Aging & Wisdom Quote by Norman Jewison

Jewison’s line lands like a quiet rebuke to an industry that keeps confusing volume with vitality. He frames his shift in taste as a personal suspicion - “maybe I’m just getting old” - but the self-deprecation is camouflage. What he’s really doing is challenging the prestige economy of spectacle: the assumption that bigger budgets and bigger booms automatically mean bigger cinema.

The phrase “not too excited about watching a huge explosion” isn’t literal; it’s shorthand for a whole late-20th-century drift toward event movies, where the set piece becomes the selling point and the human stakes are there mainly to ferry you between effects shots. Jewison, whose career runs through character-forward films like In the Heat of the Night, Fiddler on the Roof, and Moonstruck, is staking out a moral and aesthetic position: movies should be about interior detonations, not exterior ones.

The subtext is craft pride. Explosions are easy to admire and hard to argue with; they’re engineered consensus. Characters are riskier. People are contradictory, dialogue can miss, motives get messy. Choosing “people and characters” is choosing friction over fireworks - the kind that lingers after the credits, when you’re still turning someone’s choices over in your head.

Context matters, too: Jewison is talking from the long arc of a filmmaker who watched Hollywood pivot from star vehicles and social dramas to franchise logic. His “aging” isn’t decline; it’s a diagnosis. The real blast radius, he implies, is what we lose when spectacle becomes the story.