Daily Inspiration Quote by Brian De Palma

De Palma’s compliment is doing two things at once: kneeling before Godard’s genius while slyly pointing to how cinema culture can drift from movies to mythology. Calling Godard “incredibly brilliant” isn’t just fanboy awe from a fellow director; it’s recognition that Godard’s real medium, by that point, may have become discourse itself. The line lands because it frames press conferences as the main event in France, a country that helped invent the modern idea of the director as auteur-philosopher. Godard doesn’t merely release films; he releases pronouncements.

The subtext is affectionate but edged. De Palma implies a kind of cultural reroute: anticipation is less about what Godard has made than what he will say about what he has made - or about cinema, politics, art, capitalism, whatever target happens to be in range. It’s praise, but also a diagnosis of a film ecosystem where commentary accrues more heat than craft, where the brand of “Godard” functions like an intellectual weather system.

Context matters: De Palma came up in a New Hollywood moment that absorbed the French New Wave’s techniques (jump cuts, self-awareness, genre play) while remaining tethered to audience pleasure and narrative propulsion. Godard, increasingly, treated narrative as something to interrogate or detonate. So De Palma’s observation reads like a respectful outsider’s marvel at French cinephilia: a place where the director’s voice can eclipse the director’s work, and where provocation is a parallel art form. In that light, the “brilliance” isn’t only cinematic - it’s performative, rhetorical, and culturally sanctioned.