Daily Inspiration Quote by Philip Kaufman

Kaufman’s line lands like a shrug with a razor in its pocket: not “I admire,” not “I agree,” just “I liked.” It’s a director’s verb, practical and slightly mischievous, signaling aesthetic appetite rather than moral endorsement. In a culture trained to treat the Marquis de Sade as radioactive, Kaufman frames him as an “extreme character” first - a piece of human material with strong contours, the kind cinema can actually shape into drama.

The subtext is craft: extremity is useful. De Sade, as a figure, is pure provocation - not only because of sex and cruelty, but because he forces every surrounding institution (church, state, medicine, family) to reveal its own violence and hypocrisy. For a filmmaker, that’s dynamite. The “character” label also quietly defangs the man: Kaufman isn’t litigating the real de Sade so much as praising the narrative function de Sade can play, especially in adaptations like Quills, where the writer becomes a prism for censorship, spectacle, and the public’s appetite for scandal.

Context matters: Kaufman’s work often treats transgression as a diagnostic tool, a way to show what a society pretends it isn’t. Saying he “liked” de Sade reads as an invitation to stop performing purity long enough to examine desire, power, and repression on screen. It’s not a defense of sadism; it’s a confession that cinema, like audiences, can’t look away from a well-rendered edge.