Daily Inspiration Quote by Mike Figgis

A guitar or piano on set is a small detail that quietly rewrites the power dynamics of a film shoot. Mike Figgis isn’t talking about mood music as a cute indulgence; he’s describing a director’s tool for dissolving the industrial stiffness of “set etiquette” and getting actors out of performance mode and into presence. The phrase “to play something for the actors” casts the director less as a commander and more as a collaborator, someone willing to meet performers on their turf: rhythm, timing, breath, instinct.

Figgis comes out of a music-inflected sensibility (you can feel it in films like Leaving Las Vegas and Timecode), and this line hints at his broader method: cinema as a live, responsive event rather than a perfectly controlled machine. On most sets, emotion gets engineered through marks, lenses, continuity, and an air of surveillance. A musician-director introduces an alternate language - one that bypasses intellectual explanation. Instead of giving an actor a note like “make it sadder,” he can offer tempo, tone, or a chord progression that nudges the nervous system. It’s direction as atmosphere.

There’s also a strategic softness here. Playing an instrument is disarming; it makes the director briefly vulnerable, not just judging takes from behind a monitor. That vulnerability can license risk-taking from actors, the thing productions always claim to want and often punish. In an era when digital workflows can make filmmaking feel like spreadsheet labor, Figgis is arguing for something analog: the set as a room where people listen to each other.