Time & Perspective Quote by Patrice Leconte

Leconte’s line reads like a polite breakup text to the medium that made him famous. “I like cinema. I am very fond of it” is deliberately plain, almost childlike in its repetition, as if he’s insisting on his good faith before delivering the real point: attachment can still be claustrophobic. The pivot - “But from time to time” - is where the honesty lives. It admits that filmmaking, for all its glamour, is a noisy collective machine: crews, schedules, budgets, notes, audiences, promotion. Cinema isn’t just an art form; it’s a social contract with a small army and a marketplace.

The subtext is not disdain but self-preservation. “Some time on my own” suggests the rarest commodity in film: solitude, the space where taste recalibrates and desire returns. In a culture that treats creative work as a total identity (“director” as personality type), Leconte quietly refuses the romance of permanent immersion. He’s saying that love without distance becomes obligation, and obligation kills curiosity.

Contextually, it lands as a director’s corrective to cinephilia’s fetish for devotion. Film culture rewards the always-on evangelist, the person who treats watching, making, and talking about movies as a single continuous lifestyle. Leconte punctures that with a small, domestic-sounding wish: time alone. It’s a reminder that the healthiest relationship to cinema might include walking away from it - not to abandon it, but to come back with something like a private life intact.