Wealth & Money Quote by Michael Apted

The line lands like a set confession disguised as a gripe: directors need producers, resent them, and secretly share their logic. Apted frames the producer as "annoying" not because they lack taste, but because they represent the one force film romanticism can never fully absorb: constraint. The joke is in the math of it. "They're trying to stop you spending money and you're trying to not spend money" deliberately knots itself into contradiction, catching the director mid-rationalization. Everyone is allegedly being responsible, yet the implication is clear: someone has to be the adult, and it usually isn't the person with the vision.

Apted's intent is less to dunk on producers than to normalize the friction as structural, not personal. "By definition" is doing work; it turns workplace conflict into an inherent design feature of filmmaking. That move protects egos on both sides: the producer isn't a villain, just a role, and the director isn't reckless, just doing the thing art requires - making a case for the expensive version of the idea.

Then comes the needle: "but at the same time we're great artists". It's a self-mocking flex, and it exposes the subtext that directors often use artistry as a moral shield. Budgets become a battle over identity: are we craftspeople delivering a product, or artists entitled to risk? Apted, a director steeped in both documentary realism and studio systems, is pointing at the unglamorous truth behind the glamour. Great art in film is rarely pure inspiration; it's negotiated into existence.