Art & Creativity Quote by Richard Linklater

Linklater’s line has the plainspoken calm of someone refusing to romanticize his own industry. In an era when every creative act gets dressed up as “content,” “disruption,” or “auteur genius,” he shrugs: of course filmmakers make films. It’s what they do. The comparison to painters is doing quiet work here. Painting is widely understood as a practice you return to day after day, not a lottery ticket you cash once. By tethering cinema to that older craft logic, Linklater strips away the myth that movies are primarily products of hype, budgets, or awards-season alchemy. The real engine is compulsion and repetition.

The subtext is also defensive, and a little political. Linklater has spent his career toggling between the scrappy and the studio-adjacent, championing process over spectacle: the walking-and-talking talkiness of Before Sunrise, the long-game patience of Boyhood, the hangout ethos that treats time as the main special effect. “Filmmakers are going to make films” doubles as a refusal to be cowed by gatekeepers, algorithms, and the constant industry panic about what audiences “want.” Trends come and go; the making persists.

There’s a democratic note in the painter analogy too. Painters don’t need permission from a greenlight committee to paint. Linklater is gently insisting that cinema, despite its machinery, should be approached with the same everyday inevitability: keep working, keep looking, keep making the next one.