Time & Perspective Quote by Mike Figgis

Figgis is quietly puncturing the romantic myth that movies are forged in a single, sustained blaze of inspiration. His point is procedural, almost managerial, but the subtext is artistic: cinema is a tug-of-war between incubation and execution, between the long private life of an idea and the brutally short public life of production.

The contrast is doing the rhetorical work. Time Code is held up as the sprint: “a matter of months,” implying a nimble, responsive mode of filmmaking that suits its formal gimmick and livewire energy. Miss Julie is the opposite pole, a script “on my shelf” for seven or eight years, a phrase that makes development sound less like a heroic journey and more like an object gathering dust in a room full of other unfinished intentions. That casualness is telling. Figgis isn’t dramatizing the wait; he’s normalizing it. In his world, delay isn’t failure, it’s part of the ecology.

Then he lands the kicker: after nearly a decade of postponement, the shoot is “very quick - 16 days.” That compression is the real revelation. It gestures at the economics of independent production and the discipline required when money, schedules, and actors converge. You don’t get to “find it on set” for long; you arrive prepared or you don’t arrive at all.

Contextually, it also frames Figgis as a director comfortable with extremes: experimental speed runs alongside literary adaptation. The intent is less a diary entry than a philosophy of craft: filmmaking isn’t one timeline, it’s two - waiting and pouncing.