Daily Inspiration Quote by Alain Resnais

A director admitting he was "never driven" sounds like a provocation, almost a dare to the auteur myth that cinema is born from compulsion and personal confession. Resnais is puncturing the romantic story we like to tell about artists: that the great ones are propelled by inner necessity, white-knuckling their way toward a singular vision. His alternative is cooler, craft-first, and slightly mischievous: each film as an "assignment", a brief to be taken seriously, solved elegantly, then set down.

The subtext is less resignation than strategy. "Assignment" implies constraints, collaborators, deadlines, and an external problem to crack. That fits Resnais's actual working method: a director drawn to writers (Duras, Robbe-Grillet, Semprun), to structures that behave like puzzles, to memory as an engineered effect rather than a diary entry. In Hiroshima mon amour or Last Year at Marienbad, the emotional force arrives through design: repetition, temporal misalignment, architecture, voice. The feeling is real, but it’s routed through form.

Context matters: Resnais comes out of documentary and editing, from Night and Fog onward, where the ethical problem isn't self-expression but how to make an audience see. Calling films "assignments" is also a quiet refusal of the cult of personality that hardened around New Wave auteurs. He’s not saying he lacked passion; he’s insisting that passion can be procedural. The thrill is in taking a commission from history, literature, or memory and building a machine that makes us remember differently.