Time & Perspective Quote by John Crowley

“Momentum” is the tell here: Crowley isn’t romanticizing the chaos of creation, he’s diagnosing a structural problem that turns into a psychological one. A film “with as many characters as this does” threatens to become a committee meeting onscreen, each subplot lobbying for oxygen. His phrasing frames editing not as polish but as triage: the battle to keep the story moving when the sheer population of the narrative keeps tugging it sideways.

“The piece took on a life of its own” is the classic artist’s alibi, but Crowley uses it like a warning label. It suggests a moment when intention stops being a blueprint and starts being negotiation with what’s already been shot, what performances are unexpectedly magnetic, what connective tissue is missing, what the audience’s attention will actually tolerate. The subtext: directors don’t fully “control” a film so much as wrestle it into coherence, and the edit suite is where that wrestling gets real.

Context matters: Crowley’s a writer by profession, which makes his emphasis on shaping especially pointed. Writers are trained to believe structure is created in advance; film teaches a harsher lesson. With ensembles, story becomes rhythm, and rhythm is fragile. His final sentence lands like a deadline-shaped bruise: time in editing isn’t just creative space, it’s the last remaining resource. The craft becomes a race against the clock, where maintaining momentum is less an aesthetic preference than the only way the whole thing doesn’t sprawl into entropy.