Daily Inspiration Quote by Barbet Schroeder

Schroeder’s line is disarmingly flat, and that’s the point: it frames “homosexuality” as a category that’s been artificially singled out for special handling. By insisting he’d treat it like “any other form of sexuality,” he’s not performing radicalism so much as refusing the usual cinematic ceremony of difference - the hushed seriousness, the sensationalism, the coded tragedy. The intent reads as a directorial manifesto: normalize through craft. Don’t light it like a scandal, don’t write it like a pathology, don’t cast it like a dare.

The subtext, though, is that “treating it the same” is never neutral. In film, the default treatment of sexuality has historically meant heterosexuality gets to be ordinary: romantic, messy, funny, incidental. So Schroeder’s claim is a bid to extend that ordinariness to gay characters and desires - to let them exist without becoming a thesis statement. It’s also a quiet rebuke to the industry’s habit of treating queer life as either a “topic” (worthy, issue-driven) or a “hook” (marketable, exotic).

Context matters because Schroeder comes out of a European art-cinema tradition that often flirted with taboo while still packaging it for straight consumption. His phrasing signals awareness of that trap. Yet it also raises a pointed question: whose “any other” is being used as the baseline? Equality on screen can mean liberation, or it can mean sanding off specificity. The line works because it courts both readings - a promise of dignity, and a reminder that normal is a style choice, not a law of nature.