Life & Wisdom Quote by Patrick Marber

Marber is doing a delicate kind of brag here: not the loud “masterpiece” claim, but the cooler flex of rarity. He stakes the film’s value on scarcity in the marketplace - a landscape where “independent” and “mainstream Hollywood” are supposed to be opposites, yet both can end up producing the same safe shapes. By naming both camps, he implies a quiet indictment: the system’s defaults flatten difference no matter the budget line.

The phrase “like this” stays strategically vague, letting the film’s distinctive qualities remain felt rather than itemized. That vagueness is a shield against the most predictable critique (“unique how?”) and also a way of framing the work as experiential - something you recognize by encounter, not by pitch. Then he lands on “of its own times,” a claim that sounds like mere contemporaneity but carries a sharper subtext: the film isn’t cosplaying relevance, it’s actually native to its cultural moment. It belongs to the era’s emotional weather, its conversational rhythms, its moral ambiguity.

The final clause is the real power move: “the film Mike Nichols wanted to make.” Authorship becomes the guarantor of integrity. Marber shifts pride away from box office or awards and toward intention fulfilled - a film rescued from committee logic and aligned with a director’s singular taste. It’s also a subtle act of loyalty, placing Nichols’ desire at the center, as if the highest achievement in modern filmmaking is simply getting the right film made at all.