Parenting & Family Quote by Phillip Noyce

Hollywood is the punchline here, and Phillip Noyce tells it like a working director who’s tired of being managed by the managed. The line is built on a sly reversal: actors are supposed to be hired hands, but in his telling they’ve “taken over,” turning the set into a kingdom where performance bleeds into power. It’s not just a gripe about ego; it’s a complaint about a system where celebrity leverage dictates creative decisions, schedules, even the emotional weather of production.

The “real relief” comes from contrast, and Noyce sharpens it with a slightly wicked pairing: “children” and “actors that had no attitude.” Children aren’t automatically easier than adults, but they’re less invested in status games. He’s praising a kind of un-self-conscious presence, a lack of industrial self-mythology. The subtext is that Hollywood acting often arrives preloaded with brand management: the micro-negotiations, the entourage energy, the sense that every moment is an audition for dominance.

Contextually, Noyce is an Australian director who’s moved between Hollywood machinery and more locally rooted productions (often with younger or less celebrity-conditioned casts). That outsider-insider perspective matters. He’s not romanticizing innocence; he’s endorsing collaboration. “No attitude” isn’t a call for docility so much as a yearning for a set where the work is the status, not the other way around. It’s a quiet indictment of an industry that confuses attention with authority.