal metaphor because it’s accurate about power. On set, directors control time, tone, and the social weather; everyone else absorbs the pressure of making their imagination concrete. Davis is naming the predatory edge that can hide inside “passion” and “genius.”

The line also smuggles in an actor’s hard-earned pragmatism. She’s not condemning these directors; she’s acknowledging the job’s incentive structure. The industry rewards the image, not the gentleness it took to get there. When she says “as if they’d do anything,” the “as if” gives her a sliver of distance: she’s seen the brinkmanship, the manipulations, the emotional strip-mining, and she’s refusing to pretend it’s an aberration.

“Comes with the terrain” is the quietest part and the most pointed. Davis frames ruthlessness as environmental, not exceptional, suggesting that even decent people can become predators in a system built on deadlines, money, ego, and a public that consumes results without seeing process. “I don’t mind it” reads less like approval than consent-with-eyes-open: a boundary-setting realism from a performer who’d rather face the truth of the arrangement than be sold a myth about art being made politely.