Politics & Power Quote by Roland Joffe

Joffe’s line lands like an exasperated aside from someone who’s spent a career staging human stakes at cinematic scale: you can pretend you’re apolitical, but the plot is still being written around you. The slightly mangled phrasing ("make our up lives") almost helps; it feels spoken, not polished, the kind of sentiment that slips out when a director is trying to shake an audience out of complacency. Intent-wise, he’s collapsing the false boundary between "ideas" and "real life". Politics isn’t a cable-news genre, philosophy isn’t an elective you survived in college; they’re the invisible production design of everyday existence.

The subtext is a rebuke to the comforting modern pose of neutrality. Joffe isn’t arguing that everyone should become a policy wonk or a metaphysician. He’s arguing that everyone already is one, involuntarily. Your rent, your medical bill, your ability to cross a border, your sense of what counts as a good life, what you owe others, what risks are acceptable: those are political and philosophical positions, whether you’ve articulated them or not. Unawareness doesn’t equal innocence; it just means your operating system is running in the background without your consent.

Contextually, it fits a filmmaker drawn to power, morality, and institutions, stories where private lives get bent by public decisions. Directors live in the tension between message and entertainment; this is Joffe choosing message, but in a slyly democratic way: the big ideas aren’t abstract. They’re the rules of the set you wake up on every morning.