Life & Wisdom Quote by Preston Sturges

Sturges lands the joke with the casual cruelty of someone who knows exactly how the system works and how little reverence it sometimes deserves. On the surface, he is bragging: the screenplay already contains the movie, so directing is largely execution. Underneath, it is a swipe at the factory-line habits of studio filmmaking, where a hired director could be parachuted onto a project so late that “preparation” collapses into an overnight cram session. The punchline isn’t that directors are lazy; it’s that the machine is built to tolerate, even encourage, a kind of professional superficiality.

The line also reveals Sturges’s auteur politics before “auteur theory” had a name. As a writer who became a director, he’s staking a claim: authorship lives in structure, rhythm, and intention, and those are baked into the script if the writer is sufficiently controlling. “I did all my directing when I wrote” reframes directing as premeditation rather than on-set inspiration, an argument that comedy in particular is won or lost on the page: timing, reversals, the exact placement of a reaction beat.

There’s a sly class critique, too. “Regular director” implies an interchangeable employee, not an artist, someone tasked with shepherding a product. Sturges isn’t merely flexing; he’s exposing how authorship can be diluted by industrial convenience, and why he refused to be diluted.