"I also don't like films that are made just to make money, no this kind of film I don't like"
About this Quote
A little clunky in English, Dario Argento's line lands with the bluntness of a door bolt in a giallo hallway: he's not interested in cinema as product. The repetition ("I don't like... I don't like") isn't rhetorical polish; it's a refusal to negotiate. Argento is drawing a bright, almost moral border between films that chase profit and films that chase sensation, risk, and obsession.
The intent is partly defensive. Horror, especially the stylized, operatic kind Argento helped define, is routinely treated as disposable pulp until it makes serious money, at which point the industry rushes to industrialize it: sequels, safe scripts, familiar beats. His complaint isn't that money exists in filmmaking - it's that money becomes the only author. A film "made just to make money" is a film designed by committee, built from market research, engineered to offend nobody and therefore excite nobody. Argento's cinema, by contrast, is allergic to neutrality: lurid color, baroque violence, soundtracks that stab. His best work feels like it was made because he couldn't not make it.
The subtext is also a critique of a certain kind of realism-as-respectability. Argento isn't arguing for "art" in the polite museum sense; he's arguing for movies as fever dreams, where style is meaning and excess is honesty. Coming from an Italian director who watched genre cinema get both exported and diluted, the line reads like a warning: when the bottom line becomes the script, the screen goes dead.
The intent is partly defensive. Horror, especially the stylized, operatic kind Argento helped define, is routinely treated as disposable pulp until it makes serious money, at which point the industry rushes to industrialize it: sequels, safe scripts, familiar beats. His complaint isn't that money exists in filmmaking - it's that money becomes the only author. A film "made just to make money" is a film designed by committee, built from market research, engineered to offend nobody and therefore excite nobody. Argento's cinema, by contrast, is allergic to neutrality: lurid color, baroque violence, soundtracks that stab. His best work feels like it was made because he couldn't not make it.
The subtext is also a critique of a certain kind of realism-as-respectability. Argento isn't arguing for "art" in the polite museum sense; he's arguing for movies as fever dreams, where style is meaning and excess is honesty. Coming from an Italian director who watched genre cinema get both exported and diluted, the line reads like a warning: when the bottom line becomes the script, the screen goes dead.
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