Daily Inspiration Quote by Roland Joffe

Roland Joffe’s line is a velvet-glove defense: polite on the surface, quietly prosecutorial underneath. He “doesn’t really say much” about reviewers, but then he immediately defines their work as nearly impossible, shifting criticism away from his film and onto the conditions of criticism itself. It’s not an attack on any one bad review; it’s a preemptive reframing of how we should read reviews at all.

The key phrase is “all at once.” Joffe isn’t arguing that critics are stupid or malicious. He’s arguing that the standard critical ritual-premiere, quick turnaround, hot take culture-demands a kind of instantaneous comprehension that cinema, at least the kind he aspires to make, resists. “Depth” becomes both an aesthetic claim and a moral one: my movies are layered, and layers take time. If a critic misses them, that’s not necessarily failure; it might be the system’s impatience.

Coming from a director known for large, morally freighted films (The Killing Fields, The Mission), this reads like an artist staking out territory against reduction. Those films invite arguments about politics, faith, complicity, and spectacle; they don’t always land cleanly on first encounter, and their ambitions can be easy to caricature as “important.” Joffe’s subtext: you can’t grade this work like a consumer product after one viewing.

It’s also strategic empathy. By calling reviewing “a very tough job,” he disarms the critic as adversary, while still carving out space for the filmmaker’s preferred timeline: reconsideration, second viewings, slow burn reputation.