"I don't really enjoy filming"
About this Quote
For a film director to admit, flatly, "I don't really enjoy filming" is a quietly subversive move: it punctures the myth of the auteur as adrenaline junkie, thriving on chaos, charisma, and command. Bill Forsyths films are often tuned to the offbeat, the human-scale, the comic awkwardness of everyday life. That sensibility makes this line feel less like complaint than like aesthetic manifesto.
The intent reads as disarmingly practical. Filming is the loud, crowded, industrial part of an art form that many directors romanticize. Forsyths phrasing - "dont really" - is classic British understatement, a soft pedal that actually sharpens the point: he isnt staging a tantrum, hes quietly refusing the expected performance of passion. The subtext is that what he enjoys is elsewhere: writing, observing, shaping tone, working out the strange rhythms of people in rooms. Shooting days, by contrast, are logistics, repetition, compromise - the moment when imagination collides with budgets, weather, schedules, and the tyranny of time.
Context matters because Forsyth emerged in a post-studio, funding-fragile landscape where directors often had to be both poet and manager. Saying he doesnt enjoy filming hints at a suspicion of the set as a site of power games and noise that can crush delicacy. Its also a kind of integrity flex: he values the finished emotional effect over the macho theater of production. In a culture that equates authenticity with visible enthusiasm, Forsyth offers a more honest creative posture: you can love the work without loving every part of making it.
The intent reads as disarmingly practical. Filming is the loud, crowded, industrial part of an art form that many directors romanticize. Forsyths phrasing - "dont really" - is classic British understatement, a soft pedal that actually sharpens the point: he isnt staging a tantrum, hes quietly refusing the expected performance of passion. The subtext is that what he enjoys is elsewhere: writing, observing, shaping tone, working out the strange rhythms of people in rooms. Shooting days, by contrast, are logistics, repetition, compromise - the moment when imagination collides with budgets, weather, schedules, and the tyranny of time.
Context matters because Forsyth emerged in a post-studio, funding-fragile landscape where directors often had to be both poet and manager. Saying he doesnt enjoy filming hints at a suspicion of the set as a site of power games and noise that can crush delicacy. Its also a kind of integrity flex: he values the finished emotional effect over the macho theater of production. In a culture that equates authenticity with visible enthusiasm, Forsyth offers a more honest creative posture: you can love the work without loving every part of making it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work |
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