Time & Perspective Quote by Bruce Beresford

Filmmaking sounds glamorous until you remember it is basically controlled repetition: stop, start, reset, do it again. Beresford’s line punctures the romantic myth of cinema as “captured life” and reframes it as manufactured experience, built out of fragments that only pretend to be seamless. The word “fragments” matters. It’s not just a technical description of coverage or continuity; it’s a quiet admission that film is an art of disassembly before it becomes an art of illusion.

The second half pivots to power. “Until the director is satisfied” reads simple, even polite, but the subtext is authority: someone gets to decide when the moment is “right,” and that someone is rarely the person living it on camera. Actors and crews endure the loop because the director is chasing an internal movie only they can see. Satisfaction isn’t merely aesthetic; it’s control over tone, timing, and meaning. A smile can be re-shot into irony. A pause can be engineered into heartbreak. Reality isn’t documented; it’s negotiated.

Contextually, this is a veteran director demystifying the process from the inside. Beresford came up in an era straddling old-school discipline and modern flexibility, when coverage, multiple takes, and edit-room authorship hardened into standard practice. The quote doubles as reassurance and warning: film grants endless chances to refine a moment, but that refinement is also the mechanism by which cinema turns raw human behavior into a chosen story.