Daily Inspiration Quote by Patrice Leconte

Leconte’s jab lands because it treats a sacred industry ritual as a category error: storyboards aren’t planning, they’re pre-chewing. Calling them “comic strips” isn’t just a cute insult; it’s a warning about what gets lost when a film is decided in drawings before it’s discovered in space, light, bodies, and accident. The line has the breezy impatience of a director who trusts cinema’s native language - performance, rhythm, texture - more than the managerial comfort of locked shots.

The intent is also political, in a small-p “how movies get made” way. Storyboards are often a proxy for control: a tool to reassure producers, coordinate VFX, and keep crews marching to a predetermined beat. Leconte pushes back against the idea that a director’s authority comes from having everything mapped. His authority, he implies, comes from judgment in the moment: seeing what the camera wants once the set is real and the actors complicate the plan.

Context matters: this isn’t a manifesto against preparation so much as against the wrong kind of preparation. Leconte’s cinema (from the tonal delicacy of Monsieur Hire to the stylized charm of The Hairdresser’s Husband) thrives on mood and human contradiction - things that don’t reduce cleanly to panels. The subtext is a defense of spontaneity as craft, not chaos: filmmaking as living composition, not illustration.