Daily Inspiration Quote by Dario Argento

There is a special kind of fury in Argento's "in the first place": not just irritation at a bad edit, but a refusal to accept that anyone else was ever entitled to touch the work. It is the language of authorship under siege, sharpened by a career spent watching distributors, censors, and foreign markets treat films like raw material to be trimmed, dubbed, retitled, or sanitized into saleable shapes. For a director whose cinema depends on rhythm, mood, and sensory assault, "manipulate" isn't neutral. It implies violation. Cut a few seconds from a murder set-piece, lighten the color timing, swap music cues, and you don't merely change a product; you break the spell.

Argento's insistence also reads as a defense of a very specific kind of filmmaking power: the right to control affect. Giallo and horror are often dismissed as "genre", and genre is where industries feel most licensed to meddle because the work is presumed interchangeable. His pushback exposes the hierarchy: prestige films get protected; thrillers get "fixed". In that light, the quote is less diva-ish than diagnostic. He's naming the routine institutional assumption that the director is a supplier, not an author.

The context matters: Argento's films have circulated in mutilated versions for decades, especially outside Italy and in home-video eras when "uncut" became a selling point precisely because the default was compromise. The line is a demand for consent, but also for recognition: these films aren't disposable shocks. They're composed, and composition cannot survive casual hands.