Time & Perspective Quote by Griffin Dunne

Dunne slips a small grenade into a polite industry anecdote: power makes collaboration easier, not harder. Coming from an actor-director who’s spent decades watching the studio machine up close, the line reads like lived-in wisdom disguised as a friendly tip for “any studio executive who is reading this.” That aside isn’t incidental; it’s the whole play. He’s addressing the very people who typically reserve final cut as leverage, and he’s doing it with a light touch that lets the critique land without sounding like a manifesto.

The intent is pragmatic: convince executives that granting final cut can improve the notes process. The subtext is sharper: the usual justification for executive control - that directors need discipline, oversight, “guardrails” - is often backwards. When a director knows the ending can’t be wrestled away in the edit, they can afford to hear notes as information rather than as a threat. Notes stop being a prelude to a takeover and start functioning as what they claim to be: feedback.

Context matters here because “final cut” is the symbolic crown in Hollywood’s power hierarchy. Most directors never get it; when they do, it’s after proving they can deliver financially, or after they’ve become too valuable to micromanage. Dunne’s “interesting thing” is that security produces curiosity. If you want a director to actually listen, he suggests, stop making every note a proxy battle over authorship.