Time & Perspective Quote by Jacqueline Bisset

Hollywood is a temporary country, and Jacqueline Bisset is naming its most quietly brutal immigration policy: you can be welcomed in, even celebrated, and still be disposable the moment the set goes dark. Her focus on people "who have nothing to do with the film business" is the tell. She is not talking about actors or crew who are trained to surf the churn; she is talking about girlfriends, friends, hangers-on, visitors, the human satellites who get pulled into a production's gravity and mistake proximity for belonging.

The line works because it refuses the glamorous version of "the industry" and replaces it with something closer to summer camp with a budget: intense, intimate, artificially accelerated. Sets manufacture closeness on a deadline. You're eating together, waiting together, witnessing small crises and triumphs that feel like shared history. For outsiders, that intensity can read as community rather than a project team. When the film wraps, the disappearance of that circle isn't just social; it's structural. Everyone scatters because they're hired to. The affection may be real, but it's also time-coded.

Bisset's phrasing, "truly devastated", gives the emotional consequence weight without melodrama. There's a veteran's restraint in it: she has seen the wrap party's aftertaste. Subtextually, she's warning that the film world's warmth is often logistical, not moral. It's not cruelty so much as a system designed for constant turnover, where even genuine connection is built to be dismantled on schedule.