Daily Inspiration Quote by John Boorman

Boorman’s line carries the quiet swagger of a director who trusts cinema to be discovered on set, not pre-solved on paper. In an era when contemporary filmmaking often resembles engineering - previsualization, animatics, entire sequences “shot” in laptops before a camera rolls - he’s carving out a stubbornly human zone: storyboard only when the machine demands it.

The intent is practical, almost anti-mystical. Special effects work is expensive, collaborative, and unforgiving; you can’t hand-wave a crane move through a digital creature or improvise a composite that requires precise eyelines and lighting continuity. “Communicate through pictures” is a telling phrase. It reframes storyboards not as an auteur’s blueprint, but as a shared language used to align departments that otherwise speak in incompatible dialects: VFX, camera, stunts, production design.

The subtext is also a philosophy of authorship. Boorman implies that for most scenes, drawing everything in advance can be a kind of overcontrol - a bureaucratization of imagination. If you storyboard a dialogue scene, you risk embalming it: actors become pieces you move across boxes, spontaneity gets traded for compliance, and the camera stops listening.

Contextually, this comes from a filmmaker shaped by physical locations, risk, and the productive chaos of real-world shooting (think the tactile intensity of Deliverance or Excalibur). His selective use of storyboards isn’t anti-prep; it’s a defense of cinema as an art of presence. Plan the impossible. Leave room for the alive.