Time & Perspective Quote by Mike Figgis

Figgis is making the unglamorous logistics of culture sound like destiny, and that’s the point. For a director who’s moved between cinema, theater, and music, time isn’t a poetic abstraction; it’s the real budget that governs what art gets made and what audiences will actually show up for. He’s not romanticizing the stage over film or vice versa. He’s diagnosing how each medium colonizes your day in a different way.

The sly subtext is about commitment. Film pretends to be efficient: you can stream it, pause it, “fit it in,” treat it like ambient content. But it also steals time in bulk, the way bingeing and endless choice do. Theater is the opposite kind of theft: it demands an appointment, a social contract, an unbroken span where you can’t multitask or escape into your phone without being a little ashamed of yourself. “You do have to plan” is practically a critique of modern attention, where spontaneity is swallowed by work schedules, childcare, and the ever-present illusion that we’re too busy to be fully present.

Context matters here: post-90s, the director’s role expanded from making movies to navigating platforms, festivals, and shrinking windows for adult attention. Figgis is circling a cultural shift where art forms compete not just with each other, but with the frictionless convenience economy. The line works because it frames medium as lifestyle: cinema as consumption, theater as a chosen interruption. That interruption is exactly what gives theater its charge - and why it’s harder to protect.